Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation…  

Company Gabrielle Moleta’s work is based on a body of acting training techniques with a distinct lineage.

Transformation involves the actor in detailed, specific observation of animals and birds in order to incorporate them into her body as completely as possible.  The actor has to commit every pore and sinew to this focus. Once the actor absorbs themselves in this focus, a second stage of transformation from animal into a new human is possible.

Imaginative Improvisation is the actor’s practice of detailed and specific attention to the creation of an imagined world around her. The actor has to return repeatedly to her imagination, memories and senses, working with her body and mind to inhabit a detailed imaginary world truthfully and freely.  

Combining Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation means that actors can inhabit both the animal’s physicality as well as its world and the environment. The work requires actors’ absolute concentration on creatures and circumstances outside themselves. The observation must be continuous, live and rigorous, For this work to really take hold, the actor must return to looking at the subject actually again and again.

This is not ‘animal work’ in its usual sense, because the actor is not trying to ‘become’ an animal for its own sake. Nor can the actor rely on the vague and non-specific memory of the horse that lived nearby when she was a child, the lion she saw once at the wildlife park, or the meerkat in a half-remembered documentary. In order to allow this work to really take hold of the performer, she must return to looking at the subject again and again. The disciplined, absolute focus on the ‘other’ (animal or bird) should diminish the actor’s sense of self, thereby releasing other hidden thoughts, memories and imaginative circumstances.

Back in the studio, this detailed, sustained focus takes transformative, physical root in the actor’s body, unlocking each actor’s unique ability to make the invisible visible, to create striking truths onstage and to discover kernels for stories. This is where our theatre making begins.

Lineage 

The work that we use as a starting point for making theatre is derived from a body of actor training techniques that have been handed down in a unique lineage from teacher to assistant. They were first developed in early 20th century France by Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), who passed them on to his nephew Michel Saint-Denis (1897-1971). John Blatchley (1922-1994) had joined Michel Saint-Denis, Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine at the Old Vic School. When Saint-Denis set up a new school, the Centre Dramatique de l’Est in Strasbourg, Blatchley was invited to join him and worked as an actor and director, and assisted Saint-Denis in his new school, taking over the teaching of what was known then as Improvisation.  Catherine Clouzot was a student at the school and was taught by Blatchley, whom she was later to marry. Back in the UK Clouzot and Blatchley developed Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation approaches further, working together at The Central School and then at The Drama Centre, (which John Blatchley had founded with Yat Malmgren). John and Catherine later taught at the School of Acting at Arts Ed London from 1981. After John Blatchley died in 1994,  Catherine Couzot continued teaching at Arts Ed. This is where Gabrielle Moleta, training there in the late 1990s, met and learned from her. In 2005, Catherine honoured Gabrielle Moleta, Birgit Nordby and Hilde Hannah Buvik by inviting them to work as her assistants and apprentices in order to pass on the body of work before Catherine’s retirement. Birgit and Hannah now work in Scandinavia and Gabrielle is the leading practitioner and successor in the UK. In 2021 Gabrielle asked company member Timothy Dodd become her apprentice in this field. Tim, who trained at Arts Ed in the 90’s and was therefore taught by Catherine, now began his apprenticeship with Gabrielle. Thanks to the support by Ian Morgan at RADA this approach could be passed on in keeping with the way this work has been handed down- through long apprenticeship in the training room. Tim now teaches Transformation in the UK.

The work has been handed down from teacher to apprentice, starting with Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) who passed it to his nephew Michel Saint-Denis (1897-1971), to John Blatchley (1922-1994) and then Catherine Blatchley (Clouzot), and finally, in 2005, to Gabrielle Moleta (and Hilde Hannah Buvik and Birgit Nordby in Scandinavia).