Was awarded a bursary to attend this workshop, conveniently timed for the TaPRA conference in Leeds.
I made it through one day of the workshop. Was mistakenly under the impression that he was more of a visual performance maker, like Kantor, but turns out his philosophy is building off the Stanislavski-Meyerhold-Grotowski tradition, of which I suppose he sees himself as the continuum. If you are into that kind of actor tradition then this is for you.
That totally contradicted my experience the day before performing at Schloss Lüntenbeck (see review of that on next posting). Though I felt bad about it, I withdrew from the workshop and decided to attend the TaPRA conference instead (more on that as well).
On Zholdak...
As far as I could see grasp the one day I was in the workshop, his director-actor interrelation completely seems to mimick a rather traditional Sado-Masochist relationship, where he is the Dom/Director and the trainee is the Sub/Actor. According to Zholdak the actor enters into an agreement with him at which point he renders him/herself completely. The only thing Zholdak cannot do is physically hurt them or have sex with them, as per this agreement. It is at this point that the actor becomes the director's dog...Literally. As he stated, often part of his training has been keeping actors in kennels, wearing leads, eating and existing on all fours, chasing sticks and this for days at a time. As he sees it, it through the director hating the actor, destroying the actor, killing the actor that he can show him more love than he ever could otherwise. For those of you familiar with the psychology of a true S&M relationship, there are the obvious parallels. I suppose there is some master/servant in all of us. But as that is not my artistic or emotional interest, I found it a bit disconcerting. Plus I was on a spiritual high from the show in Germany and this just did not match that.
There were people though with obvious interest in being, or becoming, the dog. Like I said not for me but surely works for others... Live and let live
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