Meisner Training is an inter-dependent series of training exercises that build on one another. The more complex work supports a command of dramatic text. Participants work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to improvise, to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to textual work. The technique develops the behavioral strand of Stanislavski's 'system' mentioned further on in this study about rehearsals (specifically developing his concepts of communication and adaptation), via its articulation in an American idiom as Method acting. The technique emphasizes "moment-to-moment" spontaneity through communication with other actors in order to generate behavior that is truthful within imagined, fictional circumstances.
I'm not promoting the idea that the rehearsing technique undertaken by George Costigan and Pete Postlethwaite was anything remotely similar to Meisner but simply observing the idea of memory in rehearsal - through my experience of being there and my drawings. Early training is heavily based on actions, in line with Meisner's emphasis on "doing." The questions "what are you playing?" and "what are you doing?" are asked frequently, in order to remind actors to commit themselves to playing what Stanislavski called a "task" or "objective," rather than focusing on the words of a play's dialogue. Silence, dialogue, and activity all require the actor to find a purpose for performing the action involved. By combining the two main tasks of focusing attention on a partner and committing to an action, the technique aims to force an actor into "the moment" (a common Meisner phrase), while simultaneously propelling the actor forward with concentrated purpose. The more an actor can take-in about the partner and the surroundings while performing in character, the more Meisner believed they can "leave themselves alone" and "live truthfully." One of Meisner's famous quotations that illustrates the emphasis on "doing" was "An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words."

Rehearsal and Memory - drawings of Macbeth rehearsals by Jonathan Polkest

History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an age old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory; history is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs etc) that exists in every time and space, in every society, either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organised form. The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory: history is one way in which society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.

Michel Foucault ; The Archaeology of Knowledge

“Tradition itself, in times of dogmatism and dogmatic revolution, is a revolutionary force which must be safeguarded.”

Peter Brook

Theatre and Tradition

The continuous investigation of the meaning of theatre, which underpins all of Peter Brook’s work, has inevitably led him to an investigation of Tradition. If theatre springs from life, then life itself must be questioned. Understanding theatrical reality also entails understanding the agents of that reality, the participants in any theatrical event: actors, director, spectators. For a man who rejects all dogma and closed systems of thought, Tradition offers the ideal characteristic of unity in contradiction. Although it asserts its immutable nature, nevertheless it appears in forms of an immense heterogeneity: while devoting itself to the understanding of unity, it does so by focusing its concerns on the infinite diversity of reality. Finally, Tradition conceives of understanding as being something originally engendered by experience, beyond all explanation and theoretical generalisation. Isn’t the theatrical event itself ‘experience,’ above all else?

Even on the most superficial of levels, Brook’s interest in Tradition is self-evident: one thinks of his theatre adaptation of one of the jewels of Sufi art, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, of his film taken from Gurdjieff’s book Meetings with Remarkable Men, and of the subsequent work on The Mahabharata. Clearly an investigation of the points of convergence between Brook’s theatre work and traditional thought is not devoid of purpose.

An important point needs to be made at the very outset: the word ‘tradition’ (from the Latin ‘tradere,’ meaning ‘to restore,’ ‘to transmit’) carries within it a contradiction charged with repercussions. In its primary familiar usage, the word ‘tradition’ signifies ‘a way of thinking or acting inherited from the past’¹: it is therefore linked with the words ‘custom’ and ‘habit.’ In this sense, one might refer to ‘academic tradition,’ to a ‘Comédie Française tradition’ or to ‘Shakespearean tradition.’ In theatre, tradition represents an attempt at mummification, the preservation of external forms at all costs—inevitably concealing a corpse within, for any vital correspondence with the present moment is entirely absent. Therefore, according to this first use of ‘tradition,’ Brook’s theatre work seems to be anti-traditional, or, to be more precise, a-traditional. Brook himself has said:

Even if it’s ancient, by its very nature theatre is always an art of modernity. A phoenix that has to be constantly brought back to life. Because the image that communicates in the world in which we live, the right effect which creates a direct link between performance and audience, dies very quickly. In five years a production is out of date. So we must entirely abandon any notion of theatrical tradition…²

A second, less familiar meaning of ‘Tradition’—and one that will be used throughout this essay—is ‘a set of doctrines and religious or moral practices, transmitted from century to century, originally by word of mouth or by example’ or ‘a body of more or less legendary information, related to the past, primarily transmitted orally from generation to generation.’³ According to this definition, ‘Tradition’ encapsulates different ‘traditions’—Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Sufi etc. (To avoid any confusion between these two accepted uses of the same word, a capital letter will be employed throughout when referring to this latter use).

Mapping a Dream

Dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative; The Book of the Duchess and Piers Plowman are two such dream visions.

They have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and flexible causality. Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and The Neverending Story's world of Fantasia, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness. Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in a number of works by Phillip K. Dick, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. Similar themes were explored by Jorge Luis Borges, for instance in The Circular Ruins.The threshold between reality and dreams posses no standardized characteristic with the exception of contrast, on one side the alien world contrasting with the second familiar example, either world could fulfill both classifications but for the individual's perception. For example the concepts of Negative and Positive carry no logic without some knowledge of each characteristic. The individual is an actor, director, stage manager, designer, audience and critic the individual can only become connected: a cinema audience, auditoria or a story teller by articulating what they see, sharing those words and pictures with common vocabularies, particular meanings and specific reactions. The theatrical experience is somewhat similar to the dream in that disbelief is usually suspended for the duration of the performance, personally, even when the performance is "bad" the spectator is gripped, they have been entrapped by their own curiosity as much as by their disaffection from the performance, disaffection is a reaction that requires involvement and collaboration. Disbelief on the one hand Disappointment on the other. Acceptance and Approval. Revelation and Belief. Collectively rehearsing in a shared imagined landscape is certainly an act of faith from an external point of view, the layers of fiction inherent in small pieces of coloured tape on the floor indicating the edge of some scenery, scenery that will also represent a representation of a possible reality. Coloured marking out systems used by stage managers in rehearsal representing a space that is then altered by scale and proportion although the actor is just as life scale as any example of vitruvian man and must take smaller steps to traverse the imagined scenic landscape or use some device to foreshorten the distance between himself and the exit.

Archetype as Atmosphere

Atmosphere is an acting device formulated by Michael Chekhov (1991: 34). In this technique, the actors imagine an atmosphere filling the space, then move in harmony with that imaginary atmosphere so that it is strengthened and becomes experientially real for audience and actors alike. {Once the archetypes of the ancient gods had been fully experienced in the neutral mask, it was easy to imagine their particular quality of presence filling the space}. I connect with the reasoning of this idea through my experience of watching actors in various modes in rehearsal for Macbeth, noting the attitude of their presence, their sense of space and their sense of their own proximity to each other, to the ground and the walls and their assumptions about the projected staging. It was as if their Psychosis had become limnal, partly immersed and partly corporeal.

Suspended in Rehearsal

It is difficult for me to recall my genuine reason for wanting to make drawings in the rehearsals of Macbeth in Bristol, there was more than the usual level of pre production excitement because the play featured the actor Pete Postlethwaite who had by then gained public acclaim for his film and theatre. Pete Postlethwaite had gone from being a much loved, authentic but less well known actor in Bristol to a global phenomena with a human face. That production of Macbeth was also a moment when Pete Postlethwaite was returning to Bristol Old Vic, the theatre and the theatre school to fulfill his requite of passage, he had turned down the film role of Private Ryan and was sorrounded by a team focused around the production company Rebbeck Penny Productions who would thereafter produce Scaramouche for a world tour.

Both Steve Rebbeck and Dick Penny had previously worked at the Bristol Old Vic with Pete Postlethwaite during a particularly formative period for many at Bristol Old Vic as well as for Pete Postlethwaite. The Technical support at that time included some very innovative individuals, who appeared larger than life. Going back to my initial question, I think I wanted to be a part of that creative alignment in a different capacity, to see what goes on in the rehearsal room and have the luxury to respond to what I saw there rather than being immersed in the production of the set or some other collaborative craft undertaking. I found the experience difficult to contextualize within my reasoning, I found my presence awkward at times, although the actors were all welcoming, because I was looking for things which simply do not exist outside of the minds internal frame of reference. I also found myself "directing" what I saw, especially outside the rehearsal room where memory and ambition conspire on the page. The figurative nature of my drawing put limitations on what I was saying, I wanted to see displays of memory being used as a compass and I wanted to see formations arriving. The rehearsal room is a totally separate perfomative space and the rehearsal is something far more complex than a blow by blow memorizing of a gargantuan script like that of Shakespeare. That literary density evokes some saturated areas of confusion which tended to provide justification for almost anything but concealed the essential linear counterpoint between character, actor, text and space. Now I want to do it again.

The following notes come from a Chinese production of Macbeth, the rehearsal quotes some Stanislavskian techniques which give a delicately reordered tone to the text.
Towards the end of the ‘dagger’ soliloquy, Bao Guo’an — the actor playing Macbeth — goes down on his hands and knees when addressing the ‘sure and firm-set earth’. In an article on the production, Bao explains the evolution of this moment from his use of the Stanislavskian technique of emotion memory during the rehearsal.
Macbeth was the first foreign role Bao had ever played. The Stanislavski exercises gradually made him more at home in the character. But, as Xu had explained to his performers:

To experience the role’s feelings is not enough. This is only the first step. You must try to express all the feelings you have experienced, so that the audience can see them.
Inner feelings were meaningful in performance only if resulting in expressive action. Bao explains how he moved ‘from the inner to the outer’ in the dagger soliloquy. One night:

I was in bed in the dormitory thinking about Macbeth’s psychological state before he goes to assassinate the King. During the first period of rehearsals, I had once given the monologue: ‘... Thou [sure] and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps, which [way they] walk, for fear / The very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it.’ (II i 56-60) a ruling idea of ‘ordering the earth to obey’. However, that particular night, I tried very hard to think about Macbeth. My heart beats became faster again, I suddenly had a desire that I wanted to ‘beg’ the earth rather than to ‘order’ it. I (Macbeth) knew clearly that, like a thief, I could not be seen by other people , because I was going to do something which is against the moral standard as well as reasons. Nevertheless, I was unable to get rid of my desire. I felt that the sky was staring at me and the earth shaking. I begged both the heaven and the earth to help me. Suddenly, I felt an irresistible impulse to turn over: I changed my posture from lying on my back to on my stomach. Listening to my roommates’ sound of snoring, I felt that I heard Duncan’s. Relying on thse feelings, I held my breath and silently repeated the monologue. I entered the given circumstances before the assassination. (Bao, 1981,118)

There is a curious irony in current attitudes to heterogeneity in the theatre whereby one who would question its use in a contemporary work would nevertheless revel in its operation in Shakespeare. We accept Shakespeare because his achievement is a given condition of his appeal, his work a manifest denial of the objections we must nevertheless continue to level at works as yet unborn, as yet unproven, as yet unable self-evidently to refute our claims.

Peter Postlethwaite at rehearsals in Bristol Old Vic for Macbeth.


			Rehearsals during Shakespeares lifetime - 'cue acting' and 'cue scripting' The Globe Theatre was known to produce “eleven performances of ten different plays” in just two weeks. It was essential to beat the competition for attracting vast audiences and this was achieved by an extremely rapid turnover of plays. Rehearsal time was therefore limited. On many occasions the Globe Theatre Actors only got their lines as the play was actually in progress. Parts were often only allocated on the day of the performance. Sometimes the actors didn't even get any lines. Working with a method called "cue acting " which meant that there was a person backstage who whispered the lines to the actor just before he was going to say them. This rapid turnover led to another technique called “ cue scripting ”, where where each actor was given only his own lines. The complete scene and content of the play was not explained to the actors until it was actually being performed. These techniques allowed for zero rehearsal time, thus enabling a fast turnover in terms of new productions at the Globe Theatre and a huge portfolio of different roles.


Systems of Rehearsal ; Bertolt Brecht. Brechts understanding of Stanislavsky is loaded with images of coercion. For Brecht the Stanislavskian theatre 'systematically compells the empathy of the spectator' who is then a victim of hypnotic experience, .....completely entangled' in the action. Brecht is clear: this 'forcing of empathy' must stop for he argues, how is the spectator to be made to master life when all that happens masters him? There is a hint here of the larger political purpose of which this confrontation with Stanislavsky is a microcosm. The situation of Stansilavsky's audience is analogous to that of the proletariat who are the passive object of politics and must also be freed. The effect Stanislavskian drama has in common with political oppression is enforced submission. Theatre which naturalizes social reality is oppressive in that it compels assent.

Macbeth Rehearsal Drawings by Jonathan Polkest 1998


No one seriously concerned with the theatre can by-pass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theatre work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievements, Peter Brook.


The most beautiful of all doubts

Is when the downtrodden and despondent raise their heads
and
Stop believing in the strength
Of their oppressors.
Oh, how laboriously the new truth was fought for!
What sacrifices it cost!
How difficult it was to see
that things were thus and not thus
Bertolt Brecht

In the 1990s Steve Rebbeck and Dick Penny's production company Rebbeck Penny co-produced Macbeth, starring Pete Postlethwaite, with Bristol Old Vic for a UK tour, and in 2001 Scaramouche Jones, which also starred Postlethwaite, for a UK and world tour.

Macbeth Rehearsals

actor Chiwetel Ejiofor talking about his acting:
I remember getting cast in Amistad and getting this very strong feeling that I had overshot myself. It was a great shock. It made me realize that this is not a profession you can predict; that you can have all these ambitions and expectations and that they can all be thrown to the wind. What was peculiar about that situation was that my aspirations were so far below what actually happened.
I like to disappear into a role. I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.
I always thought of the play as a sequel to Romeo and Juliet. I think Shakespeare's so astute in his understanding of people being vulnerable, you know. And that love is so easy to corrupt. I think so many of Shakespeare's plays are about how fragile love is - how perfect and beautiful it is, but also how terrifying and easy to manipulate it is.
But these are the realities of the artistic idealism and the stock, the commercial/financial realism, and, so, somehow sometimes it is going to work in your favor and sometimes against, and that's all part and parcel of it. We just, in our end, just carry on trying to sort of produce the work, or the best work we can do, and hope that at their end they find a way of getting that to as many people as possible in the cinema medium.
I think I just look for what appeals to me, and maybe what appeals to me is kind of serious sometimes. I like characters and I like story and I sort of like narrative, and that is what excites me. And sometimes, I suppose, in the contemporary context a lot of that is based around dramas these days so I enjoy that and it's what I have always done. I have always been involved in drama, and somehow that is where a lot of the good stories are. And I think there can be comedic moments in drama, like in Kinky Boots, I think there are some funny beats, but the overall, I'm just saying, is that it is a complex story between a few groups of people, and even though the story is heightened and amusing, there are all sorts of beats and machinations that go on and I think that's just what intrigues me and that's what I pursue.

Pete Postlethwaite during rehearsals at Bristol Old Vic

actor Patricia Kerrigan reads her script during rehearsals at Bristol Old Vic Theatre

An experience I could most easily metaphorically compare to passively attending a reheasal is that of a job I once had as a boatman for a sea-diver, I could watch the bubbles on the surface and assist the surfacing diver into the boat, keep the motor running, but the life that went on down there in their world among the atlantic currents was unknown to me, just as those actors ran around, lazed on the floor or paced around with another light in their eyes, they were under the surface of the text and under the surface of now, they were neither here or there.

Drawing In Performance is actually drawing in rehearsal, weirdly intrigued by the idea of memory and how memory is used in a very precise way for rehearsals although I insist on rehearsal being extremely various in execution - the general idea was/is/could be to practice by rote and perfect each move each syllable and yet this is far from realistic. So many incredible things are discovered in a rehearsal, how are they faithfully recorded? And really are they developed memorised activities or does something quite separate take over

Drawing in Performance in this particular blog is drawings I made of rehearsals for the Scottish Play, it is perhaps stereotypical of the artist to say what a great privilege it is to be present in rehearsals and to endorse such an extreme detached presence among the many interlocking sensitized needs of characterization, the actors are preparing their landscape in their collective minds. To the onlooker the situation looks banal and urbane as each real person immerses themselves into a shared psychosis becoming less and less conscious of the old bed, the broken chair and the sagging curtain rails, even their clothing seems to represent far less to do with their everyday identity, remaining in this absentee filled rehearsal room, the actors retain that same focus of attention that children seem to have naturally bestowed upon them and ordinary adults discard as foolish.

Rehearsals evoke a very particular set of rituals and rites, although there could be sequences of action, memorising, reasoning there is a general sensitising to the text and to the mind set of location that brings these widely spread people and roles together in one place, as it happens an imagined place marked out on the floor w3ith little bits of elex tape and random pieces of furniture representing features yet to be realised in this landscape of collective memory.

There is a curious asymmetry in contemporary theatre studies.On the one hand theatre historians admit that drama criticism must include analyses of performance. They argue that, as theatre is a compound entity comprising of speech and action, criticism must find ways of addressing theatre's non verbal elements. On the other hand they continue for the most part to discuss only those features of the theatre event that are dictated by the authors text. This is largely because scripts can be reproduced and are therefore easier to study in a standardised format - rather than performance which is ephemeral. Productions of Macbeth by Reinhardt, Craig and Irving are still discussed in ways that tell us less about these directors than about Macbeth. The demand for a method of studying theatre on the basis of its immediacy is met with all that constitutes the denial of that immediacy : the mechanical and indiscriminate application of the critical methods to literature to theatre.
From; Systems of Rehearsal, Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook by Shomit Mitter

The Appraisal of The Facts

In Creating a Role, Stanislavsky maintains that "in the language of the actor to know is synonymous to feel" by feeling something actors can be satisfied that they are intimate with it in a fullness that approaches the required condition of being that thing. In the alchemy of drawing reality from representation, the actors problem is therefore primarily that of knowledge. To know is to feel and to feel is utterly to be, then to know is, by logical extention, to be. To know more about a character is to experience it more fully and eventually seamessly to become it.

The term "Archeometre" originates from the Greek and means "the measure of the principle". The system refers also to a series of symbols and meanings, which refer to the federal drawer.
'Archeometre' is it the measurement of the 'Archee' (Universal Cosmic Force) of which the Hermetists speaks. Is it a process, a 'key' which makes it possible to penetrate the Mysteries of the Word. It is a measuring instrument of the first (primary) principles of the manifested universe.
Alexandre Saint Yves d'Alveydre's Archeometre shows the original Atlantean alphabet translates into the material the word, form, color, smell, sound and taste, the key to all religions and the sciences of antiquity.
The Archeometre is represented by a circle, which has two scales from 0 to 360 degrees and 360 degrees to 0. It is divided into 12 ranges with 30 degrees each. In the individual ranges are drawn in the tierkreiszeichen, planet, colors, tones and the letters of different alphabets.
The Archeometre is a universal canon (guide), which wants to point the relationship out between the astrological indications, tones, smells, letters and colors. The musician finds therein the color of tones, the writer the toncharakter of letter etc. The Archeometre is to also point practical use out that the religions, arts and architecture a synthesis from different ranges to form.

A Rehearsal Room in Bristol Old Vic Theatre

Daisetz Sukuki, writing in the realm of Zen Buddhism, maintains that "man is a thinking reed but his greatest works are done when he is not calculating or thinking". The methods of Zen Buddhism begin with the assumption that enlightment comes only with the obliteration of conscious purpose. If one lets the unconscious work without conscious interference, the body somehow works more efficiently. If one does not, the body becomes tense and even the most normal motor functions become difficult. Theatre is not immune to such self consciousness. Most actors know that the more one thinks about what one is doing, the more difficult is to do it. The more clearly one works out what one is going to do on stage, the worse the result. A conscious awareness of the image that is required leads actors to imitate it rather than live through the experience of which that image should naturally be the creative result.

The discomfort of unreasonable presence on the stage and the conscious inner truth of reasoned presence and action on it, controlled Stanislavsky's actions on the stage from his earliest years into maturity as a performer."An action is only meaningful if it is real, and reality is a function of reason.

At the end of the day, acting is all about telling lies. We are professional imposters and the audience accept that. We`ve made this deal that we tell you a tale and a pack of lies, but there will be a truth in it. You may enjoy it, or it will disturb you. Pete Postlethwaite

Truth on the stage is that which the actor construes as real. On the 5th of September 1869 Konstantin Alexeyev (Stanislavsky) made his first stage appearance as Winter in a tableau vivant depicting four seasons. He had been instructed to pretend to tend a fire represented by a candle placed behind some logs. As the curtain rose he actually prodded the candle in an attempt at heightening the actuality of the real situation, thus destabilizing the candle which ignited the props fabric around the logs. In his autobiography Stanislavsky recalls being terribly embarrased about his cod fireplace antics and insisted that the act of overturning the candle was, in contrast, completely natural and logical.

In Performance Drawings of a Rehearsal of MacBeth at Bristol Old Vic by Jonathan Polkest


Pete Postlethwaite rehearsing MacBeth at Bristol Old Vic Theatre directed by George Costigan.

MACBETH, BRISTOL OLD VIC
George Costigan's production interprets Macbeth's "I conjure you" very literally, turning him from pilgrim to the black shrine to master warlock himself, summoning forth the bloody child et al with his own pricking thumbs. This is less a man led astray by glowing promises and vaulting ambition, and more a willing Faust, transforming from innocent to magus.
The production is littered with stylistic devices which elicit only the response "Why?". The cast are dressed like an explosion in a costume store, a jumble of periods and wardrobe bric-a-brac which neither please the eye nor aid the understanding. Macbeth and Banquo enter in crimson cassocks swathed in bullet-proof vests, parachute harnesses and swords, like members of a monastic SWAT team. The one suggestion which does succeed is that the Macbeths are unspeakably naff. From the leopard skin bedspread through the coronation fanfare of "We Are The Champions" to Macbeth's white dinner jacket at the banquet, the couple have all the sophistication of a neo-Georgian mansion in Basildon. Clearly the nouveau riche - or in this case the nouveau royale - can only achieve their success through a pact with the Devil.
Yet any flaws in this production are redeemed by Pete Postlethwaite's Macbeth. At hearing the weird sisters' first prediction, he has the glazed and joyfully startled look of a lottery winner. His first encounter with his wife is the unfettered delight of a couple who can't believe they've hit the jackpot. Although the build-up to the assassination sees him more chattering than fretting, thereafter his performance lifts off with the stately grace of an Atlas rocket. Reduced to near-hysterical post-homicidal gibbering, his "Wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?" is a moment of pure heart-rending anguish. From that point on, Postlethwaite rides the rollercoaster of emotion, through possession and psychosis, writhing in agony as he is broken on Fortune's wheel. Internal torment and external violence balance on a knife-edge - the "tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy is an embittered blast of pain and anger as he strangles the messenger who brought news of his wife's death. "Out, out brief candle" indeed!
The other actors struggle to stand out against this megawatt glare of talent. Patricia Kerrigan (Lady Macbeth) is considerably better at high emotion than high treason. It's only when Lady M. starts to come apart at the seams that she gets into her stride - up to then she rattles through the lines as if fearing she'll miss the last train. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an excellent performance as Malcolm - a cool politician, utterly controlled and delivered with icy precision -and only he and Richard Howard (Duncan/Porter/Doctor) can even begin to rival Postlethwaite for stage presence.
The powerful depth and complexity of emotion which Postlethwaite can project through the close-up of the movie camera transfer with rolling resonance to the stage. Whatever else this production may lack, that alone makes this Macbeth a must-see.
TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE
Macbeth is at the Bristol Old Vic until 1 November (box office: 0117 987 7877), after which it tours to Liverpool, Belfast, Bradford, Guildford and Nottingham.

John East at the 606 Club London

Drawing Jazz in a non figurative state of mind

Two-dimensional images contain a capacity for spatial illusion.

Objectivity as a grand illusion

performance is a form of process acted out in real time.

BRAS YW.

votive works exhibition

Votive Drawings an exhibition by Jonathan Polkest

Bromley Arts Council

London BR1 2PX

http://www.bromleyarts.com

Some background information about 24 small works in this exhibition. Originally the main body of these small votive drawings began in the early 1990’s in the British Museum London and in NSW Art Gallery Australia. The idea of investigating such potent symbols was as much a personal quest to interpret the clouded expressions of human existence in the face of the obfuscated historical background so often overlooked by mainstream historical analyses.

The Votive Drawings exhibition has been shown over the last decade in many guises, gradually becoming less in number as works were sold and not replaced but taking on different nuance reflecting the place and time in which they are shown.

1.votive painting of Wicca. Water based gouache on gesso board.