The Practice

… the way is continuous, organic & relentless …

Company Untamed is a link in a chain. Perhaps the company was surreptitiously conceived the moment Teo Spychalski, a member of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, conducted a work session that incorporated a Theatre of Sources exercise called Mouvement-Vigil on Keats Island which proved to be the culmination and end of the 12th Ave. Theatre Project, a group working in Vancouver, BC.

A winding path from Keats Island through Vancouver to Edmonton and Saskatoon resulted in the purchase of a space (1999) later to be known as The Temple which allowed for a radical resurgence research.

We imagined ways about the nature of performance. We sought out explanations and deeper meanings.

We desired our practice and theoretical understandings to be constructed and woven into a practice of doing. Layered in meaning, the investigations may be communicated through story, song, action, and embodied presence.

Active experimenting, observing, reflecting, mentoring, dreaming, and visioning were ways of generating knowledge.

We walk the world to understand our place in it creating face to face relationships.

The critical test of our work is whether it validates, clarifies, challenges, inspires or confounds to invigorate performance practice.

본 단체는 연극 리서치와 실험 정신의 유산을 이어가며 기술과 지성이 균형 잡힌 배우 양성을 목적으로 훈련과 교육을 병행함과 동시에, 한국의 연극을 재발견하고 새로운 무대 언어의 토대를 정립하는 창작활동의 범주까지 구현하여 민, 관 및 시민사회와 소통하고 협력하여 한국 공연예술, 더 나아가 세계 공연예술에 이바지한다.

- AeRan

Continuing the legacy of theater research and experimentation, this organization provides training and education for the purpose of cultivating actors with balanced skills and intelligence, while also engaging in creative activities that rediscover Korean theater and establish the foundation for a new stage language. By implementing categories and communicating and collaborating with the public, government, and civil society, we have contributed to Korean performing arts and, by extension, to global performing arts. (Translation)

(I am in debt to have lived in Treaty 6 Territory for allowing me to research our practice and all the elders & writers that have shaped my articulation, among them Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in As We Have Always Done.)

- raymon