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Laurance Rudic

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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.

For 34 years, (1969-2003) '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 its resident playwright, dramaturg and translator, R.D. McDonald. For many years, the Citz was proving-ground and creative home to young actors who passionately eschewed existing English literary and mechanistic acting conventions in order to develop their own very 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 semi-professional singer, and his aunt was the Scottish actress and broadcaster Edith Ruddick.

Career[edit]

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 theatre's potential as a space for expressing the immediacy of human existence beyond conventional approaches to 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 dream theatre of the iconoclastic theatre artist and mime, Lindsay Kemp, whose approach introduced him to what Rudic refers to as Dynamic Meditation - a heightened state of sensory awareness in which intuition and spontaneity within the moment of the performance play a major role. Kemp's physical theatre work had its root in many inspirations including the Corporeal Mime of Etienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau, and also the classical Noh theatre of Japan, in which time is non-linear and of the moment.

His work with Kemp in Flowers and Woyzeck at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh led to his being accepted as a company member of the newly established Glasgow Citizens Theatre company ('The Citz') (1969-2003), run by Giles Havergal. At that time (1972) he was one of only three Scots actors to be accepted into the young company who were predominantly English. Rudic continued to work there intermittently until 1996.

Travels in the East[edit]

Throughout his years at the Citz, Rudic travelled frequently to cultures beyond Europe in order to understand more about holistic process in the oral 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. 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 contributed greatly to his understanding of his own transient 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 got to know the old generation of traditional performance artists such as Sayed El Dowwi, 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[edit]

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.

Theatre[edit]

Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama[edit]

Giles Havergal's Glasgow Citizens Theatre Company[edit]

1971
1972-1973
1973-1974
1974-1975
1975-1976
1981-1982
1982-1983
1983-1984
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1996
2006
2008

Tennessee Williams The Parade Don Rudic European and UK premiere

Other theatre[edit]

Film and TV[edit]

BBC
STV
FILM

References[edit]


External links[edit]


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