SURRY HILLS: Back in late March, second-year students of the Actors Centre Australia (ACA) staged their first performance of the year, showcasing their talents and the results of hard work.
Over three consecutive nights the students performed Voice and Movement Project pieces they had been rehearsing from the start of term. Of the rehearsals, second-year student Amy Hack said: “It was difficult at first. The course itself is very full on, you know. It’s the kind of thing you need to completely succumb to and put all your effort into.”
Although demanding, Amy has no regrets, as being part of the Actors Centre is “the most incredible experience of [her] life”.
“There’s unlimited opportunity to express yourself and to grow and learn. There is a real sense of challenge, but the Actor’s Centre is an environment of care and nurture, so having that balance is good.”
The first performance of the night, the voice piece, was called “Brief Encounter”. Directed by ACA’s Head of Voice, Jennifer West, the piece is a compilation of poems on a broad spectrum of modern poetry from Australia, England, America, Ireland and Scotland. The show, set in the Refreshment Room of a 1950s railway station, revolves around several groups of people gathered to wait for their trains. The piece explores the brief, transient moments, stories and secrets shared between absolute strangers.
“For us, it was about applying our voices to the poetry. We learn to develop our voices as actors, so the performance really was testing our abilities and what our training has amounted to,” Ms Hack said.
“Vanishing Point” was the name of the second show. Devised and directed by Sam Chester, ACA’s Head of Movement, the performance explores the complex issues of salvage, through the use of images and movement. The students themselves contributed their stories and experiences to the development of the piece.
“A lot of the content generated in the movement piece was a product of what we’d devised in class, and sometimes we would draw on personal stories of loss and despair or of finding something, or a sense of hope. We plotted through those experiences and saw what would happen,” Ms Hack said. “We were exploring the different ways to use our bodies to communicate what we were feeling, both to each other and to the audience.”
Their first performance for 2013 a success, the students are now getting ready to tackle the likes of Chekov and Shakespeare in the weeks to come.
Of the three-year full-time acting course, Ms Hack said: “First year is about finding your voice and presence and establishing your right to be on stage. Second year is more putting it into practice and getting on stage and exploring texts, whilst third year is more learning about the industry, so we are then prepared to be thrown into the real world!”
