Last month, two of NIDA’s senior graduate school staff, Head of Directing Dr Egil Kipste and Director, Graduate Studies and Head of Cultural Leadership A/Prof Cheryl Stock, embarked on a two-week residency at Vietnam’s Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema (HATC).
Photo: Cheryl Stock working with HATC students
Last month, two of NIDA’s senior graduate school staff, Head of Directing Dr Egil Kipste and Director, Graduate Studies and Head of Cultural Leadership A/Prof Cheryl Stock, embarked on a two-week residency at Vietnam’s Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema (HATC).
The latest international collaboration further demonstrates NIDA’s commitment to engaging in partnerships with other leading performing arts organisations around the world.
‘The highly successful residency of teaching and rehearsals culminated in a showing of three new works, introducing students and staff of the academy to processes and approaches which were completely new to them,’ commented Stock.
Stock worked on alternate day with two different groups comprising 21 second year acting students from the drama department and 14 choreography students from the dance department. The acting students worked on Stock’s self-devised work, Falling. It dealt with the nature, reality and poetic/symbolic interpretations of falling, which integrated improvised movement and text, with live accompaniment of the traditional dan bau (monochord). The acting students also wrote the poems which formed the text for the work.
A second piece, Flow, saw the choreography students explore a compositional process to create site-specific movement for outdoor spaces. Flow was a journey which evoked past and present across four outdoor sites. The audience shared this journey of old and new memories with the performers as they travelled from place to place. Traditional bamboo flute (sao) and drums (trong) accompanied the dancers on their journey.
Kipste worked with directing students and acting fourth year students on The Procession, which comprised a series of scenes that resulted in an abstracted celebration of the capacity of human emotion and behaviour. Each scene focussed on a specific emotion, and individual events were defined by an iconic song. During the creative process, the HATC students applied a number of dramaturgical and performance techniques that were taught alongside the rehearsal process. The performance also used live relay camera and screens. Students were introduced to numerous skills, including dramatic scenarios for performance, based on guided improvisations, integration of media, dramaturgical structuring of story-telling, character development and staging.
‘Although the techniques we introduced to the students were unfamiliar, after overcoming initial challenges, they were very open to new ideas and willingly embraced the creative processes of the work resulting. Their performance went beyond our expectations and the audience obviously enjoyed the experience as well,’ commented Stock.
‘Vietnam also taught us many things – their long history has seen an extraordinarily rich and varied traditional culture evolve. The generosity and warmth of the friends we made was very special and Hanoi is a dynamic and vibrant city,’ she added.
The residency paves the way for further reciprocal projects between for the two leading national dramatic arts institutions.
