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anna-helena
mclean
Actor - Singer - Musician - Director
Photo by Karol Jarek Centre Anna-Helena McLean Right Alexandra Kazazou
Where did your journey as an actor, singer, musician and director begin?
My Mum would always involve me in her shows as a child. I remember being a beetle at about 4 or 5 years old, and a worm in a huge cornish pasty (I wore a pillow case over my head and she poured gravy over me... yes. I remember it felt awful but I still wriggled on cue and the audience seemed to love it). Surely that qualified me as an actor from a young age.
My Dad made me a mini violin when I was little and I started playing a 3/4 size violin around 6 or 7 yrs old. I didn't really take to it. Found it over competitive and squeaky. I moved onto Piano around 8 and got through a few grades before finding the cello as 'my' instrument about 11.
As a singer, my Mum used to run singing workshops led by the Czech gipsy Ida Kelarova each year in our house in Cornwall. I was the first child to let rip the mournful deep tones of her foreign lamenting repertoire and she then started children's singing workshops. I found my voice and appetite for the Eastern European then.
Director I can't say. I've been told I am a natural leader but I also enjoy being part of a team and very happy when being led well. At school I always played Left Inner at hockey, like the cellists role in an orchestra I gave space and stay energised on standby, ready to run in for the shoot if required.
I relish the love and skill involved in changing roles.
My Mum would always involve me in her shows as a child. I remember being a beetle at about 4 or 5 years old, and a worm in a huge cornish pasty (I wore a pillow case over my head and she poured gravy over me... yes. I remember it felt awful but I still wriggled on cue and the audience seemed to love it). Surely that qualified me as an actor from a young age.
My Dad made me a mini violin when I was little and I started playing a 3/4 size violin around 6 or 7 yrs old. I didn't really take to it. Found it over competitive and squeaky. I moved onto Piano around 8 and got through a few grades before finding the cello as 'my' instrument about 11.
As a singer, my Mum used to run singing workshops led by the Czech gipsy Ida Kelarova each year in our house in Cornwall. I was the first child to let rip the mournful deep tones of her foreign lamenting repertoire and she then started children's singing workshops. I found my voice and appetite for the Eastern European then.
Director I can't say. I've been told I am a natural leader but I also enjoy being part of a team and very happy when being led well. At school I always played Left Inner at hockey, like the cellists role in an orchestra I gave space and stay energised on standby, ready to run in for the shoot if required.
I relish the love and skill involved in changing roles.
Photo by Pau Ros During ACT Training programme at CreationBox London
Are there any one of those facets that you identify with most?
I see myself as an actor who uses her voice; an actor who speaks with an instrument. A director with compassion aquired from deep immersion as an actor and practitioner. I direct from a place of knowing how it felt to be there and what I wished I might have heard or needed myself. I also enjoy the reality check in finding a way to communicate something that seems so obvious to you but not to someone else, and the millions of ways you can find that mutuality.
Quite possibly my approach to work comes from my classical music background. You can never be skilled enough, there is always more to do. The moments of flight are brief but incomparable to anything else. It takes (me at least) a huge amount of devotion, self control, repetition, endurance and meditation to get there. It teaches you how to make the impossible possible.
It must all be about having an enormous joy to play and to keep playing... Not limiting yourself to one way of looking at things.
I also get bored quickly.
Have you always been involved in the arts?
Yup. Born into it. I think I was first seen at a Festival when I was around three climbing up on a stage naked drawn by a desire to take the microphone. At least that's what my Dad tells me but then again he's quite a storyteller.
I drew a picture about 8 of a girl singing and it said over the top "I want to be a performer". I was always very sure of what I wanted to do.
Photo by Clive Tagg During rehearsals of Titania at Trestle Arts Base
You've spent a lot of time in Europe, how did that come about?
I travelled throughout Europe as a child with my Mum's theatre troupe, so living on the road and amidst different languages felt natural. My Dad is Danish and runs a violin shop in Copenhagen.
At University I became obsessed with Teatr du Soleil, soon devoured by mask making and wondering about becoming a Fool with Jonathan Kay. I was auditioning for drama school but aware I was very probably not in with much of a chance of success in the business, mostly because I was a girl and didn't think of myself as particularly interesting looking. Not long after that my teacher encouraged me to do a Summer course with Song of the Goat, a physical theatre company from Poland. After a phenomenal 2 weeks they invited me to visit them in Wroclaw. Two months later I was there. I went to work with them in a rural set barn called Brzezinka on initial ideas for Chronicles: A Lamentation, a work that went on to make them their international acclaim and consolidate their style.
We played complex music all day outside with master musicians, rehearsed at night in the barn by candle light, ate late night picnic 'kolacja' and slept on hay bales with animals scampering nearby. I found it all complete magic and felt totally at home while acknowledged for my musical and acting interests and enjoyed for my international background. To be honest, though, I was young, very naive and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I came back to the UK and engrossed myself in paintings to send them. I was basically in love. But I got no response.
Within three days of graduating from my degree in Music and Drama I went to Gardzienice. I knew that Grzegorz and Anna, the directors of Song of the Goat, were taught by a man called Staniewski in a village called Gardzienice, South East Poland on the Ukrainian border. I hoped I'd get more of a response there. Within three days I was playing cello and singing in their renowned production, Metamorphoses and within 5 days the Director took me for a walk in the woods and said "You have the fire necessary to work with us". I stayed there for 7 years almost to the day.
Photo taken during Electra by Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practice 2002-2007
What do you think European process and practices can bring to the UK?
Something very different to what we already know and love.
I think the Polish style in particular brings a sense of community that I rarely find in the UK or London in particular. It is a theatre that embraces the subconscious of day to day life as well as the conscious. The symbolism and poeticism in reality that is often only visited in our dreams and rarely translated. The performances I helped create in Gardzienice were as much physical as metaphysical. They were stories to which I believe I brought a psychological approach to character and dramatic relationships (in my case the role of Electra) while simultaneously interweaving poetry, song, rhythm, breath, body, image and motion in one.
The way Staniewski worked with me was like a painter; mixing me with his concepts, training me like colours on a palette, testing me like drafts in a sketch book for a master work, realising me as paint marries with blank canvas. Once the composition was made though, don't think he let you rest. I think I was able to accept his way with such abandon and honesty because of my upbringing. Most foreigners who came to learn from him needed to question everything and defend themselves. Perhaps it was/is old fashioned but that way they will never make the journey from "coal to crystal", as he called it.
There is something about the Polish identity, its political and religious history that is key to what what makes work like 'that I learnt in Gardzienice', so unique. Art for them is necessary. It has a real function and offers freedom from ingrained oppression... at least it was so in 1980 when they first started producing shows. With this need comes such a sense of respect for the power of art, a humility and openness to listen to the unknown.
In the UK, a work space is always full of words, questions, giggles, tea breaks, politeness and in Poland there were none.
I like a mix of both.
Photo by Pau Ros
How did you establish your theatre company Moon Fool?
I first set up platforms for international theatre and music exchange and sought Arts Council funding in 2004, while I was still in Poland. I then progressed to create an adaptation of King Lear and called the company BangZed but somehow things did not settle.
In 2010 Trestle, in St Albans, offered to produce a three handed version of A Midsummer Night's Dream devised with Peter Reynolds of NoFit State Circus and Christopher Sivertsen from Song of the Goat and directed by Ian Morgan, also from Song of the Goat. It was then that I established Moon Fool as the company name.
My ambition has been to further what I learnt in Poland with Staniewski but to bring more of my personal background and interest as an actor - with a psychological approach to developing character and story. In Gardzienice we worked only on the Ancient Greek Plays, mostly Euripides' Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. I wanted to return also to my vernacular at last and as such to Shakespeare, as a guide to developing an original approach to devising theatre that blends musicality, movement and text with equal weighting. I am now moving toward new writing and site specific work with large scale ensembles.
Can you tell me about ACT training. How did you get involved with this process?
ACT stands for Actor - Chorus - Text and the order in which I work with actors through a programme of my training. I, as the director, of course start with the text before I meet them and carry it silently with me through the initiation period.
It probably started when I was a child making plays in my back garden and the seriousness with which I went about it all, and believed we needed to practice. It was probably deepened by my relationship to sports and orchestra at school. It was certainly sparked on the dance floor as a teenager. I loved what happened to me as my body opened my mind through dancing. I could dance for hours (under no influences too I might add!). It began to take form as a theatre training at University and found a home when I met Song of the Goat.
In Gardzienice I was a diligent student and notated everything taught every day, every single exercise and I practiced them alone if not with the company every day to ensure I knew everything I had learnt and could own it confidently. I directed and composed King Lear for three women, adapted under the title The Lear in 2007. I realised that in making the piece I had in fact crystallised a training. I called it, Archetypes in Shakespeare - workshops in Musicality, Movement and Text.
I went on to develop that with Pamela Prather, a voice coach from Yale School of Drama I met while on tour with Gardzienice in 2001. We ran residencies in France, USA and UK and worked with 9 different Shakespeare plays designing a comprehensive teaching method together that combined Fitzmauritz voice work and yoga with Gardzienice training to offer actors a fresh way of approaching select speeches from Shakespeare.
I went solo in 2009 when Anirudh Nair and the British Council India invited me to run an ACT workshop tour in three parts of India. It spiralled out further from there.
Photo by Pau Ros
Tell me about your recent physical theatre production STORM.
STORM has evolved out of the last 10 year's research. It is also the culmination of my journey as an artist and person with the work that I do. Every step I make is asking me as an artist to advance to the next level, what is it that needs to grow next. What is calling me. What am I responsible for?
It was hinted at in an Archetypes in Shakespeare workshop I was leading alone at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with 2nd year acting students. A phenomenal young actor, extremely tall with a voice that can stun the world was working on the role of Prospero. He came into the room through double doors, blown open by an huge sung scream. His mouth an enormous O. It broke my heart and I knew it needed to be realised one day.
During a dark period in my personal life, I became exaggeratedly paranoid about the threat of climate change. Yes one of those moments you are not sure if it's a rational or irrational concern... At the same time I had a powerful dream in which many things happened, I won't go into here, but it culminated with me braving my way out of the safety of my 'home' and all the 'rooms' of my life to face a huge sea storm. I had to halt the waves and found myself conducting them as if with magic from the training I had learnt in Gardzienice. Through suspensions, release and musical listening.
I managed to stop all the sea and stood alone holding the immensity of all the water of the world riddled with all the problems of life on earth, standing in front, above, all around me frozen, a shard, a cross section of everything I could possibly imagine. Terrifying. And I realised I could not do it alone.
I wanted to make a play that attempted to take responsibility for the personal and the global at once. For me the archetypes of mind, body, spirit as represented by Prospero, Caliban and Ariel seemed like a code that might break Miranda free from the bondage of obedience and into awakening.
Photo by Karol Jarek During rehearsals for Storm with Alexandra Kazazou, George Bellamu, Chris-Gerard Heyward and Ragnhild Freng Dale
What are the pros and cons of hiring volunteer actors?
I find the main struggle to make theatre is money, especially in London. I was brought up in theatre and I never took drama as an 'official' lesson, I worked overtime to do drama GCSE outside 14 other GCSE's I was already doing. If I ever needed to buy something special I would go out and busk on the streets, whatever the weather. Or make badges out of fimo and sell them door to door.
At University I had the fortune of being the last year to get free tuition and due to my family background my rent was subsidised by the government. I also managed three jobs throughout a joint degree programme in order not to get into debt because I knew I wanted to be an actor and would not make money in the 'big wide world' and I might want to go to drama school.
In Poland we didn't think much about money because our accommodation was provided and we learnt to live on very little because we had very little. We did not work for money, we worked because we believed in what we were doing and money was a token acknowledgment of our loyalty and commitment. Since leaving Gardzienice in 2007 I have not had a permanent home as rent and bills is the main thing that stops people generally from being able to follow their dreams. But in its place you gain stability of course, on many levels. With age I value that more and more.
I suppose your question brings rise to another question about the state of mind with which one approaches doing what you want to do.
"I do believe that if you want to do something you will find a way. Money is energy that flows, it comes and it goes. It is not to hold onto. I have also learnt, probably from busking on the streets with my Mum as a child, that you can earn your way to do anything you want if you have the right state of mind. You don't need to wait for anybody, it's up to you"
If I want to make an album of music I invest the time; my professional time in composing that music, promoting it and selling it. I earn the money back. Or not.
In Gardzienice I committed 7 years of my life and sacrificed every thing else to my devotion to that practice. Next to no social life, being on call 24/7, living in the middle of nowhere half an hour's walk (7 months of the year in freezing conditions) to the nearest shop, little contact to family. Honestly if I think about it, I don't know how I did it. I just did't think that much and once I'm in I'm not someone to look back. But I came away with the greatest treasure I might ever have wished for and Staniewski's blessing to share it with the world. It was my responsibility to own it with integrity and figure out how to live with that outside the protection of a community and make a living out of it.
Based on a form of respect for what it has taken to gain the skills and experience I now have, and the work it has taken to build the work for myself since in Western Europe where this work is not rated as highly as in eastern Europe, I now expect students who are showing great potential to take part and pay for at least three residency workshops before I employ them and share my own fee with them if there are not funds to employ them on their own fee.
In circumstances when I have not kept to this rule I have found without exception that students have taken the training and opportunities offered for granted and soon run off without showing respect for the trust and work invested in them.
We are still finding our way with STORM and it changes from project to project. It is clear when we enrol people what they will be getting out of it and what will be expected of them. In our project this Summer that exchange was crystal clear and a complete joy on all sides. It is important when enrolling volunteers that a contract is set up between you and they know in black and white what the exchange is and that that is honored fairly. Anything more than that is their good will. Such good will is usually rewarded by more involvement in the company and a share in future opportunities as and if they arise.
This is not a job that will make you money but it will make you richer in so many other ways.
Photo by Pau Ros
What have you found to be the main barriers in theatre making?
I hate to say it, but at this point in my journey I must say money does seem a huge obstacle. I think it's become most critical due to my personal need to live in London, close to my friends and close to the heat of progress. It is such an huge effort to pay rent and to afford commuting across London, to enrol trainees who comprehend the commitment necessary to take on this training style and even if they do who can afford to make the time and travel to the rehearsal room to keep practicing.
In Poland we lived on very little and were paid very little. Basic needs were provided there and you learnt not to need more. We could survive on a shoe string and we were grateful for what money we were paid and we gave our time and energy without limit or doubt. This is the way to make art to begin with and then you see the rewards.
The Beatles got big because they were not only gifted and a balanced combination but most of all because they played together all the time. It's the only way to get anywhere. If it's a group you have to do it together as much as possible.
There are ways around it and I have tested those i.e making a solo show that you can practice in your bedroom and tour in a suitcase, your chorus of 12 in a loop station. But this does not bring to audiences the full power of what this work can do. The style deserves to be seen and heard and felt in its full range. It has to be possible.
I believe, like in Ancient Greece, theatre can 'move and shake'. It can sway political views, provoke intense catharsis and empower individuals. It can make a storm that changes you forever. If we listen well and we are generous with the people who want to exchange with us, then I know how incredible this approach can be and how immensely positive the impact.
Photo by Pau Ros
Photo by Linnea Peterson
What does the future hold for STORM?
We're looking to raise funding to mount the full new writing production with interactive multi media and tour nationally and internationally as a site responsive work. The vision is to tour with director, 4 core actors and 3 chorus members and run ACT training residencies for community members local to the site. These workshops will train new participants into the chorus for the show and they will perform alongside the core team in runs of up to three weeks.
We currently have three international bookings and at least five strong partnerships in UK. I cannot say at this point what will happen but as with the message that the piece itself expresses, we move and change with circumstances while staying true to the heart. And we do this as well as we possibly can.
What does the future hold for Anna-Helena McLean?
Living life to the full with compassion and a sense of humour. Allowing myself space to chill out and never ceasing to believe that we can all fly. Being light.
Are you a fan of any actors, writers, directors who are not on the radar yet?
My goodness I feel like there is so much talent out there. Many of my friends are artists who I believe to be 'the best'. I'm seeing students I teach burst into fame within months of working with them on a regular basis.
I must say I think my working colleague of 8 years Anirudh Nair is one of the most talented, humble and intelligent people I have had the fortune to meet. I can see him move from strength to strength and have an inkling it's his time now and hope, of course, Moon Fool can provide the platform he needs as much as his own independent work.
I recently collaborated on a play by Mike Bartlett and for such a young writer (33) I think he is brilliant. Come see King Charles III at Wyndham's Theatre this Autumn (I'll be on cello in the balcony).
Tom Leamon too, an artist/painter as well as director of Gallery 223. A seriously cool and hard working dude, a prolific creator and advocate of artistic community and integrity in practice and life, based in London. And THAT'S saying something.
What advice would you give someone trying to break into the arts?
Be realistic about what you can do, fall in love with it and build on it. Don't be afraid. Work hard. Keep going. Keep a close circle of people you know and trust and who love you for being you. Look after them. Look after your relationship with them as they are the protection that will give you all the freedom you need.
Be realistic about what you can do, fall in love with it and build on it. Don't be afraid. Work hard. Keep going. Keep a close circle of people you know and trust and who love you for being you. Look after them. Look after your relationship with them as they are the protection that will give you all the freedom you need.
"Don't believe the applause but be generous and gracious in receiving energy from others. Listen to your heart and those you trust, and have trusted for more than 3 years. Stay focused and don't get distracted by shallow matters. Keep your heart on the goal.
Be ready and be good. Every time."