Anna-Helena Mclean |
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Anna-Helena McLean is a multi-disciplinary music and theatre artist, director and researcher. When she is not working with MOON FOOL, Anna-Helena freelances as an actor, musician, composer, director, voice and ensemble coach, and lecturer.
Brought up in a travelling theatre company to a violin maker father from Copenhagen Anna-Helena found her way to Poland after graduating in Music and Drama at Royal Holloway in 2000. Further to initial collaboration with Song of the Goat Theatre in Wroclaw, she went on to tour as the principal in Electra with Staniewski’s – now legendary – Gardzienice Theatre Company. She was living and working in the rural Gardzienice village on the border between Poland and the Ukraine from 2000 to 2007.
She started bridging means to return to the UK in 2004 by founding MOON FOOL as a platform for International Theatre and Music Exchange (with Dr. Rebecca Loukes and Cassie Friend). She began working with The Awake Projects Ensemble, Love Orchestra and Youth (2006-2012) and leading workshops and training at Drama Schools, Conservatoires, Universities and with prominent artists and ensembles the world over - thanks to the networks connected during her time in Gardzienice.
Through constant effort and daily rigorous practice as well as independent fundraising and producing, Anna-Helena evolved the ACTOR-CHORUS-TEXT (ACT) Ensemble Practice alongside freelance performance and music composition work. In 2014, she built her critically-acclaimed solo cabaret 'TITANIA' and in 2015, she generated MOON FOOL's first full-scale production using the ACT method; ‘STORM’ is an urban, music-led retelling of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ seen through the eyes of climate change.
In 2019, Anna-Helena began a Practice as Research Ph.D at Guildhall with supervisors Dr. Alex Mermikides and Niamh Dowling (Head of School, Rose Bruford). There, she is navigating identity, authority, gender and interpretation in the field of post-Grotowskian laboratory practices. Building on 20 years at the forefront of Grotowski’s legacy, she has resolved to cultivate a language with which women and other marginalised identities can discuss and communicate their contribution to the otherwise male-dominated tradition.
Brought up in a travelling theatre company to a violin maker father from Copenhagen Anna-Helena found her way to Poland after graduating in Music and Drama at Royal Holloway in 2000. Further to initial collaboration with Song of the Goat Theatre in Wroclaw, she went on to tour as the principal in Electra with Staniewski’s – now legendary – Gardzienice Theatre Company. She was living and working in the rural Gardzienice village on the border between Poland and the Ukraine from 2000 to 2007.
She started bridging means to return to the UK in 2004 by founding MOON FOOL as a platform for International Theatre and Music Exchange (with Dr. Rebecca Loukes and Cassie Friend). She began working with The Awake Projects Ensemble, Love Orchestra and Youth (2006-2012) and leading workshops and training at Drama Schools, Conservatoires, Universities and with prominent artists and ensembles the world over - thanks to the networks connected during her time in Gardzienice.
Through constant effort and daily rigorous practice as well as independent fundraising and producing, Anna-Helena evolved the ACTOR-CHORUS-TEXT (ACT) Ensemble Practice alongside freelance performance and music composition work. In 2014, she built her critically-acclaimed solo cabaret 'TITANIA' and in 2015, she generated MOON FOOL's first full-scale production using the ACT method; ‘STORM’ is an urban, music-led retelling of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ seen through the eyes of climate change.
In 2019, Anna-Helena began a Practice as Research Ph.D at Guildhall with supervisors Dr. Alex Mermikides and Niamh Dowling (Head of School, Rose Bruford). There, she is navigating identity, authority, gender and interpretation in the field of post-Grotowskian laboratory practices. Building on 20 years at the forefront of Grotowski’s legacy, she has resolved to cultivate a language with which women and other marginalised identities can discuss and communicate their contribution to the otherwise male-dominated tradition.
