Katarzyna Lech (Poland-Ireland) 

Presentation
"The Problem of Verse-Speaking Training"
 

Katarzyna Lech

Katarzyna Lech trained as an actress and completed her MA in Acting at the Ludwik Solski State Drama School in Wrocław (Poland), where for three years she worked as an Assistant to Professor Mirosława Lombardo and
Dr. Jacek Przybyłowski, who both lecture verse-speaking. Katarzyna Lech started her professional career in theatres in Poland and has been continuing it in Ireland, where she is pursuing her PhD on the performance of verse structure in the theatre at University College Dublin. Katarzyna teaches at University, but also works as an actor, an acting coach and she is the Artistic Director of Drama Lab Company. 

Presentation Overview

Theatre in its early days existed in a strong relationship with verse. This cultural tie survived through hundreds of years, but in the twentieth century, seduced by the body, Theatre abandoned and betrayed verse. A thread was broken.

In contemporary practice, obsessed with theatre stripped off its artificiality, the conviction that verse structure needs to be dismissed in order to have verse spoken like prose, to be “real”, more accessible for the audience, lingers in the theatre. In her paper presentation Katarzyna Lech would like to focus on the one of the reasons behind it: the actor verse-speaking training.

Katarzyna Lech will look at the methods of training of the verse-speaking teachers whose publications are available on the Irish and Polish markets. She divided into two groups with regard to their opinion on an actor's principle task while rehearsing verse-drama: structural (the principle task is a discovery of the structure of verse) and sensual (the principle task is a sensual perception of words). Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg, Danuta Michałowska, Zbigniew Józefczak Barbara Houseman: they all insist on the actor’s first task being the discovery of verse metre. The ‘sensual’ approach of Kristin Linklater claims that the actor needs to first comprehend words. Katarzyna Lech will debate on how these teachers make the student-actor aware of the purpose for obeying the verse structure in the performance. The conclusions of this discussion will allow to mark the link between the contemporary verse-speaking training and the reluctance to artificiality of verse in the modern theatre.