Outside Influence

By Chris DiRaddo

While the majority of the School’s students come from Canada’s own backyard, they are often exposed to the theatrical traditions and influences of people from other countries. These teachers, many of whom still call their native land home, routinely return to teach at the NTS, offering students a different, and welcome, approach to their craft.

MSipho Ndlela came to Canada from Johannesburg, South Africa five years ago to perform at Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival. His dance troupe, Gumboots, played an extended, sold-out run at the Centre Pierre-Péladeau and introduced North American audiences to a South African art form deeply rooted in the country’s history.

“Gumboot dancing began in the mines of South Africa as a form of communication between labourers,” says Ndlela, who has taught the dance to the NTS’s Acting students for the past three years. Forbidden to speak, these workers developed a way of communicating with each other by slapping their gumboots and rattling their ankle chains. Many years later, this dance is now a popular form of entertainment that continues to be practised by the South African population today.

Ndlela, who began dancing almost 20 years ago at the age of nine, now teaches Gum-boots to NTS students, but in a much kinder way. “The way we learned it, my friends and I, was hard because our teacher would punish us

if we did it wrong. I don’t teach it the same way,” he laughs, “but it is the same technique.”

Second-year Acting student Abdu Bedward found learning from Ndlela to be a great experience. “What we study a lot as actors is communication,” he says, “so it was interesting to see how other people communicate without words… We had to memorize all of these steps and it took us a long time to nail sections of his routine. I have a way of memorizing text but I had no way of memorizing steps, so I had to find a completely different approach to learning how to memorize.”

Although Ndlela does not teach the students specifically about South African culture, the stu-dents do ask him about his country. “We have good actors in South Africa, but their opportunities are slim. I really appreciate that there are a lot of opportunities in Canada, that things are not the same as they are in our country. Even though we have change in South Africa, things take time.”

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

“Theatre is very fashionable in Russia,” says Alexandre Marine, known affectionately to his students as Sascha. “It plays a major role in social life. It still poses certain important questions to audiences.”

Marine is passionate about his work with the students. “Theatre is life presentation,” he says, and he hopes to impart to them the importance of exploring human nature through theatre. “I’m very inspired by working with them. They’re a new generation of actors who are going to play a major part in Canada’s theatrical life and they are quite open to many possibilities and are looking for new forms in theatre.”

Born in Moscow, Marine worked for 17 years as an actor and then as a director, teaching at the renowned Moscow Theatre School and co-founding his own company. His talent has taken him all over Russia, Europe, the United States, and Japan. He began his relationship with the National Theatre School in 1992 when he was asked to teach a Master Class on Chekhov. Since then, he has returned a number of times to direct and inspire the students, most recently by directing a stage adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment last December.

““A lot of what I apply to my acting now comes from everything he taught us about the method that he brings from Russia.” “ Ian Lake.”

Third-year Acting student Ian Lake, who played Svidrigailov under Marine’s direction, found it to be an ideal marriage for him between role and director. “A lot of what I apply to my acting now comes from everything he taught us about the method that he brings from Russia,” says Lake. “Clarity of action, having a strong knowledge of the given circumstances you are coming on stage with. For Sascha, it didn’t seem as though the text and the words were as important as what the characters wanted on stage. Never before had it been taught to me so clearly.”

“Stanislavski’s Method is quite an amazing method for actors if it’s in the right hands,” says Marine. “I bring everything I know about theatre to the people I work with. I try to be open and give my knowledge to anyone who has a desire to work with me. It is important to create an atmosphere of trust with the actors and then things happen in more of a natural way.”

A SPIRITUAL FLIGHT

“I can remember incredibly well the work of each of the classes from the past five years,” says Set and Costume Design teacher Judit Csanadi. “They work incredibly hard and with so much passion. I find new levels of meaning that I never experienced before.”

Born in Hungary, Judit Csanadi has an amazing story of how she began her career in the theatre. Growing up in Budapest, there were no Scenography programs. If one wanted to study the craft, one had to apply for a student visa to neighbouring Prague. Such passports were only available every three years, so you can imagine Csanadi’s horror to find out that an incompetent clerk had lost her application. But all hope wasn’t lost. Csanadi met a man during a tour of one of Budapest’s theatres who would later extend an invitation to her to come and study in Canada.

“Canadian society is wonderful,” says Csanadi, who still lives much of the year in Budapest. She began to teach at the NTS in 1991 and has been teaching at the School ever since.

“She definitely did stand out because her approach was very different,” says third-year Set and Design student Jessica Chang. “The process she taught us was very spiritual. I find a lot of the teachers we have from North America are very concrete, very realistic. But when she came, she gave us wings and we just flew. She really opened my eyes to what design could be.”

Although Csanadi doesn’t teach students specifically about Hungarian theatre, its philosophies and traditions are entrenched in everything she does. “I do not speak about Hungarian society, but about how you can understand your own community… I ask them questions based on the world from where I come.”

The experience of working with these teachers has proven invaluable for the students. “You can almost tell when you have a teacher who is from another part of the world,” says Chang, who has also worked before with Marine. By that she doesn’t mean their thick accents or visible features. “They’re more relaxed and have this kind of humility. There is this sense of respecting every simple thing they have.” “I think it’s hugely important,” says Bedward about being exposed to other cultures while at the School. “We’re dealing with communicating emotions and feelings but, at the end of the day, we’re all human… we all have the same instrument. So in relating emotions, it’s nice to know that there is something that everyone can relate to and that there are other cultures that are tackling the same types of problems.”

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