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 is a performance practitioner and researcher at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She most recently ran the voice practices for the BA Acting Studies course also at Guildhall School. Anna-Helena is additionally a freelance multi-disciplinary practitioner, director, composer and acting and voice coach.
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 the Song of the Goat (Piesn Kozla) Theatre in Wroclaw, she went on to become the principal in Wlodzimierz Staniewski's interpretation of Euripides' 'Electra', touring extensively with the Gardzienice Theatre Company and leading its training around the world (Yale, New Haven; MIT, Boston; Columbia Uni, NYC). 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 the means to return to the UK in 2004 and founded MOON FOOL as a platform for International Theatre and Music Exchange (with Dr. Rebecca Loukes and Cassie Friend at South Street Theatre in Reading). She began working with Awake Projects Ensemble, Love Orchestra and Youth (2006-2012) while acting as a visiting theatre director at Drama Schools, Conservatoires, Universities and with prominent artists and ensembles the world over.
In 2009 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 PhD at Guildhall with supervisors Dr. Alex Mermikides (Former Research Programme Leader, Guildhall and currently Arts and Medicine at Kings College), Dr. Rachel Hann and Niamh Dowling (Principal of RADA). In her research she is navigating questions around identity, sex, gender and interpretation in the field of post-Grotowskian laboratory practices. Building on 20 years at the forefront of British practitioners progressing Grotowski’s legacy, she has resolved to cultivate a practice-based means for women and other marginalised identities to discuss and communicate their contribution to - and creative agency within - the largely male-dominated canonic tradition. Anna-Helena is currently a 2022 artist in residence at Snape Maltings funded by Britten Pears Arts and commissioned by VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association).
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 the Song of the Goat (Piesn Kozla) Theatre in Wroclaw, she went on to become the principal in Wlodzimierz Staniewski's interpretation of Euripides' 'Electra', touring extensively with the Gardzienice Theatre Company and leading its training around the world (Yale, New Haven; MIT, Boston; Columbia Uni, NYC). 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 the means to return to the UK in 2004 and founded MOON FOOL as a platform for International Theatre and Music Exchange (with Dr. Rebecca Loukes and Cassie Friend at South Street Theatre in Reading). She began working with Awake Projects Ensemble, Love Orchestra and Youth (2006-2012) while acting as a visiting theatre director at Drama Schools, Conservatoires, Universities and with prominent artists and ensembles the world over.
In 2009 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 PhD at Guildhall with supervisors Dr. Alex Mermikides (Former Research Programme Leader, Guildhall and currently Arts and Medicine at Kings College), Dr. Rachel Hann and Niamh Dowling (Principal of RADA). In her research she is navigating questions around identity, sex, gender and interpretation in the field of post-Grotowskian laboratory practices. Building on 20 years at the forefront of British practitioners progressing Grotowski’s legacy, she has resolved to cultivate a practice-based means for women and other marginalised identities to discuss and communicate their contribution to - and creative agency within - the largely male-dominated canonic tradition. Anna-Helena is currently a 2022 artist in residence at Snape Maltings funded by Britten Pears Arts and commissioned by VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association).
