Training

Understandably, most people know NACL for its performances. However, there is a whole other side to our work, and it is this aspect that we consider to be the foundation of everything we do.

This aspect is our training -- a private, ongoing research into our craft. This research is not book research, but rather it is highly physical and practical. The training is the work on the physical, the vocal, and the creative impulse and ability inside each actor. Based on the work of master teachers in the traditions of Odin Teatret, Primus Theatre, and Jerzy Grotowski, NACL has evolved a training that we continue to practice and teach to actors and students in North America and abroad.

Our training is divided into three categories: The Animal Work, Vegetable Work, and Mineral Work. These categories are at play to varying degrees at every moment in our collective and individual paths of inquiry and experiment. Every day we try to push ourselves past a new boundary, deepening our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the art of theatre.

The NACL collaborators have developed, and continue to develop, individual explorations of such elements of craft as: The performative body (i.e. what is the physical difference between daily and performative behavior?), vocal vibration, singing technique, work with dynamic action, acrobatics, stilts, the imaginative and associative body, etc.

Without this ongoing work, NACL would not be able to continue so strongly. Thanks to our training, we have a never-ending, highly personal discipline, which belongs to us, by which we can be engaged even when we are not working directly on a specific performance. It is our hope that this commitment to personal excellence will translate into progressively more powerful experiences for our audiences for years to come.

(Click here to read about NACL's 2005 training research project, "The Book of Many Days.")