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Laurance Rudic

Laurance Rudic (born 10 September 1952) is a British theatre artist best known for his long association as a leading member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre company - 1972-1996.

For 34 years, (1969–2004) 'The Citz' as it came to be known, was run by a trio of maverick geniuses - Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald. Under this triumvirate the company quickly gained fame and notoriety for its glamorous and ofttimes outrageously decadent European-style treatment of rarely performed European and English classics. New works such as Camille, Chinchilla, A Waste of Time and Webster were regularly written for the company by resident playwright, dramaturge and translator, R. D. McDonald. For many years, the Citz was proving-ground and creative home to young actors who eschewed existing English literary and mechanistic acting conventions in order to develop their own highly passionate and individualistic approach. Famous actors who started their careers there include Tim Curry, Pierce Brosnan, Gary Oldman, Rupert Everett, Sean Bean, Tim Roth, Celia Imrie and Ciarán Hinds.

Rudic was born into a musical, theatrical family in Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a violinist, his mother a semiprofessional opera 0singer, and his aunt was the Scottish actress and broadcaster Edith Ruddick.

Career

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Rudic began acting in amateur dramatics at an early age and working as a dresser when he was twelve years old in Jimmy Logan's Metropole Theatre in Glasgow. This early experience of the world of variety and music hall, created a deep and enduring fascination with the potential of theatre as a space for expressing the raw immediacy of human existence beyond conventional approaches to acting in text-based theatre. Intent on becoming an actor, he left school at the age of 15 and worked as an office boy at the BBC. While acting in a staff play he was chosen by director, Pharic McLaren, to play the name role in The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1969), part of the BBC's Wednesday Play series.

Rudic completed three years of formal actor training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (1969–1972). At the same time he began performing in the physical theatre of Lindsay Kemp - mime, dancer, and teacher of singer David Bowie. Rudic likens Kemp's approach to a theatre of the heightened senses in which intuition and spontaneity within the moment of the performance play a major role. His time with Kemp was a living education in the corporeal mime of Étienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau, and the classical Japanese theatre of Noh and Kabuki, in which time is non-linear and of the present moment.

His work with Kemp in Flowers based on the novel Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet and Woyzeck by George Buchner at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, led to his being accepted as a member of the newly-established Citizens Theatre Company. At that time (1972) he was one of only three Scots actors to be accepted into the young group who were predominantly English. Rudic continued to work there intermittently for almost a quarter of a century until 1996.

Travels in the East

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Throughout his years at the Citz, Rudic travelled frequently to cultures beyond Europe in order to understand more about holistic process in the oral performance tradition. In 1975, on his first visit to the Dalai Lama's refugee headquarters-in-exile in the Himalayas, he was invited by the Dalai Lama's private office to teach acting to the young refugee performers of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (T.I.P.A.) who were preparing for the first Tibetan cultural tour of Europe and the Americas. IN 1978, he also experienced life as a Kathakali acting student at the leading school for Kathakali actors in Kerala, South India - the Kerala Kalamandalum. These travels and others in cultures with strong oral traditions in music, dance and storytelling (Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco), contributed greatly to an understanding of his own intuitive process.

In 2000, intent on developing himself as a ‘stand-up’ theatre artist, he was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant to travel to Egypt and observe the dying tradition of epic storytelling. As part of his research, he based himself with El Warsha Theatre Company, a group of young Egyptian actors, dancers and singers, working in downtown Cairo. Through the company he came to know the old generation of traditional performance artists such as Sayed El Dawy the improvising epic storyteller from Upper Egypt, and Hassan Khanufa, a traditional street performer and Aragoz puppeteer from Cairo, who died in 2005 at the age of 74.

Recent projects

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In 2006, working with Scottish theatre practitioner Andrew McKinnon, he returned from Cairo to Glasgow to perform a solo improvising "Stand-Up Theatre" piece - And God Created - at his old theatre, 'The Citz'. The entertainment, improvised around a theme of autobiographical stories about acting and travel, deals with universal themes such as Time, the search for identity beyond society and culture, and the role of thought and memory in consciousness.

In October 2008, he returned once again to Glasgow, this time to direct and feature in The Parade, an early work by the American playwright, Tennessee Williams. The actors were encouraged to work within the action through an ongoing use of sensory awareness. There was no fixing of character and throughout the twelve performances, the life between the text was always in a state of flux, which meant that each night was considerably different from the other. This was the European and UK premiere of the work which was played at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in the Circle Studio.

During his years in Egypt, he has continued to refine and expand his Somatic approach to consciousness in theatre in which the actor works out of a dual extemporising reality as both storyteller and story.

Theatre

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Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama

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Giles Havergal's Glasgow Citizens Theatre Company

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1971
1972–1973
1973–1974
1974–1975
1975–1976
1981–1982
1982–1983
1983–1984
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1996

WORKS AS GUEST ARTIST AT CITIZENS THEATRE:

2006
  • Laurance Rudic And God Created... solo work created by Laurance Rudic. Creative Advisor Andrew McKinnon
2008

Tennessee Williams The Parade Laurance Rudic Don European and UK premiere

Other theatre

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Film and TV

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BBC
STV
FILM

References

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