‘I’m proud to be intellectually disabled, it’s who I am’. Blue Teapot gears up for the arts festival with ID
Blue Teapot Theatre Company provided one of the big hits of last year’s arts festival with Christian O’Reilly’s heartbreakingly beautiful play, Sanctuary, a production which also enjoyed a successful run at the Dublin Fringe Festival.
The critical and popular acclaim accorded to Sanctuary definitely whets the appetite for Blue Teapot’s new show ID, which receives its premiere in a couple of weeks’ time as part of this year’s Galway International Arts Festival.
The term ‘ID’ is shorthand for both ‘identity’ and ‘intellectual disability’ and in the show the gifted Blue Teapot performers bravely confront the way the world sees them, and how they see the world. Filled with humour and with insight, ID dramatises the experience of intellectual disability while prompting us to question our own notions of identity along the way.
The play is directed by Scott Williams and devised by him and the Blue Teapot actors. At the end of rehearsals last Monday, Scott sat down to talk about the show and what it has been like for him working with Blue Teapot.
Scott Williams and the Meisner Technique
A native of California, Williams has been based in London since 1996 where he founded the Impulse Company which is dedicated to offering acting courses using the Meisner Technique. The Meisner Technique deeply informs the work he has been doing with Blue Teapot, he began our chat by telling me about this particular acting aid.
“Sanford Meisner was a co-worker with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at The Group Theatre and they introduced Stanislavski’s ideas to the American public,” Williams begins. “The interesting thing about their various careers is that they all went in slightly different directions from the same starting point.
“Strasberg went heavily into what he called ‘affective memory’ or what is called in the business ‘sense memory’ or ‘emotional recall’ which entails exercises where an actor uses their own emotional past in order to create a level of truth in the play.
“Stella Adler’s whole take was based on what she called ‘the imaginative force’, she was very caught up in what was possible in the imagination of the actor. Meisner’s avenue was, in certain ways, profound in my view because it is the most simple and the most basic. The thing that distinguishes Meisner’s work from the others is this - what happens to the actor with the Meisner technique is that it depends, not just on themselves, but on what the other person does to them, which Meisner summed up in the phrase ‘the pinch and the ouch’.
“All of his work is about engaging in the present moment, being very alive and truthful right here and right now which, if you think about it, is the polar opposite of ‘What’s my memory?’ or ‘What’s capable in my imagination?’.”
Read the full Galway Advertiser Interview.
For more information on booking tickets for ID premiering at this years Festival.
