Kristine Landon-Smith

Last updated
Kristine Landon-Smith
Born1958 (age 6566)
London, England
NationalityBritish
Alma mater Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
Occupation(s)Actor and director
Known forCo-founder of Tamasha Theatre Company

Kristine Landon-Smith (born 1958) is a British actor, director and artistic director of mixed Australian and Indian parentage. Together with Sudha Bhuchar, she founded the Tamasha Theatre Company in 1989. [1]

Contents

Life

Born in 1958 in London, England, Landon-Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia. In 1978, she returned to the UK to train at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and worked as an actress. In 1985, she co-founded the Inner Circle Theatre Company, producing and acting in a production of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening at the Young Vic studio. [1]

In 1989, on placement as a director-teacher at the National School of Drama, Delhi, she adapted and directed a student production of Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable . On returning to the UK, she cofounded the Tamasha Theatre Company with her friend Sudha Bhuchar, and the company opened with a Hindi-English production of the play. She has continued to direct Tamasha's plays, and several radio plays. Women of the Dust won the Race in the Media Award for Best Radio Drama from the Commission for Racial Equality. [1]

Landon-Smith directed the original 1996 performance of East is East , and a 1999 production of the play at the Oldham Coliseum Theatre. In 1999 she also directed Jean Anouilh's The Orchestra at Southwark Playhouse. In 2001 she directed the Agatha Christie Festival season at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff-on-Sea. [1]

Landon-Smith has repeatedly worked at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Australia. As visiting international director in 2009, she directed the Australian premiere of East is East. She returned in 2011 to direct a production of Port, and in April 2013 took up a position in the acting department at NIDA. [2]

In 2019, she again directed Anouilh's The Orchestra in a TeatroLatino production at the Omnibus Theatre. [3] [4] Later that year, she directed Tuyen Do's Summer Rolls, a domestic drama about a family who have emigrated from war-torn Vietnam to Essex, at the Park Theatre, London. [5]

In 2022, Landon-Smith called for actor training to move beyond Stanislavski's system, and free actors to incorporate the full range of their cultural backgrounds. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Konstantin Stanislavski</span> Russian actor and theatre director (1863–1938)

Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a seminal Soviet Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor, and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his "system" of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Anouilh</span> French playwright (1910–1987)

Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. His plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theatre director</span> Person overseeing the mounting of a theatre production

A theatre director or stage director is a professional in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production such as a play, opera, dance, drama, musical theatre performance, etc. by unifying various endeavors and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team into realizing their artistic vision for it. The director thereby collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff to coordinate research and work on all the aspects of the production which includes the Technical and the Performance aspects. The technical aspects include: stagecraft, costume design, theatrical properties (props), lighting design, set design, and sound design for the production. The performance aspects include: acting, dance, orchestra, chants, and stage combat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanislavski's system</span> System to train actors

Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing". It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stella Adler</span> American actress and acting teacher (1901–1992)

Stella Adler was an American actress and acting teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Institute of Dramatic Art</span> Australian centre for education and training in the performing arts

The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) is an Australian educational institution for the performing arts based in Sydney, New South Wales. Founded in 1958, many of Australia's leading actors and directors trained at NIDA, including Cate Blanchett, Sarah Snook, Mel Gibson, Judy Davis and Baz Luhrmann.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Lewis (director)</span> American actor and director

Robert Lewis was an American actor, director, teacher, author and founder of the influential Actors Studio in New York in 1947.

Lindy Davies is an Australian actress, director, actor trainer and performance consultant. She played Ruth Ballinger in the Australian soap opera Prisoner in 1985, and won the AFI (AACTA) Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1986 film Malcolm. She went on to be the head of drama at the Victorian College of the Arts for over 11 years until 2007, and worked as a performance consultant on films including Afterglow (1997) and Away From Her (2006) with Julie Christie.

Drama Centre London was a British drama school in King's Cross, London, where it moved in 2011 after a major reshaping of the University of the Arts London. It was part of Central Saint Martins, a constituent college of the university. Following a review in 2020, the school closed with the graduation of its final students in 2022.

My Life in Art is the autobiography of the Russian actor and theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski. It was first commissioned while Stanislavski was in the United States on tour with the Moscow Art Theatre, and was first published in Boston, Massachusetts in English in 1924. It was later revised and published in a Russian-language edition in Moscow under the title Моя жизнь в искусстве. It is divided into 4 sections entitled: 1-Artistic Childhood, 2-Artistic Youth, 3-Artistic Adolescence and 4-Artistic Adulthood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela Rabe</span> Canadian-born Australian actress

Pamela Rabe is a Canadian–Australian actress and theatre director. A graduate of the Playhouse Acting School in Vancouver, Rabe is best known for her appearances in the Australian films Sirens, Cosi and Paradise Road, and for starring as Joan Ferguson in the television drama series Wentworth.

Tamasha Theatre Company is a British theatre company founded in 1989 by director Kristine Landon-Smith and actor-writer Sudha Bhuchar. Tamasha is an Indian word meaning "spectacle". The company has brought contemporary Asian-influenced drama to the British stage, mixing naturalism with humour, and succeeding in attracting large Asian audiences.

East Is East is a 1996 play by Ayub Khan-Din, first produced by Tamasha Theatre Company in co-production with the Royal Court and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. A semi-autobiographical story of growing up in a mixed-race, working-class family in 1970s Salford, East is East is often cited as one of the key works to bring South Asian culture to mainstream British audiences. The play was published by Nick Hern Books, and subsequently turned into the 1999 film East is East.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lev Shekhtman</span> American actor

Lev Shulimovich Shekhtman is a Russian-American theatre director and actor.

George Whaley was an Australian actor, director and writer, known for his work across theatre and film.

Melanie Beddie is an Australian actor, director, dramaturg and acting teacher. She is founder and director of Branch Theatre Company.

Sudha Bhuchar is a Tanzanian-born British Asian actor, playwright, and co-founder of the Tamasha Theatre Company. She is best known for Tamasha's Balti Kings (1999), A Fine Balance (2005), The Trouble with Asian Men (2005), and My Name Is... (2014) as well as numerous screenplays for television and film. Bhuchar's playwriting and producing work focuses on the stories of British Asians with the goal of attracting culturally and ethnically diverse audiences. She has been called "one of Britain's most successful artistic theatre directors and well-established actors" by Asian Culture Vulture online magazine.

Fin Kennedy is an English playwright, teacher, and university tutor, specializing in writing for youth and marginalized communities. He writes for both adults and teenagers and his plays are regularly produced in the UK and worldwide. Kennedy is also a teacher of playwriting and a community arts project manager, with a particular focus on young people's projects in London's East End. Occasionally, he contributes with blog articles about the intersection of drama, politics, and society for The Guardian. In 2021, he founded the Applied Storied company.

Andrea Moor is an actor based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. She is known for with roles in theatre, film and television. She is also a stage director and coordinator of actor training at QUT.

Shaheen Khan is a British film, television and stage actress and playwright of Indian descent, based in London.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Bhuchar, Suman (2002). "Landon-Smith, Kristine". In Donnell, Alison (ed.). Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Routledge. pp. 141–142. ISBN   0203194993.
  2. Tongue, Cassie (23 September 2012). "Kristine Landon-Smith appointed to NIDA Acting Department". AussietTheatre.com. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  3. Christie, Jennifer (3 February 2019). "REVIEW: The Orchestra, Omnibus Theatre". British Theatre. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  4. Billington, Michael (31 January 2019). "The Orchestra review – Jean Anouilh's band clash over sex and politics". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  5. Gillinson, Miriam (28 June 2019). "Summer Rolls review – fascinating tale of Vietnamese family in Essex". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  6. Landon-Smith, Kristine (1 February 2022). "It's time for actor training to venture beyond Stanislavski". The Stage. Retrieved 9 October 2022.

Further reading