Practitioner focus: Angelique Rockas

Background and career

Angelique Rockas has had quite a remarkable career. Perhaps best known for founding the Internationalist Theatre Company in London in 1981, her achievements go much further.

Born in South Africa in 1951, Angelique already had a multicultural awareness and perspective before she established the Internationalist Theatre Company in London when she was 30 years old. As an actor she attracted admiration for her strong interpretation of roles which also challenged casting cliches. She is now a well-established theatre producer and artistic director has her own film company, Contemptuous Mundi Films. Her work as an activist is also inextricably connected to her role as producer and actor.

Internationalist Theatre Company

The central aim behind the formation of the Internationalist Theatre Company was to create and perform theatre with blind casting, in particular blind to race. Many felt that at the time, Rockas started a revolution within theatre, as the idea of multi-racial actors being cast in drama classics was then something unknown in British theatre. The Internationalist Theatre Company produced and performed a great number of European classic plays, and performed with multi-racial and multi-national casts. They not only took exciting risks in relation to their international casting policy, but also in the way they chose casts in order to heighten or emphasise the political nature of the plays.

Notable theatre productions

The Internationalist Theatre Company produced a number of notable theatre performances throughout the early 1980s, with each performance developing and improving the company's style.

The company's performance of The Balcony in July 1981 focused on making a statement about how power and political manoeuvres corrupt the ruling classes, leading them to watch as the rest of society burns around them. In this performance the action was often not restricted to just the stage area, but actors would appear and act in the auditorium so that there was no separation between the actors and audience. The company's performance of The Camp in October 1981 explored the psychology of fascism through symbolic and non-naturalistic movement sequences which were woven throughout the text. In May 1982 they performed Mother Courage and Her Children focusing on its anti-war themes around the human costs of war. This performance took place in a makeshift basement theatre located in the old disused Charing Cross hospital in London.

Key Features of the work of Angelique Rockas

• Political content
• Multi-racial casting
• Bold use of theatre space
• Symbolic and non-naturalistic movement sequences added into the text
• Performances in non-traditional performance spaces
• Strong interpretation of character
• Bold and symbolic set and costume design.

Creating your own performance inspired by Angelique Rockas

Angelique Rockas and the Internationalist Theatre Company were particularly inspired to shake up the established norms within theatre by taking a fresh approach to European classics, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, The Balcony and Medea. Rockas wanted to take something familiar with an established audience and change it to make it unfamiliar to the audience; she did this mainly through bringing the political themes of the play to the foreground. Choose a play that is familiar to you and research into the social, economic, political background of the play and establish how that connects to a modern audience. Create a director's vision for how you would emphasise this connection through things like casting, setting, characterisation and/or context.

Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Peter Stevenson, was performed by Rockas in a disused part of a hospital. Consider where you want to perform the piece and what that location might say about the performance. Is there somewhere else, other than your drama studio, that you can perform the piece to add meaning to it? What challenges does this new location have and how will you overcome them? Or is there a way you can use your performance space in an unconventional way?

Once you have got the director's vision established, research further into the protagonist. Establish the character's given circumstances and build up your knowledge of the character through activities like hotseating, improvisation and the ‘Magic If’. Use this information to help you bring the character to life through performance. Select a short extract of the text and establish what the character's objectives are for every line, reaction and movement. When you start to perform the extract, try to emphasise this objective through your use of movement and voice.

Finally, Rockas used symbolic and non-naturalistic movement to help add meaning to her work. Try adding a movement sequence into your performance. Start by exploring the themes of the text and bringing out different words and ideas that you could then use to create symbolic still images and movement sequences.