I approach Acting in Aotearoa as a Wellington born-and-raised performing arts practitioner who became an actor through Wellington Repertory, Nola Millar drama classes, Victoria University Drama Club, NZBC Radio Drama, Downstage Theatre (where Davina Whitehouse told me I would never be an actor because of my New Zealand accent) and the New Zealand Players Drama Quartet. Then, in the late 1960s, I went to drama school in Sydney (NIDA) because there wasn’t a fulltime option here and I knew my acting was inauthentic: I had rarely played a distinctively Kiwi character and was mostly just imitating other actors whose stock-in-trade was playing people from other cultures.

My stage and screen work in Australia was almost exclusively Australian characters in Australian plays, TV series and films. Further training included Commedia Mask and Personal Clown. When I returned to Wellington in 1985, I had to prove I could do a New Zealand accent in order to score a role in the Open House series. There was much to recover and throughout the decades since there has been lots more to learn that I didn’t know I didn’t know, both cultural and practical.

Acting in Aotearoa, edited by Hilary Halba and David O’Donnell, captures a lot of it. “Like most post-colonial countries, Aotearoa is a charged space for examining cultural identities,” is their opening line in the Introduction, which states their aim as “to interrogate and honour the special role the actor plays in society in Aotearoa, now and in the past.”

Fellow actors, don’t be put off by such statements as, “the performing body has become central to meaning making” or this quote from Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tomkins’ Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (Routledge, 1966):
“Because the body is open to multifarious inscriptions which produce it as a dialogic, ambivalent, and unstable signifier rather than a single, independent, and discrete entity, it is not surprising that the production of some sort of personal or cultural subjectivity via the body is complex indeed.”

You could see it as an acting challenge: express it with a physicality that embodies its meaning, if you can discern it; explore it as your clown, perhaps. Meanwhile, there is much of value to be mined from the book: gems throughout, notions you may want to challenge and nuggets of gold to invest. This extended review-cum-book report aims to summarise some of what you might discover in detail when you read it.

The intro offers a comprehensive overview under four sub-headings:

• ‘Colonial Acting in Aotearoa’, tracks our progression from Eurocentric models of practice and training towards evolving our own ways of doing it.
  
• ‘Documenting Acting in Aotearoa’ surveys key autobiographies, biographies and actor training books by influential practitioners. “Interweaving voices of tāngata whenua, Pasifika, Pākehā and New Zealanders from Asian, Eastern European and South American descent, Acting in Aotearoa traces movements and people significant to shaping the acting landscape, each contributing to the bricolage of local and non-local influences.” [bricolage: construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.]
  
• Under ‘Thematic Approach’, the Editors reinforce Aotearoa as “a salient case study of post-colonial adaptation, transformation and indigenisation of approaches to acting” with quotes from Cliff Curtis, and point to the “strong feminist sensibility running through the creative industries” and the ways non-binary and disabled actors are achieving agency.
  
• ‘Chapter Outlines’ foreshadows the “diverse array of approaches to acting and actor training … [that] has resulted in a distinctiveness in Aotearoa’s acting landscape where multiple global and local influences are modified and woven into an original and inceptive embodied art form.” [inceptive: relating to or marking the beginning of something.]

The Introduction and each Chapter are followed by Notes and, where applicable, a list of Works Cited.

Chapters 1 to 3
Te Āo Māori: The Māori World through Acting

The chapter by wāhine Māori Nicola Hyland (academic and practitioner) and Trae Te Wiki (performer and producer) explores ‘Māori Experiences of Acting in Aotearoa New Zealand’ under the title ‘A “Wairua Workout”’ – a phrase coined by actor Rob Mokoraka after a Taki Rua rehearsal for Putorino Hill by Chris Molloy in 2014 (observed by Te Wiki and Hyland). Its director, Te Kohe Tuhaka, recounts how acting coach Miranda Harcourt awakened him to the prospect of acting as a career, after witnessing his mahi in a “national schools’ Shakespeare Competition”. That’s in a section headed ‘The Only Actor in the Whānau’ which follows ‘The Whakapapa of Performance’, ‘Invoking Whakapapa within Performance’, and ‘Going There: Ihi/Wehi/Wana’.

Under ‘Māori Theatre – performances to Change Your Life’, Rangimoana Taylor is eloquent in illuminating the intangible energy flow of ihi, wehi and wana. Te Kohe Tuhaka, Jason Te Kare and Rob Mokoraka share their formative experiences of connecting with that energy flow. The basic premise of the Theatre Marae Movement, developed by Rangimoana Taylor and Jim Moriarty at Taki Rua in the 1990s, is explained by playwright Hone Kouka. Readers will appreciate how significantly the embedding of kawa, kaupapa and tikanga differs from the imported models for creating theatre, and some will note how some of those principles are now informing performing arts practice throughout Aotearoa.

‘The Myth of the Typical Māori Actor’ shares more from Jason (too fair-skinned to be the ‘token brown guy’ but not put up for general roles) and Te Kohe (“I am an actor that happens to be Māori” and “We are all very unique, we have a common language and we have a common culture, but we don’t all play the same … if we [did] then it would be really boring to watch”), while Rob exemplifies how Te Ao Māori informs the mahi of many professional actors (“Once you have the professional practice and you imbue it with your tikanga, you’re setting the mauri [life force] …” [See Shot Bro reviews.]

Having noted, “Several of our participants described having two different versions of their performing selves,” the Editors’ Conclusion includes, “Nurturing and supporting Indigenous actors enhances the strength and diversity of actors across the industry.” They end it with, “Aroha is the key: aroha for the craft, aroha for the stories, aroha for the language, and aroha for the culture.”

Tautoko to that and everything else held in A “Wairua Workout”!

“Everything is Wairua” transcribes Halba’s kōrero with the creative leaders of Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu, Aotearoa’s longest surviving independent Māori theatre company: Jim Moriarty, Lisa Maule and Helen Pearse-Otene. The way they enter into this conversation exemplifies the tikanga touched on in the previous section.

When I was a young actor, the rehearsal room rule was to ‘leave your personal life and problems at the door’ and arrive ready to work on the play. Te Rakau leaders take the time to check in on everyone’s ‘emotional scale’ (e-scale). Whanaungatanga and manaakitanga underpin their rehearsal process. In performance, their ‘Theatre Marae’ practice arises from a blend of Māori and non-Māori principles. It’s a fascinating and informative chapter.

Annie Ruth traces her ‘Personal Journey through Fifty Years of Actor Training in Aotearoa’ – as a student and teacher – in a chapter called Lightning Flashes. Her introduction concludes that in Aotearoa, as in Australia, “a multitude of acting theories from overseas have been assembled and reinterpreted, leading to dynamic and distinctive acting styles.”

Part One: Learning and Training runs under the subheadings ‘The Journey Begins’, ‘Drama Student’, ‘The Greek Influence’, ‘Drama in Education’, ‘Touring and Protests’ and ‘Warwick Broadhead’s Tempest’. She marks 1970 as the turning point when Victoria University’s Drama Studies with Phillip Mann and The New Zealand Drama School under Nola Millar’s directorship allowed actors to train without going overseas. Annie recalls a range of people and formative experiences that contributed to her artistic and socio-political development before Overseas, and Greece in particular, expanded her consciousness even more – not least of the cultural distinctions apparent in the Aotearoa to which she returned.

We learn how Annie’s further training as a teacher, and the influence of Ralph McAllister and his mentor Dorothy Heathcote, led to an understanding of how valuable drama can be for ‘difficult’ students and people marginalised through mental illness or physical disability. While devising and improvising with Town and Country Players, theatre and political activism became entwined. Playing Prospero in Warwick Broadhead’s The Tempest event, at Downstage, taught her that “when the actor’s attention is directed away from themselves and they are truly absorbed in others, they shed self-consciousness and achieve a truth that makes the audience experience them as more alive, more present.”  

Part Two: Becoming the Trainer – Still Learning begins with Annie becoming an acting tutor at the NZ Drama School (destined to become Te Kura Toi Whakaari O Aotearoa). Her ‘Improvisation’ work was informed by a sojourn with Keith Johnstone in Canada. ‘Toi Whakaari and Te Ao Māori’, ‘The Challenges’ and ‘Acting Methodologies’ cover key aspects of the school’s evolution under Andy Noble, Sunny Amey and Robin Payne before ‘Director of Toi Whakaari’ sees Annie become the first graduate of the school to take the helm, appointing Miranda Harcourt as Head of the Acting Department, when Murray Lynch moved on to become Director of Downstage.

‘Te Ao Māori’ covers the increase in the number of Māori staff members and the introduction of Māori protocols at Toi Whakaari. ‘Long-Form, Situational Improvisations’ and ‘The Grid Improvisations’ discuss psychology-based and body-based approaches to improv. ‘Discovering Viewpoints’, ‘The Impact’, ‘Directing Processes’ and ‘International Experiences’ share Annie’s adoption of methodologies imported from the USA’s Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, who co-authored The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Compositions. After exploring it with Toi students she taught it in England, India, Romania and China – “which reinforced for me the value of this Viewpoints-based approach which unleashes the actor’s creativity inside both text-driven and devised work.”

‘Return to Aotearoa’ covers how Viewpoints informed Annie’s directing of an adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage at Toi Whakaari and tells of how Toi graduate Julia Croft incorporates it in creating “performance works that explore representational politics, violence, the body, and increasingly feminist futurisms and Queer world building.” The ‘Performing Autobiography’ section shares Annie’s experience of rehearsing and performing her solo show, The Book Addict, directed by Robin Payne.

‘Concluding Thoughts’ includes a summary of the diverse approaches of the teachers Annie deliberately employed to open possibilities for students, and the observation that “the politics of gender and race, of power and surrender, of war and peace have been woven into everything I do. I come back to the Hippocratic oath: ‘Do no harm.’”

Chapters 4 to 7
Physical and Visual Approaches to Acting.

The opening gambit of Murray Edmond’s Making the Mask Move chapter, entitled “Dream Moment: A Suitcase Full of Masks” is a tenuous mid-1969 memory of his first meeting with mask in the Mercury Theatre’s upstairs space. He uses his observation of “extroverts” Francis Batten and Ian Mune “cavorting” with masks as an example of the wrong way to work with masks. Assuming they were commedia masks, possibly left-over from a 1968 production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Edmond’s thought that they had been used as “alienation devices” doesn’t gel with me, given their unerring capacity to amplify true human emotions.  

I actually find it offensive that Murray casts two highly skilled professionals as incompetents in his dream-like recollection. He does acknowledge that Batten went on to study at Jaques Lecoq’s school in Paris and returned to co-found Theatre Action, where Murray first learned about “the power of stillness in the mask”. But in January 1969 (when I was back for the break between years at NIDA), I had the pleasure of taking part in a two-week intensive workshop with Mune where he passed on the skills he’d acquired with the Welsh National Theatre, including commedia mask. The masks Mune had made from moulded chamois leather were exquisite; his respect for the power of the mask and the way he taught us how to ‘become’ them were exemplary. His stress on the importance of “the moment of nothing where everything happens” has stayed with me ever since. Whatever Mune and Batten were doing that day at the Mercury a few months later, in private play, did not involve ignorance.

Murray’s account of his encounter with The Living Theatre’s street performance of a commedia play at Scarborough Fair (in Parnell) and on the steps of the Auckland Museum leads to his joining the troupe and discovering that masks “transform. You put the mask on, you become the mask. Not alienation, but possession (or ‘identification’ as the French say).”

The principles of the Neutral Mask, Larval Masks, the Clown nose and large, iconic masks used in Street Theatre are touched on under the intriguing headings, ‘Picasso Many Bull One Bull: A Mask Method’ and ‘“Those Masks!”: Masks Proliferate’. ‘Raising the Dead’ brings us mentions of Murray working in Community Theatre with Marxists in London’s East End, returning to Muldoon-oppressed Aotearoa in 1976, tearing off an old mask and growing a new one as a father, and initiating the Half Mask Project to create modern mask characters who performed outdoors then at Circa in Masks-a-Raidings, from which two characters went on to have longer lives.

‘Here Come the Indians’ promises, at last, to profile Murray’s involvement with Indian Ink Theatre, which has introduced Kiwi audiences in their thousands to the magic of mask throughout this century – but first we follow a succession of steps through his founding of Town and Country Players, a year as Writer in Residence at Canterbury University, starting an outreach programme with Mercury Theatre, working as a tutor in the University of Auckland English Department and with Mervyn Thompson on the Diploma in Drama, and taking on a succession of roles – observer, actor, director, organising committee member and dramaturge – over a number of biennial Playwrights Workshops. After Mervyn died, Murray shifted the nature of the Diploma course “away from the ‘training school’ model to one of conceptual inquiry and theoretical study combined with practice.”

It was attending a promenade performance of Jeff, Son of Jeffrey, that “partook of the 1900s fashion for men’s groups that examined the nature of masculinity and its problems” where Murray met its director, Justin Lewis. They worked together on a couple of maskless shows before teaming up with Jacob Rajan to expand his celebrated 20-minute Toi Whakaari solo piece, Krishnnan’s Dairy, into a longer show. Rajan’s ingenious device for swiftly switching masks allowed him to manifest “Two characters in one body. Lecoq had never thought of this.” Murray’s work as Dramaturge on ten Indian Ink shows (one of which has never been performed) has involved Italian half-masks, Basel (aka Larval) full masks, Balinese masks, plastic teeth and puppets. [See reviews of their many shows here.]

“The Body is Psychology. The Body is the Unconscious” records Halba and O’Donnell’s interview with Dr Pedro Ramos Ilgenfritz da Silva (known as Pedro Ilgenfritz), artistic director of the Hagley Theatre School in Christchurch, and previously a Senior Lecturer in acting training and theory at Auckland’s Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts. Potentially a professional surfer, Pedro got involved with Brazilian company Grupo de Pesquida Teatral Atormenta instead, got a BA in Acting and was part of a clown show for six years before coming to New Zealand to spend a year learning English. He stayed on, became a New Zealand citizen and directed a street theatre show which led to Anna Marbrook pointing him towards Toi Whakaari and Victoria University’s Master of Theatre Arts director training in Wellington.

Pedro name-checks an impressive lineage of European and Brazilian influences in his progress toward developing a way of teaching “to build psychophysical unity, the organic body-mind” using the languages of Stanislavsky and Lecoq. The quest is “to unify the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, the spiritual faculties.” Masks are slowly introduced – neutral, larval, Balinese, Commedia, red nose … To meet the needs of his students, he has developed Māori and Pasifika masks. Students choose them because “I can use my own dialects, my own mātauranga Māori, my own knowledge; that mask is my cousin.”

Aware of the need to embed indigenous culture in the early stages of training, Pedro feels inspired by Giovanni Fusetti, who comes to New Zealand and Australia every summer to teach Lecoq-based material, and has said: “Aotearoa-dell’arte, that’s the thing you guys have to discover.”  

The title of David O’Donnell’s chapter on The Influence of Jacques Lecoq and Philipe Gaulier on Acting in New Zealand is “Lecoq is in my Whakapapa”, quoting actor Guy Langford, who blogged it from Paris. He was studying with Gaulier, who had been taught by Lecoq along with John Bolton and Tom McCrory, both of whom had then taught Langford at Toi Whakaari. A section summarising the work of Lecoq and Gaulier is followed by sections based on interviews with a cross-section of actors who have trained in their … I was going to say methods, but in his conclusion David quotes from Simon Murray’s book, Jaques Lecoq (Routledge): “Lecoq did not offer either a system or a method and … constantly stressed – his teaching proposed a journey of discovery for each student.”

‘The Lecoq-based Influence in New Zealand’ skims the journeys and subsequent practice of such local luminaries as Francis Batten (Theatre Action), Robert Bennett [who trained at Rose Bruford college in the UK then emigrated to NZ in 1974, became Senior Lecturer in Drama at Wellington Teachers’ College and established Mime International] and Juliet O’Brien (who trained at Lecoq, is based in France and occasionally returns to teach, direct and perform in NZ), before focusing on what Tom McCrory experienced at the Lecoq school from 1989 to 1991. It informed his teaching as Head of Movement at Toi Whakaari from 1998 to 2013, influencing more than 300 actors. The performance ‘languages’ they explored included Bouffon and Commedia, “to support emerging artists in their aspiration to move beyond the ‘colonial hangover of the well-made play’ in New Zealand at the time.” He sees Gaulier as “a formative teacher in extending Lecoq’s work … rooted in the art of the clown” and has encouraged many students to take Gaulier’s short block courses in English, to wake themselves up, and build resilience and self-sufficiency.

[My introduction to ‘Lecoq clown’ was in Sydney, 1980, in a workshop led by Geoffrey Rush, who trained in Paris. He brought his clowning skills to playing Dave, the gawky son of an Australian outback station owner, in On Our Selection, in which I had two very contrasting roles… But that’s another story.]

‘Spreading the Gaulier Influence’ traces “the second wave of French influence” through the work of Anna Marbrook and Christian Penny (Theatre at Large), Sam Scott (Maidment Youth Theatre which became Massive Theatre Company) – whose Gaulier-trained actors include Margaret-Mary Hollins, Miriama McDowell, Madeleine Sami and Kura Forrester – and Nina Nawalowalo, who founded The Conch with Tom McCrory.

The ‘John Bolton’ section covers the influence the English-born, Lecoq-trained, Australia-based actor/director and teacher (Victorian College of the Arts) had on the NZ scene. He worked with many students at Toi Whakaari and set up his own school in Melbourne with tutors including Anna and Christian, “graduating many New Zealanders including Kate Parker and Julie Nolan” (Red Leap). Others who value his teaching include Jonathan Price (A Slightly Isolated Dog, discussed later), and Carmel McGlone, actor and sometime tutor (Te Auaha Performing Arts Centre) who trained with Bolton in order to avoid becoming an actor who had “stopped being alive and inventive”. Having gone to Shakespeare’s Globe in London on a Fellowship, Carmel found parallels in their approach, “because both focus on empowering the actor and developing the actor/audience relationship.”

‘Going to the Source: New Zealanders Studying with Gaulier’ canvases actors who, over three decades – often after training with Bolton or McCrory – made that pilgrimage. They include Marie Adams and Mike Mizrahi (Inside Out), Clair Adams and Stayci Taylor (Short and Girlies), and Lucy Schmidt. Guy Langford [Moira’s Wheel of Fortune], Aaron Cortesi [he mentions Mark Twain & Me in Mâoriland directed by John Bolton], Kura Forrester [Here if you Need], Barney Olsen [A Traveller’s Guide to Turkish Dogs] and Trygve Wakenshaw [Nautilus] amplify their Gaulier experiences.

‘Case Study: Johanna Cosgrove’s Aunty’ includes David O’Donnell’s review of one of the shows Cosgrove had developed after studying Le Jeu and Melodrama with Gaulier in Paris. [See Aunty and Hi, Delusion! reviews.] Under ‘Parodying the French Influence’ David details the work of A Slightly Isolated Dog [Don Juan, Jekyll & Hyde] in which Jonathan Price’s performance persona, Philippe, is “a tip of the hat to Philippe Gaulier.” Cortesi suggests the French personas are “a kind of mask.”

I am surprised by the opening line of ‘Bringing the Audience into the Game: Le Jeu, Complicité, Lightness’: “Simon Murray acknowledges that the emphasis on play in acting originated with Copeau and the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) …” Isn’t that why plays and playhouses were so named in the first place? The meanings ‘perform or act on the stage’, ‘take the role of’ and ‘make a pretence of, make believe’ “are attested by early 14c., perhaps late Old English” (Etymonline). But perhaps we have needed Lecoq and Gaulier to rejuvenate the idea, to counter the relatively recent but increasingly entrenched ‘fourth wall’ influence of European naturalism.

A number of the practitioners mentioned above offer their takes on Le Jeu, Complicité and Lightness, and David records in detail his observation of a Le Jeu class led by Guy Langford at Toi Whakaari in 2019. That “Langford’s direction was generous, polite, encouraging, yet direct and honest” is offset by ‘Questions about Gaulier Pedagogy’, discussing concerns about Gaulier’s “‘abusive’ teaching style” and that some teachers were channelling it in New Zealand. David’s ‘Conclusion’ finds the positives in Gaulier’s teaching that have undoubtedly “had a significant impact on acting in Aotearoa.”

An even more in-depth chapter on Gaulier comes with “I Would Trust Gaulier with My Performance Life.” David O’Donnell interviews Sam Scott. It’s a verbatim record, so sometimes you have to read bits more than once and imagine Sam’s rhythms and intonations to get the meaning, which is a skill most actors have.

It was seeing Harry Sinclair performing in The Front Lawn and discovering he had done a year’s study with Gaulier that set Sam on the path that would inform her work as Artistic Director of Massive Theatre Company in Auckland. She tells of many trips back and forth, first to Gaulier’s London studio then to Paris where he relocated. “He and I had formed a bit of a friendship, a cheeky friendship on his part, so when he came to New Zealand [brought to Wellington by the Arts Council in 1995] I looked after him.”

Sam offers more insight into Gaulier’s way of liberating actors from their own limitations, citing her own positive breakthroughs. In their work at Massive, however, the tutors are “nowhere near as brutal as Gaulier might be, because I’m working with much younger people a lot of the time and I want to build people up.” They do have a “no-bullshit attitude”, however, validated by a response from a young woman at a recent Christchurch workshop conducted by Sam and Kura Forrester: “Can I just say it’s so refreshing how you guys are no bullshit. I love it. I can’t bear the fact that we’re so often told everything’s great when we all know it’s not great.”

Sam talks about taking The Sons of Charlie Paora* (written by Lennie James) to the Royal Court in London then taking the cast to Gaulier’s school in Paris for a few days. “I think fundamentally [Gaulier] really likes New Zealanders,” she says, “he likes our gutsiness. He’s so rude about us often, you have to grow a bit of a thick skin, he’s not PC at all. He’s the most wonderful, kind, generous, lovely man, but he’ll take the piss out of anything to get you having fun; you can’t have fun if you’re trying to be PC all the time, you have to have irreverence.”

As a sometime director of Shortland Street, Sam says her Gaulier work “came into play to help people who were first starting out, helping them to have a bit more fun in it.” She concludes by saying the work builds resilience; “this work, although you have to be brave to do it, builds you in a way that is forever yours … It’s great to be so joyful and so terrified all at once, which is life really.” [See also the Pedagogy section of Gaulier’s Wikipedia page.]

[*Excerpts from my National Business Review critique published 19 August 2005:
[The Sons of Charlie Paora proves how the personal, particular and culturally specific can, in the hands of skilled and committed theatre practitioners, offer insights into human experience that resonate well beyond the immediate story. The intense physicality of the production, with its entirely credible fusion of drama, song, dance and cultural ritual, makes it a must-see show. …
   The Sons of Charlie Paora gains power by pursuing this theme without fear or favour. It also expands beyond itself by confronting the question of redemption and proving it is possible when fearless tough-love communication feeds the forgiveness process. …
   It is to Samantha Scott’s credit that the cast excels as an ensemble, coalescing seamlessly for the song, dance and haka sequences, and supporting each other’s individuality to the collective benefit of all. …]

Chapters 8 to 11
Physcophysical Approaches to Acting.

Hilary Halba’s chapter, Threads of Connection: Stanislavsky and Meisner in Aotearoa, begins with student responses to ‘The First Day’ of the actor training course she teaches at Ōtakau Whakaiku Waka/the University of Otago, then outlines her own first encounter with Stanislavsky as a university student and shares a cautionary tale about her over-reliance on ‘affective memory’ [aka ‘emotional memory’] in performance.

The ’Stanislavsky’ section includes material based on interviews with twenty practitioners, from Hilary’s 2018 article for The Theatre Times: ‘Through a New Zealander’s Eyes: The Subjunctive World, Notes from Venice Beach’ which suggests “the System came to Aotearoa/New Zealand in a piecemeal way”. Some of them went on to teach what Hilary calls ‘the System’, sometimes merging the principles with other approaches. Those we hear from, or of, on Stanislavsky include Louise Petherbridge, Raymond Hawthorne, John Givins, Hilary Norris, Cindy Diver, Jonathon Hendry, Grant Tilly and David O’Donnell.

Variations came from the USA – Lee Strasberg’s The Method; Uta Hagen (Respect for Acting) – and Britain’s Mike Alfreds, while Bert van Dijk represents those who saw Stanislavsky as “a cultural relic” and preferred “extra-daily movement and energy in performance” to the “daily energy” aimed for in the theatre of naturalism and psychological realism. “Although Stanislavsky has, in some ways, a precarious place in actor training in Aotearoa,” writes Halba, “his principles have syncretised with a range of acting practice, such as Viewpoint, Laban, Lecoq-based practice in addition to performative and life-world practice from te āo Māori (the Māori world).” Quotes from Bella Merlin, “the ‘holistic’ nature of Stanislavsky’s work, especially his Active Analysis, draws together the ‘mental, physical, emotional and experiential’ elements of the Actor’s apparatus,” and Sharon Marie Carnick, that Stanislavsky’s holistic views included a rejection of “the Western conception that divides mind from body,” leads Halba to see its relationship with Māori theatre’s “focus on tikanga, wairua, manaakitanga and whanaungatanga.”

[My first encounter with Stanislavsky was at a mid 1960s Nola Millar class. We were working on a Chekhov play and she asked us to study a character, make a collage of them and present them to the class. The value was in the blend of analytical thinking and creative craft. At NIDA the key was to mine the text for all the facts and opinions about your character to determine Who you are, then focus What you do and Why you do it, which leads naturally to How you do it: What + Why = How. ‘Emotional memory’ was very carefully monitored by the tutor and recommended as a means of recalling emotions in rehearsal to be embedded in muscle memory, but not to be summoned directly in performance.]  

‘Meisner: A New York State of Mind in Aotearoa’ reveals that Barbara Woods and Hilary Halba studied Stanford Meisner’s technique at the Neighbourhood Playhouse in NYC then taught it back in Aotearoa, naming the Repetition exercise as the cornerstone. But Hilary profiles Michael Saccente from North America as the teacher who had the most profound reach at his own Auckland studio from 1995 until mid-2024, identifying “core differences between his New Zealand students and the North American Actors he taught before coming to Aotearoa. ‘Their energy is more subdued and they are reticent about being seen.’”

Saccente’s student James McLaughlin says the most significant benefit for his own acting “was to act on impulse without censoring (himself).” While Saccente developed his own teaching style, McLaughlin became a Meisner teacher in the UK. It’s interesting that this section doesn’t name Kiwi actors who are devoted to the technique in their work. Hilary concludes, “perhaps Stanislavsky is still more relevant here in Aotearoa … than we might have initially assumed.”

Hilary Halba’s interview with Elena Stejko, from Ukraine, covers her teaching based on the Michael Chekhov Technique, and is titled “Acting is a Form of Spiritual Practice”. “Whatever works for you, whatever resonates with you,” Elena says to her students. “This is not gospel. These are tools, so play with them, make your own discoveries and your own connections.”

Having studied with Stanislavsky, Chekhov [Anton’s nephew] developed a different pathway. “He stressed the importance of using the imagination rather than the actors’ personal experience. His approach was to bypass the dry faculty of intellect and to focus on imagination and movement. He developed a concept of Psychological Gesture … which is performed inwardly in [the] psychological domain.” Elena sees the actor as an artist who daily dedicates themselves to their craft – their voice, body, ability to radiate – so their instrument supports their artistic choices. She suggests it’s your “‘fool’ or the ‘inner child’ … that will allow you the final stages of transformation into the character.” Later she says “It’s important for people creating characters to realise they’re actually creating another reality; they are creating a human being [who lives] in a different ‘world’ from them.”

Asked by Hilary how her New Zealand students react to Chekhov’s “idea of the spirit and the intangible – yet tangible – energy that moves between actors,” Elena notes some take a while to understand that ‘spirituality’ “is about creating human beings with inner life … that’s based on Stanislavsky … an uninterrupted life of the human spirit. You really have to experience it. That’s why it’s spiritual – because only when you’ve been moved deeply, can you move the audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s stage or screen – it’s still the same fundamental principles.” And she stresses, “It’s a toolbox, it’s not a dogma.” We can certainly feel Elena’s spirited commitment in this chapter.

Vanessa Bynes’ chapter, Mike Alfred and the (R)evolution of Text-Based Praxis in Performance is subtitled, “The Actor is Absolutely the Essence of Theatre.” Although it was a bit before her time there, she notes his Arts Council-funded 12-day Masterclass on acting and directing at Toi Whakaari in January 1989, was “an experiential workshop designed to teach methods that enhance the actor’s technique.” She describes his work as actively connecting her to “tributaries of Stanislavsky’s knowledge”, permeating her practice as “as actor, director and teacher with a consistent, yet evolving methodology.”

Vanessa expands on the methodologies under the headings ‘Shared Experience(s)’, ‘Whakapapa and Context’, ‘Rhizomatic Responses’, ‘Structures without Impediments’, ‘Participants’, ‘Text – No Text – Text’, ‘The “Ripple Effect” of Alfreds’s Technique’, ‘Application of Methods’, ‘Points of Concentration’, ‘Alfreds Meets Lorca’, ‘Actions and Beats’, ‘Emotion as a By-Product of Action’, and ‘Points of Difference’.

I offer the following quotes, from Vanessa unless otherwise stated, as a ‘tasting plate’ of the chapter:

“The … relationship between actor and director is a critical one in the development of acting technique. In Aotearoa, this interconnection is protean; many directors initially trained, and continue to work, as actors.”

“All three of Alfreds’s precepts – text, character and world of the play – are intended to be simultaneously micro-forensic and macro-creative levers, designed with the core objective of enabling immediacy and freedom for the actor.” 

“In my experience, I have found [the] degree of preparatory work of lists and incontrovertible facts undertaken by both actors and director equalises the playing ground enormously, not the least because it means that considerable time and effort have been invested by both parties before the collective rehearsal work begins. This approach empowers all concerned.” It is noted this is especially relevant in Aotearoa where most rehearsal periods are much shorter than in Europe.

“With ‘a minimum of interpretation’, Alfreds’s action-playing requires the actor to name each action in a transitive manner, then enact every action physically.”

As a director, Simon Bennett “refers to actions as ‘the first part’ of a process towards crafting vitality in a performance. The second vital question is why the characters do what they do … As Bennet says, Text – No Text quickly liberates actors from the tyranny of thinking, ‘what’s my next line?’ As an objective-driven exercise that focuses on what happens next rather than what is said next. The technique can generate action that is motivated and alive.”

“Central to the Alfreds approach is the elimination of ‘blocking’. He still maintains the ‘blocking blocks,’ … Instead, actors are encouraged to employ ‘self blocking’ via, for example, using points of concentration or essential stage directions to motivate spatial activity.”

“Nearly forty years after the Wellington masterclass, Alfreds’s techniques have evolved to the point where practitioner now employ the Stanislavski-Alfreds fusion. This post-Alfreds confidence has resulted in dynamic work capable of advancing local voices working within our own unique domain … Like others, I am indebted to him for the legacy of work he has left in Aotearoa as the tributaries of knowledge continue to flow.”

“An Organic Moveable Feast”: Hilary Halba Interviews Lara Macgregor profiles the way, as an actor, director and teacher, Lara draws from her training with Uta Hagen and Athony Abeson in New York. Their emphasis on environment, the world of the play – “I do use that a lot” – and researching the facts, which merges with Alfreds and Stanislavski, is central although she adds, “It’s not like I have one core pedagogy.”

Although it was a big part of learning when she trained in the USA, Lara doesn’t tend to use “emotional recall”, saying, “you’ve gotta be very careful with people’s psychological health.” As an actor and director, she uses PEM (Perdekamp Emotional Method), where emotions are harnessed through physicality. When directing RED [with Fortune Theatre], she broke the script down into beats, and got the actors to talk through the subtext of every single line and give it an action, because “you can’t play an idea, you can only play an action.”

Lara’s performance as Annie Wilkes in Misery at the Court Theatre is discussed. Hilary describes it as a tour-de-force performance that “was both at once incredibly chilling, but you also had an enormous empathy for her.” Lara outlines the research she did, from history (Annie was a real person) and “every single embellished detail that was in the book” [by Stephen King] as well as breaking the script down into beats, noting “everything that’s a reference to the character’s past that I needed to own as an actor.”

She notes that the process is necessarily faster when playing TV roles. “That’s when I engage Anthony Abeson’s [work about] how to make choices really quickly, how to read a script quickly, how to identify references to the [character’s] past, take ownership, and make choices really fast.” The influences in his book, Acting 2.0: Doing Work That Gets Work in a High-Tech World include Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman.

Asked about what’s different about working in the USA and back in Aotearoa, Lara says “90% of my peers have trained at Toi Whakaari … there’s definitely a confidence that comes with [those] actors, and there’s quite a strong craft there … it’s their way of working.” Of the kaupapa Māori element, she says, “I think it gives the actor a really lovely framework in which to create … it gives them a strong sense of culture, in terms of practice within a room.”

Lara also values having a global perspective from travelling, working with other people and “seeing how things operate differently beyond our shores” while agreeing that “taking kaupapa Māori practice into the rest of the world, and showing what a wonderful umbrella it is” would be good. She counsels actors to “remain lateral in your thinking” and describes creativity as “like an organic moveable feast, where you might have learnt something, and then you’re going to have to let it go” when working on another project. She also agrees with Hilary, that it’s important to remain “alive in our practice, and not [become] ossified, or stuck on the same thing.”

Chapters 12 to 15
Kōrero with Actors.

‘Taulaaitu: The Channeler of Spirits’ is poet Tusiata Avia’s description of Anapela Polata’ivao, who directed Wild Dogs Under My Skirt and The Savage Coloniser Show, and it’s the title of David O’Donnell’s interview with Anapela. Asked if channelling spirits is part of what she does, she replies, “Not intentionally, no. It just happens. It’s like meditation, being in a trance, I guess. You zone in and the purity of the words, the purity of a character’s soul emerge.”   

Given ‘I’ does not exist in the Samoan culture – “we serve the aiga [family], not the individual” – when training as an actor at Toi Whakaari, Anapela had to reconcile that with her “blazing desire to rage the stage”. It was years later that she realised “drama school led me to face the severity of my own grip of what being Samoan meant and to gracefully accept that both acting and being Samoan can exist simultaneously without judgement, without it being a ‘thing’, and that in itself was a very powerful foundational lesson to becoming a Samoan actor.” She credits Toi Whakaari with helping to shape her as an actor, listener, director, mother and friend, and teaching her “lifelong lessons about relationships, relating to other humans, sharing space and communication.”

On working with actors on the energy of Tusiata’s words, Anapela says, “the challenge is in stillness, to quiet the inner critic, to listen to the breath of the actors around you; that ease and submission allows sound and rhythms to waft another dimension of life through the text, you can hear the ebbs and flows, you must listen. If you’re not listening to the scene, how can you obey the scene?”

Playing the mother in a hostage situation in Victor Rodger’s Club Paradiso brings a powerful passage to the interview, and the questions Anapela confronted over seven years teaching at the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts (PIPA) are salutary. Asked how she approached directing a show like Savage Coloniser when the audiences would include lots of Palagi, she says, “With peace and stillness. That’s where the bite comes from.”

“Storytelling Is a Very Spiritual Place” is the quote that heads up Hilary Halba’s interview with Ahi Karunaharan. A performer, director, playwright and deviser, of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, Ahi trained at Toi Whakaari to figure out what acting was about so he could become a director. Having endured, in 3^rd Year, a guest tutor lining up students and telling them what kind of stock characters they’d be cast as, Ahi says, “I’m really interested in those messy in-betweens … people that can be fluid … the performers I actually enjoy are those who’ve got such a broad range of work that they bring to the table.”

When developing his solo at Toi Whakaari, with Jade Eriksen, Ahi realised he didn’t need to speak in order to create a world and a feeling for the audience to experience. His internship was with Tara Theatre in the UK, who “were making works that were so messy and disruptive and just out of it … like imagined futures.” After graduating, he worked with Tawata Productions in Wellington, with whom he developed and performed The Mourning Afterthen, 12 years later (2021), he directed another actor in the role.

Ahi’s sharing of his recent experience as an actor in Counting and Cracking, a four-hour epic with a cast of 28 South Asians that went to the Edinburgh Festival and toured extensively, emphasises the importance of creating a sense of company. His work with Prayas Theatre Company includes directing A Fine Balance, where “I learned not to impose the ideas I had brought in from my training, because [Indian] characters move in a different way, they’ve got a different heartbeat.”

Hilary and Ahi complete their kōrero talking about “the actor’s ‘line in the sand’ – beyond which they’re not prepared to go.” This includes how actors may let go of their roles after a performance and how this generation “can feel empowered enough to go, ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing that’ or ‘I don’t feel safe doing this’ … to trust that instinct and impulse that’s coming from the performer, and acknowledge that.”

“Our Own Stories” heralds Hilary Halba’s kōrero with 10 members of A Different Light Theatre Company: performance-makers living with a range of disabilities. They start by telling Hilary what sort of performance experience they’d had before joining A Different Light then share what it’s like to be part of this company – e.g. “connection, we have a big connection in our group. It’s not just the one person in performance; it’s all people connected together into full experience of performance.”

The verbatim record of the conversation reveals the range of people involved, what they are learning and the experiences they’ve had in their recent shows. There are anecdotes about ‘stage fright’ on a trip to Auckland in 2022, which was the first time they’d performed in public for three years.

[Theatreview has reviewed: Spoonface Steinberg (2006), The Poor Dears (2009), The Wizard of Oz (2010), The Earthquake in Chile (2011), Still Lives (2011) which they took to San José, Canterbury Tales (2013) and The History of Different Light (2019).]

Halba and O’Donnell both interview Lynda Chanwai-Earl, a playwright and performer of Chinese and Pākehā ancestry, about ‘Pan-Asian Acting in Aotearoa’. Having traced her lineage within her “little bit unusual” family, leading to her mother (age one) arriving with her Gung Gung’s family group on the Wanganella in 1940, Lynda reveals it was the poll tax the Chinese refugee women and children had to pay on entering New Zealand that “was a great motivator” for her to write Ka Shue.

In the 1990s she had studied drama with Murray Edmond, done a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam, studied creative writing with Albert Wendt, discovered a love of poetry and poetry performance, and trained in circus trapeze. Her “first proper acting role” saw her “half-naked, swinging down the ceiling from the B-Side Theatre (The Maidment, Auckland) accompanied by singer Victoria Kelly.”

Witnessing solo performances by William Yang (Sadness), Miranda Harcourt (Verbatim) and Jim Moriarty (Michael James Manaia) were pivotal influences in her creating Ka Shue. She worked with James Littlewood on the script development and “jumped in the deep end” as its solo performer at Circa, as part of the 1996 International Arts Festival: “probably the most terrifying night of my life because I wasn’t actually ready as an actor.”

Lynda had joined Te Rākau the year before and, after the premiere, got Jim to re-direct Ka Shue for touring. “He really challenged me to own each character … He would literally [say], ‘I don’t believe you’ … He would haul me up if I started to do a stereotype or lean into the contrived. So he worked me! He made me really dig deep into the authentic.” She also talks about her collaborations with cultural advisers, designers and director Nat Lees on her play Foh Sharn: Fire Mountain in 2000. And she keeps coming back to Ka Shue, which she last performed in the 2020 TAHI Festival.  

Other New Zealand-Chinese actors are name-checked, the establishments of Pan-Asian Screen and Proudly Asian Theatre are noted and the conversation covers her play Man in a Suitcase (2012) before concluding with mention of Farewell Guangdong, the seven-part documentary podcast series Lynda has directed. “I love the fact that now we can cast for Asian actors.”

Chapters 16 and 17
The Current State of Actor Training in Aotearoa.

Hilary Halba’s interview with Tanea Heke, actor, director, producer, educator and tumuaki/director of Toi Whakaari is headed, “It starts with Truth”. Perhaps somewhat more than the previous conversations, this kōrero suffers from being printed verbatim. I feel if I was sitting in the room with Tanea, I’d have no trouble tuning into her meanings. She talks about subtext – “it’s not what you say, it’s the gaps in between” – and I feel that’s where the pearls of her wisdom are to be found.

Tanea’s tribute to the late Nancy Brunning, with whom she founded Hāpai Productions, is heartfelt and heartwarming. After Nancy had passed, when the Auckland Theatre Company wanted Tanea to produce Witi’s Wāhine with them, originally written and directed [from her wheelchair] by Nancy, “I said, ‘Oh Nan, shall we do it?’ and y’know I kicked it around with her a bit. So we’re a two-person gig with one of them on permanent leave.” [It opened in Auckland in 2023 then graced the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts 2024 in Wellington.

Tanea was 33 when she went to NZ Drama School, around the time “all that stuff” about breaking down an actor to build them up again “started to fall away.” She recalls K C Kelly was “real big about technique. I remember thinking technique is something you can put in your kete for the day it’s a bit more difficult.”  

Aware that people feel that teaching at Toi Whakaari is trademarked by a ‘template’ or ‘process’, Tanea says, “that’s sort of helpful, ’cos it’s nice to have a framework, right? But every time you do, it has got to be different, because the people that you’re working with are different. And while you have a spine that runs through it, you have to be able to adjust accordingly.” She prefers ‘collaboration’ to ‘partnership’, says “that word ‘model’ sort of annoys” her, and notes how “COVID has really changed things for our students and the way they relate to each other. And, of course some things they’re very very good at and they’ve adapted well to working off screens.”

As well as sharing her own experiences as a screen actor, Tanea’s stories about working on the TV drama After the Party and the feature film Cousins encompass her admiration for the skills other actors bring to their mahi. When asked to be on Māori TV’s Pathfinders series, representing the Māori leaders who were raised through the challenging years where te reo Māori was shunned, she reveals she was “adopted and brought up by a Pākehā family … That’s one way of looking at why I don’t have my reo.” Yet kupu Māori pepper her conversation. Asked by the interviewer, “What is acting?” she replied, “The skills you need to be pou … just be, just be.” In her kōrero with Hilary she adds, “… and the other thing is listening. How good are you at listening? If all else fails, just shut up and listen to what your mate is saying to you, or what is happening around you. Because there’s your truth, there’s the moment, there’s your authentic being.”

Tanea calls the school “an adaptive conservatoire … because I came through with that, and it’s its own thing, it’s not like the Europeans would do … It’s about decolonising your thinking …” Asked to amplify that concept, she replies, “You use that word de-colonisation – for some Pākehā they go ‘Oh, my God, does that mean not doing Shakespeare [for example]?’ And I go, ‘It just means that we’ll be comfortable about actually being much more inclusive with our practice’ … decolonisation is talking about a collective … and also really drawing from our collective whakapapa to help and inform the way that we do our mahi.”

Tanea’s lively kōrero includes mention of having an Intimacy Coordinator and a shared leadership team at Toi Whakaari, managing emotion in a screen role, and the difference between acting in theatre and film.

Miranda Harcourt’s statement, “The Actor Is Already the Person That They Need to Be” is the heading for Hilary Halba’s final interview. Being from a theatrical family, Miranda was two when she got her “first job”. Later she went to Toi Whakaari, “learned to be an actress, and then acted for a long time.” When she “got pregnant”, having developed a way of working as an actor that was “very psychologically and physically immersive”, Miranda found she couldn’t combine that with being a good parent, so she started working at Toi Whakaari as a tutor and became Head of Acting for seven years.

The informative conversation about Miranda’s mahi as an Acting Coach, mostly on international film projects, is sprinkled with insights into the experiences that have informed the “jigsaw assemblage” of her ever-evolving practice. She may be working simultaneously with highly trained and experienced actors and “somebody who’s been cast literally from outside a fish and chip shop, and has never acted before.” Also, “On a film set, there’s no time, so what I’ve tried to develop are approaches that can impact deeply and also take up no space or time.”

When it comes to preparation, however, she says, “you’ve got to take up space in order to not take up space” and discusses strategies that allow big gestures to become “a little cosmic echo … I’m aiming for actors to be able to achieve the tiny, tiny flicker of thought behind the eyes, the tiny, tiny gesture. And in order to achieve that smallness, you have to have the capacity to achieve hugeness.”

Miranda discusses the value of activating your internal landscape through immersive, location-based experiences – not least to help you work in greenscreen where “you are having to create a reality inside your head, and then project it, and then respond to your own projection.” Actors have to be adaptive and responsive to other people and the world around them, in order to “vibe and fibrillate with the energy of the real person that is in the scene with them.”

Readers may be shocked to discover Miranda doesn’t “subscribe to the idea of objectives, because it’s never worked for me.” The tool she’s been using is called “Hopes, Fears and Expectations – which is really based on the multiverse.” She also invokes such concepts as mycelium, the “wood-wide web” through which trees communicate underground.

The value of full-time three-year drama schools is also questioned, when it restricts you to only working with people the same age and stage as you., because “that’s not what happens in the industry. Your first job will probably have a five-year-old, a 70-year-old, a 40-year-old, and a dog.” It’s a fascinating and challenging conversation that’s well worth tuning into, given the assertion that “young people putting themselves into ‘acting prison’ for three years can negatively impact on the way in which their futures play out.”

The question, as I see it, is how may an aspiring actor of any age develop their physical/mental/spiritual instrument and keep it ‘tuned’ so they bring “courage and connectivity” to every gig? Miranda advocates segmented learning combined with life experience of rich humanity – and work experience as an actor, where possible.

A variety of games are canvassed as ways for actors to direct their attention away from themselves and achieve connection. There are strategies for gaining agency, where child actors are working with adults, for example. Games can also play a part in beginning and ending intensive periods of work. “I used to start my classes with connection,” says Miranda, “but now I start with the idea of entry and exit codes … I’m saying let’s talk about self-protection and preparation first. Then we can go to connection and bring the sense of courage that you need to bring to connecting with the other person.” ‘Hug to connect and hug to disconnect’ is one of a number of options.

The title if this chapter is a response to the old-school idea that actors need training because there is something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. “The actor is already the person they need to be. What the camera is going to capture is already there; you’ve just got to find the right way to let it out.”

Rangimoana Taylor’s KUPU WHAKAMUTUNGA (concluding words) honours Acting in Aotearoa thus: Ko te mahi tēnei, he mahi whakahirahira (This work is of the greatest importance). “Theatre is oratory,” he writes; “it opens your heart. It takes you to another dimension.” He compares the childhood experience of listening to great stories of te ao Māori told in the dark on a marae after a hui. They could be “quite scary, but I’d be lying between the old people so my imagination could go with it. I was in a safe space. Similarly you’re in a safe space in the theatre.”

Rangimoana speaks of the generosity and trust actors bring to this international artform. “We can always learn from others, but now people throughout the world are learning from us. Don’t be afraid of who we are. Our accent is not something we need to be ashamed of.”

Acting in Aotearoa is an extremely valuable collection of conversations.
[Order it from University of Otago Bookshop.]

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