seventeen, vacation drama school

I speak about this in my show MIDRIFF. The moment where I look around - we're outside for some reason, doing an exercise or having free time together in the open air. Two girls walking about wrapped in a crochet blanket. A boy in a pink shirt. I have an epiphany of sorts where I feel - 'at home'. Sounds trite I know.

We do movement with Salvatore Marrucci. He looks like an beautiful Incan with a superb profile, glorious skin and a shock of dark hair. We warm up our hips: 'hit the apple! hit the banana! hit the orange! griiiiiiiind the coffee!' He has an American accent and I've never seen anyone more exotically beautiful.

There are two female teachers on the course. One American and one English. We do exercises where we lie on the floor and visualise relaxation, passing an imaginary hoop over our body while someone chings hand cymbals - wow is this permitted? Is this work? One of the female teachers ridicules me when we read a section of text. I think I am brave because I step up. There's a podium and I stand with my toes over the edge, apparently, and wiggle them as I read. So many young people who begin theatre have no concept that the whole of their body is being seen, or that it matters. She tells the whole class loudly and emphatically at the end - 'that was all we saw, your toes wriggling!' Teachers, be kind. She could have stopped me and let me know kindly and started me again. Of course I didn't have the wit to think that then. Just a tad disappointed that, in a world where we were learning 'trust' exercises, the great teaching technique of ridicule was still employed.

She also taught that damned falling-like-a-plank 'trust' exercise. Giving trust is easy to do. That's when you follow the teacher's instruction. What is harder is preparing the group as a whole to be worthy of the trust of the others, to really look after each other...bend your knees, lower your centre of gravity, keep your eyes in soft focus, stay relaxed. Instead, someone got headbutted.

We study 'Camino Real'. They tell us it's Spanish for the royal road and I am afloat in its surreal world and pretty much blind to the themes. We have to do a makeup for a character. The boy in the pink shirt makes himself up as Don Quixote. I am surprised at how much he knows about shading and lines and why he chooses this character and not one closer to his age range. I think we are also working with The Rose Tattoo. Anyway I have chosen a young girl, a virgin. I think I do a white face like a mask. At the end I am disappointed at my choice and the result. I'm ashamed I haven't read the plays since. Certainly I didn't study them enough before I went. Auditionees, always read the play, study it! Apart from David Sutton's stretching our reading and creative writing, my schooling contained very little to make me proactive. 
(The life-saving teacher David Sutton first suggested I read The Year of the Flea, about Guerilla Warfare - not my choice of subject, but the book was slim. I got into the habit of using the library shelves and one book lead me to another. I read maybe most of Ibsen in this way. One collection of plays would lead me to the next. he also suggested we subscribe to Time magazine. I would flick through the news and end up mainly reading the literary section without realizing that was what I was doing.)

That's all I remember about the Drama course. Apart from one mad evening where a group of us made a small spontaneous parade around the campus, across the huge lawns chanting in nonsense. I remember being embarrassed and a little exhilarated, wishing I could jettison self-consciousness. Pleased to be 'in' something with others (a solitary childhood sniff sniff, very sad). I think once, in class time, we improvised sitting in a toboggan just like the song in Chorus Line. Once we did a long extended journey improvisation. Oh and one evening we sat around with a guy who could play Gloria on the guitar. G-L-O-R-I-A. The excitement of the riff, the satisfaction of the spelling out, the disappointment of not knowing the words of the verse.


There was a student who had stayed on in the student accommodation (no one called it halls). A French boy, aged 21. He said he could have gone to his sister's house for the holiday, but preferred to stay to meet 'interesting people' - ie the tutors, Jazz dancer Ronnie Arnold among them. He'd sit and meet them in the refec at meals. (I never found out or thought to care who was teaching the writing course, maybe it was held elsewhere). 

Somehow I got to meet Eric (disappointingly un-French name). He was studying Modern Political Ideologies (1968, Daniel Cohen Bendit, 'sous les pavés, la plage' etc) and was a photographer. His special basement room had a shower stall which he used as a dark room. He took photos of me one day just outside the halls - me in my pale green Indian shirt, long blonde hair held back by a bobby pin (kirby grip). When I walked into his little student den I saw them - newly out of the developing chemicals, glossy 8x10 prints showing my face (as large as I'd even seen it, barring in a mirror) plastered still-wet to the walls. 

We sat side by side and he opened a large book. The photographs of Henri Cartier Bresson. He made me aware of composition - 'What is it about this one? See, the priest's cassock matches the line of the roof'. Ah, not just content but form. A visual language. An assonance of images. My dad had had a darkroom when I was tiny. Just family snaps really.

And Eric listened to Mozart and Jazz. He said that Jazz is what Bach would be writing now if he were alive. 


At the end of the course, I was taken back to my dry southern suburb in Dad's big cream-coloured Valiant. I had met someone from the northern hemisphere. Someone who lived in one of the more established and pleasant suburbs of the sprawling urbanity of Brisbane. I wasn't dreaming of becoming an actress. I had no thought to create a life on stage. But I knew I wanted to be a creative person, I had seen things that were mysterious - not blank and stark un-knowables like the family secrets but mysterious in a different way, a good way. The world had opened its doors. Even if just a little.