Thank you for visiting the Kate Willoughby website.
I have just finished working with a new company called Foreign Affairs, formed by Camila Franca and Trine Garrett, who bring their background in the Meisner Technique to site specific work. The performance at the Lord Napier was an intense night of drama and comedy, bringing some of the best of contemporary writers (including Mamet, Hampton, Eldridge and Marber) to one of London's established rave venues. The place was packed and a great night was had by all without the aid of any illicit substances!
The production built on my recent work with Scott Williams and the Impulse Company on Caryl Churchill's TOP GIRLS, THE THREE SISTERS and TWELFTH NIGHT.
Impulse Company combines the technique devised by Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater with the positive, supportive approach practised and promoted by William Ball, founder of the American Conservatory Theater.
From repetition exercises to lifting the text off the page and then experimenting with tasks Impulse Company's approach opens up all sorts of avenues in the work.
The Meisner Technique encourages living truthfully in a set of given circumstances (with no fourth wall). It can be pretty terrifying at times as you literally step into the unknown, until you realise that you will always have "the moment" and that this and the other actor(s) as your lifeline.
In performance the freedom I had found through repetition and later rehearsals opened up still further when I simply relaxed and responded to the other actors. New discoveries happened on impulse every night and this gave the work an energy and truthfulness that had previously eluded me.
TO FREEDOM’S CAUSE – KATE WILLOUGHBY PRODUCTIONS - OVERVIEW:
After hugely successful performances of the play at Bolton Castle and the Friars Head in September and October, I am looking to develop TO FREEDOM’S CAUSE further. The play was featured on BBC Look North on Friday 2nd October and on the BBC's Politics Show (North East edition) on Sunday 4th October.
Feedback from the audience includes:
"Makes you feel very grateful for what they did"
"If I'd have lived then I would have been too frightened to go to gaol."
"My distant relative Zoe Proctor wrote 'My Life and Yesterday', in the 1900's she had been a suffragette for a short time ... she wrote about life in prison. All ties up with your production."
"I thought that the forcible feeding scene was excellent. It was enough to make the audience imagine the brutality of it, which is what the work of the theatre must do - stimulate the imagination. When that happens people can be changed."
"The fervour of the women dedicated to the cause was most powerful. I wished to join the campaign."
"The play began to illustrate the needs we all have for approval, affection, love, trust, etc and if they can be focused on a CAUSE, to some extent we come alive."
For more information go to the Kate Willoughby Productions section or click here.
