This year, the New World Theatre Club of Luxembourg not only hosted at Whitsun the FEATS Festival of European Anglophone Theatrical Societies (FEATS), as readers of the Luxembourg News will know, but also ran its usual residential Summer Theatre School at the Château de Munsbach from Saturday 5 to Sunday 13 August.
This was the thirteenth
European Summer School, the twelfth to be organised by NWTC and the tenth to be
held in the Château. It was, as always, a burst of intensive training for
theatre enthusiasts, and was perhaps not alone in that. But – to gauge from the
feed-back from this year’s students, which included as always a number of
“regulars”- it is quite clear that Munsbach has become something very special
indeed. This seems to have something to do with the evolution and integration
of the School into a kind of “total experience”. There appears to be something
almost uncanny about the way the venue serves the venture, and the creative
surge and interaction that develops. Students of all ages and abilities and
many nationalities have found this a very fulfilling, and in some cases (no
exaggeration) even life-changing time.
The
school was fully integrated, bringing together fifty theatre enthusiasts, happy
to commit almost every waking hour for eight days to developing their skills,
their knowledge, their trust, their instincts. The course was as usual run by a
team of four tutors, professional theatre practitioners with a passion for
teaching, to share their knowledge and experience with committed and
enthusiastic amateur practitioners under the admirable leadership of Course
Director Mike McCormack, actor, director and lecturer in the Performing Arts at
the University of Luton. The other members of the team were Noël Greig (actor,
writer, director and much-travelled British Council teacher) and Graeme du Fresne (actor, director, teacher -
Guildford University - and musical director) both well known to habitués of Munsbach. They were accompanied, for the first time, by Peta Lily,
movement specialist, performer and teacher (Central School, London), whose
special talents in the area of comedy and clowning were fully deployed.
The
whole school revolved entirely around project work designed to accommodate both
directing and acting students. The various projects interwove from time to time
: there were sessions where staff moved across from one project to another (swaps) ; particular explorations
were shared or pooled (shares); there were developments that briefly pulled in
the entire student body. By the end of the week, everyone had sampled something
of the experience of everyone else – and had had an opportunity to enjoy the
enormous range of material taken on board. All this fitted into an very sophisticated
but practical timetable, the fruit, apparently, of much deliberation over the
years.
The
two main projects, with equal time dedicated to each, ran side-by-side
throughout the week, offering a choice from four "theatrical skills" options (e.g. directing, music,
movement, improvisation etc.), four more thematically-based options and a third
project in which the tutors acted as guides and mentors and the student body
led.
Mike
McCormack divided his time between a directing course, looking especially at
the various major innovators of the 20th century, and a leading-edge
project working with straight-from-the-net unpublished texts and peering into
the fascinating near-future prospects for a theatre that stands to be utterly
transformed by the new information age.
Graeme
du Fresne took his skills students with him on an exploration of modes of
acting, from the Brokers’ Men in Panto to recitative in Mozart and, in his
thematic project, into the electrifying area of the great Brecht-Weill
collaboration.
Noël
Greig’s chosen areas this year were the Actor as Writer, using a mix of practical writing exercises, on-the-floor
acting work, and discussion, and, with Mike, Fin de Siècle, looking at the
phenomenon of those turning-points in theatre that seem always to have
accompanied the arrival of a new century.
Peta Lily’s charges were initiated into the
mysteries of “installing one’s clown” (we all have one, waiting to emerge) ;
the craft of delivering comedy in the most simple elemental ways, and the intriguing
process whereby the actor transforms the moment, the place and him/herself as
(s)he makes the journey through a play.
All this is clearly much helped by the special
atmosphere and surroundings of the Château and the enthusiasm with which the
group is welcomed there, year after year, to engage in activities that must
certainly seem to the staff and locals to be at the very least mildly eccentric
; at most, heroically extravagant (“mais,
dîtes-donc, que de braves gens”,
commented the gardener this year, from his privileged vantage point). The
Château is one of the chain of "Instituts
d'Europe", which are more
than youth hostels but less than hotels, used to accommodate various
residential courses in the cultural and educational area. Munsbach is much orientated
towards the European institutions on the Kirchberg, but by no means exclusively
: hence the presence of the NWTC Summer
School.
The welcome to the group is extended in person by
the Director of the Institut
d’Europe, Alain Tandel, and this
year by Germain Lutz, President. For readers who may still not know it, the
Château de Munsbach is a lovely old "manoir", with quite a chequered history set in its
own park in rolling farmland on the edge of Munsbach village, some
10 kilometres from Luxembourg City. It provides accommodation for about 50
students as well as offering all sorts of interesting working spaces (the Salle des Vitraux, the Grand
Salon, the Salon Rousseau etc., not to mention the heart-lifting sweep of
the park).
For more about the Summer School, call Chris Bearne
at 35 89 77 or John Brigg at 44 66 80, or check into the Munsbach website at munsbach.org ; for more
about the Château, call Alain Tandel at 35 96 91.