Munsbach Summer School

Graeme was first invited to teach at the summer school in 1994 and he has since returned to this wonderful event on a regular basis. His work includes writing, directing, musical directing, acting and teaching. He has been at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester for the past 15 years as musical director for their Pantomimes.

Other theatre work includes The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui and Oh What a Lovely War at the Mercury Theatre. Graeme was the musical director on both shows and additionally played Sir John French in Oh What A Lovely War. Graeme has also been in shows at the Everyman Theatre Cheltenham, the Liverpool Everyman, the Crucible Theatre Sheffield, New Perspectives Theatre Company, Salisbury Playhouse, Solent Peoples Theatre, Norwich Playhouse, Forest Forge Theatre Company, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and at the London Palladium Graeme was in the cast of Showboat. He is co-founder and director of In Fieri Theatre with ex summer school director Mike McCormack.

On film and television he has been in Truly Madly Deeply, Inspector Morse, Holding On, Streets Apart, Henry Pratt, Casualty, The Blonde Bombshell, Family Affairs, Micawber, Chucklevision, Murder City and also a French film entitled Remake written and directed by Antoine Decaunes and starring Jean Rochefort.

Graeme’s directing credits range from professional, student and amateur productions including several community plays : Open Arms by Rib Davis, his own adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream called Wycombe’s Dream, and two of his own plays Taking It’s Toll and It’s Hard To Resist, both community plays produced in High Wycombe. Professional directing credits include From Fetlock To Forecourt and Beast Feast for The Natural History Museum in London, which he also wrote.

Graeme is head of music & singing on the 3-year B.A Acting course at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. His Musical Directing work there includes The Beggar’s Opera, Into The Woods, Happy End, Billy and Assassins (currently in rehearsal). As of September 2009, he is also singing teacher and ‘acting through song’ specialist at Drama Centre, London. Graeme holds a master’s degree from London Metropolitan University where he lectured in drama.

Following her initial training at Bretton Hall College Janice has trained with a variety of practitioners including dance therapy with Wolfgang Stange, mask work with Geese Theatre, physical theatre with Odin Teatret, Denmark, Grotowski and directing with Eugenio Barba and movement/ mask with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Sue Lefton. Janice has worked as a director and choreographer with professional companies, students and youth theatres.

She was associate director at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (1996 to 1999), where she was responsible for all community, education and T.I.E output. Janice also directed several main house and studio shows there including Chicago, Guys and Dolls, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, Boyband, Road and It’s a lovely Day Tomorrow.

In a similar role at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, Janice has continued with all these strands of work. For the main stage there she has directed Babes in the Wood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington and Cinderella (these last three she also choreographed), Dick Whittington and the Pi-Rats of the Caribbean and Cinderella (again!). She wrote both Dick Whittingtons and both Cinderellas plus Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty and is currently writing a new Aladdin for this year. She has also directed Coward’s Present Laughter, The Europeans by Howard Barker, Oh What a Lovely War, The Triumph of Love, Road, The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui, Habeas Corpus, the premiere of Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy a new play for children for the Mercury, and Catastrophic Sex Music by Bysshe Coffey, a new physical theatre verse play, for the Mercury and Theatre 503, London (this also played at the Latitude Festival), Sound of a Hammer at Birmingham Rep, Goldfish at the Liverpool Everyman and The Force of Change at the Royal Court. She also wrote and directed a new writing project in the Mercury studio entitled Slammers and has directed Mother Courage at the Italia Conti Drama School.

With her own company, Mad Half Hour (see madhalfhourtheatre.com), Janice’s own show Camped Out was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002 and she co-directed and co-wrote The Boy with the Bomb in his Crisps with Lyndi Smith. This was in co-production with Belgrade Coventry and Mercury Colchester Theatres. Chris Bearne (ex Summer school participant and course administrator, now professional actor) was in the cast! It was based on hundreds of interviews with people who had journeyed to the UK to live and work over the past 50 years. Mad Half Hour has also been working with the Arts Council England funded Creative Partnerships project to offer creative input, training and consultancy within schools and colleges. Janice also wrote "Sidste Sommer" (Last Summer) with Maria Lohmann,a new play for young people which is about to be published and performed in Denmark this spring.

She is hugely excited about returning to Summer School, and found life without it last year quite odd.

London-based artist Peta Lily has been creating theatre works since 1983. She is a performer, teacher, devisor and director and has worked in shows, plays, film and opera in the UK, Hong Kong, Australia and Europe. Current performing projects include Wolf directed by Kath Burlinson and solo show iN/Vocation (touring 2010). She also works as a movement director.

Recent work includes directing Endangered, a new music theatre piece composed by Jonathan Cooper, in association with YMT:UK; movement direction on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Library Theatre, Manchester and Alice for Refresh Theater in Liverpool.

Peta has trained with Jacques Le Coq, Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, Theatre du Mouvement, Yoshi Oida, Carlo Bosso (Commedia dell'Arte), Sankai Juku (Butoh Dance), Alvin Ailey School, Master Yeung Kim Wah (Cantonese Opera) and Mike Alfreds (Theatre Direction).

In her directing and performing work, she developed her own breed of physical theatre, which brings together voice and body, and melds the work of the Parisian Masters (Le Coq and Gaulier) and renowned Stanislavski-based English Director, Mike Alfreds. She is further enriching this work with techniques from Dina Glouberman’s Imagework and Arnold Mindell’s Process Work.

As a writer, Peta has created plays and devised scripts that extend the visual and physical possibilities of performance, writing works that explore deep-seated emotions in unexpected areas. Her most recent work is a 15 minute play partly inspired by the recent demonstrations in Iran, titled Be There For Me.

As a teacher, she extends her students' range of physical expression, courage and charisma. She initiated a unique approach to Dark Clown, a challenging style of comedy, inspiring shows by other artists such as Robbie Gringras (ex-Besht Tellers) and generating a devised work, Hamlet or Die at the Hong Kong Fringe. She teaches at Central School of Speech and Drama and The Actor's Centre and has taught at Guildford School of Drama, École Philippe Gaulier, Mountview Theatre, ArtsEd School of Acting, London. She also works in the corporate field where her work covers presentation skills and leadership development.

BRIEF HISTORY
1980: co-founded THREE WOMEN, touring Britain and Europe. (Fringe First with High Heels, 1980). 1983: created PETA LILY THEATRE touring solo throughout the UK and abroad. Shows included Red Heart, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Frightened Of Nothing, Wendy Darling (Awarded a Fringe First, 1988). 1993: created PETA LILY & CO to create highly crafted, energetic theatre works: Low Fidelity, Beg! and entertaining confessional shows Topless 1999 and Midriff, 2002.

She has toured throughout the United Kingdom and performed and taught in Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Greece and Brazil. Both the Arts Council of England and the British Council have supported her work. She has written three full-length plays, The Porter's Daughter (a below-stairs, woman's-eye view of Shakespeare's Macbeth), Blame and Random Oracle. One of her stage productions, Beg! was made into an eccentric independent feature film. Beg! the film appeared in the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1995, alongside Shallow Grave.

As a director, works include Rough Magic, a vaudeville style retelling of The Tempest at London’s historic Wilton's Music Hall, Mirthless: a Suburban Seduction (Hamlet meets The Graduate in the great Australian backyard) at The Powerhouse Theatre, Australia, an exciting and gritty production of The Maids set in a female prison in Portugal, and autobiographically based shows: My Polish Roots And Other Vegetables for Karola Gajda and The Situation Comedy/About The Oranges for Robbie Gringras, Israel. She directed and devised three Music Theatre shows for Youth Music Theatre UK: Please Look At Me Now, Last Tango and Endangered.

Lawrence works as a director, movement director and actor. He was nominated for an Olivier Award for his work with Tony Harrison at the National Theatre and has worked with the poet and playwright on all his site-specific theatre pieces since 1988. He received a Best Actor Award from the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post Northwest Arts Awards and his co-written play Lives Worth Living is published by Heinemann.

His recent directing credits include A Midsummer Nights Dream with Mendelssohn’s incidental Music for the Irish Chamber Orchestra & Storyteller’s Theatre Co., and The Big Enormous Present for Pied Piper Theatre Company. Other directing work includes Theatre Centre, Polka Theatre, Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company, London Bubble Theatre Co., CDS New York Agents Showcase, The Soldiers Tale for the Orchestra of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, as well as several fringe companies.

His work as a Movement Director includes the National Theatre, NT Studio, Northern Broadsides, Hampstead Theatre, Tamasha Theatre Co., for the Edinburgh International Festival and Bristol Old Vic.

His work as an actor includes small, middle and large scale touring nationally and internationally, many of the regional Repertory Theatres throughout the UK as well as the National Theatre, NT studio, Cheek by Jowl, the Young Vic and Northern Broadsides. He was an Associate Artist of Theatre Centre from 1994 to 2007 and an Associate Director in 2001/2. He also teaches and directs in several UK Drama schools.

Mike trained as an actor at Central School in the 1970's and has performed in regional theatres throughout Britain, played Shakespeare in Regent's Park and in 1990 led his own company on a world tour of Lyall Watson's Cage. He has directed numerous productions throughout Britain and Europe and was the founding Artistic Director of the Finborough Theatre, London. He is also a puppeteer, mime and magician and has directed a number of large scale actor/puppet productions for Parasol Theatre for Children, most recently Snow White in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. He is co-founding Director [with Graeme] of In Fieri Theatre for whom he played Macbeth earlier this year. Mike has taught since 1982 and was a member of the Board of Directors of British Theatre Association Training. Mike is Senior Lecturer in Drama at John Moores University, Liverpool.

Rhys studied at Hull University; has an MA (distinction) in Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths College, London and in 1991 he won the Rose Bruford Trust Directors Award for his production Aquarium. He has taught and directed theatre in the U.K and abroad; recently in Tel Aviv, Israel directing David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby. Other work abroad includes Shakespeare's Macbeth (Beit Zvi Theatre, Israel), Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (Ramad-gan Library Theatre, Israel), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (Harlekin Art Festival, France) and the world premiere of The Tale of Peter Vanicek by David Bridel (Nitra International Theatre Festival, Slovakia). Productions in the U.K include Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn (Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton), the 30th Anniversary production of Steven Berkoff's Metamorphosis (The Albany, London), Dr Faustus (Latchmere, London), Road (Green Room, Manchester) Godspell (Tameside Apollo, Manchester) and world premiere's of The Immigrant Song by Mick Martin (The Albany, London), 100 Years of Enchantment by David Bridel (The Oval House/Union Chapel, London) and The Rabbit by Meredydd Barker working with Terry Hands at Clwyd Theatr Cymru.Touring productions include national tours of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner adapted for the stage from the poem by Samuel Coleridge and Aquarium a triple bill comprising Lunch by Steven Berkoff, the world premiere of The Frog Queen by Gerd Knappe and Landscape by Harold Pinter.

From 1996 to 1999 Rhys was Artistic Director of The Brockley Jack Theatre, London. Implementing a robust programme of new, classic and contemporary writing. Rhys turned this small studio space into one of the most popular small-scale venues in London. Productions included Bouncers, The Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, The Hairy Ape, September in the Rain, East, and world premieres of work by Rhiannon Tise, David Bridel, Barney Aston and Mick Martin including the premiere of his BAFTA/TAPS award-winning play Life and Times of Young Bob Scallion.

Rhys was Resident Director at Tameside College in East Manchester from 1991-1993 where he worked alongside other specialist arts practitioners to empower and enable young people from a variety of backgrounds to engage with the imaginative and creative possibilities of the theatre. He has undertaken specialist training with Monika Pagneaux (L'ecole Le Coq) and Elke Tasche (Volksbuhne, Berlin) and has subsequently taught acting, storytelling and ensemble performance in Israel, France, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Turkey; most recently in Istanbul for Z1 Films on behalf of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has also taught audition technique, ensemble acting and directed a broad range of work in a number of British drama schools including Webber Douglas, Guildhall, Arts Educational, Guildford School of Acting and East 15.

Helen studied the piano at the Royal Northern College of Music and Peabody Conservatory, USA. After graduating from the University of Birmingham, she worked as an accompanist and ensemble player before being seduced into the world of theatre. Since then she has been a Musical Director working on both plays and musical shows in many repertory theatres in England, in London's West End and the Royal National Theatre ; she has toured in Europe and 'Godspell'ed in Africa with David Essex. Helen has taught and coached children, adults, musicians, actors, amateurs and professionals in drama schools (Rose Bruford College, RADA, Central School), adult education establishments, youth theatres, summer school courses and privately.

Singer, performer, tutor, voice researcher and writer, Barb Jungr has performed and workshopped in Europe, Africa, Asia, America and Canada. Her innovative shows embrace performance, singing, stories and humour. During 1999 Barb presents Red Roses Blue Ladies, Girl Talk, created with Claire Martin and Mari Wilson, a continuing collaboration with director writer, Julia Pascal and Bare, her new show for the Edinburgh Festival where, in 1987, she was the first woman to receive a coveted Perrier Award. She also appears in Opera Circus' Cut With a Kitchen Knife. She is also an experienced TV performer and broadcaster and composes and arranges themes for Julian Clary's spectacular shows. Barb runs adult and children's choirs, is a respected voice tutor and writes and researches on the voice.

Lyall was a theatre director and acting teacher for twenty-five years and directed several repertory companies including the Bristol Old Vic. He was co-founder, with Mike McCormack, of the Finborough Theatre. He has worked for the British Council, the British Theatre Association, the EEC and the Lincoln Center, New York, as well as at most major British Drama Schools, culminating in his appointment in 1987 as Deputy Principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Since leaving to write, he has had seven plays performed and his first film was chosen for the Leeds International Film Festival. He has seen his work presented at six Edinburgh Festivals, across Europe, in the House of Commons and as far away as Fiji.

Ris studied English and Theatre Studies at Lancaster University and trained at Britain's leading physical theatre school, The Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theatre, where she now teaches. She is the founder of Mimus Mimandus, a touring company focusing on Brazilian themes, and performs solo as a clown/jester. She was a member of the board of Mime Action Group [now Total Theatre] with a particular interest in training and has written extensively for Total Theatre magazine. Ris recently spent six months in Rio de Janeiro working with Augusto Boal and Teatro do Oprimido and filmed his workshops both in Brazil and with the RSC in the UK.

Jen is a director, teacher and performer. She is based in Liverpool and has strong links with the Unity Theatre where she is to be Artist in Residence from Sept 2002 – Jan 2003. She was a founder member of Bare Faced Cheek Theatre Company and more recently Cut To The Chase Productions. Her directing credits include 2 award winning productions THERESE RAQUIN and WANNABE. She has taught at Liverpool John Moores University for the past 3 and a half years as well as Wolverhampton University, Hope Street Actors Centre and The Everyman Theatre, Liverpool. She has directed 2 extremely successful productions in Oporto, Portugal YERMA and WOMEN IN SHAKESPEARE for ESMAE Academy of Music and Theatre and has been invited to work with Teatro de Garagem in Lisbon later this year. She has been associate director on many community projects including OUR TOWN (Millenium Dome) and OUR HOUSE OUR HOME (Liverpool Housing Association and residents) as well as touring youth theatre productions and running a thriving youth theatre for 6 years.

Julia Mcleish is a teacher, singer, director, musical director and animateur. She trained at Middlesex University and has performed as a singer in many Musicals, concert halls and venues across the UK. She is the Artistic Director of Bedfordshire Youth Opera, being nominated for an East of England Arts Award for her 2001 production of SWEENEY TODD. Other recent productions include RIDERS TO THE SEA (JM Synge), TRIAL BY JURY (Gilbert and Sullivan), DOWN IN THE VALLEY (Weill) and INTO THE WOODS (Sondheim). Recently she has set up her own company Peculiar Productions which approaches work with an original educational concept. She has taught for eight years across the entire educational spectrum from schools and colleges to work in Higher Education at Luton University and most recently has been working as a choral animateur with under-privileged children.