Cue Online (Grahamstown)
Christina Kennedy
2 July 2009
Andrew Buckland, a Festival stalwart and South African physical theatre icon, recently returned from a year-long contract performing with the celebrated Cirque du Soleil company in Las Vegas, in the Beatles-themed entertainment spectacular, Love.
It is testament to the world-class talent of the Buckland family that both Andrew and his son Daniel were handpicked to appear in George and Giles Martin’s Love – dad in the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band number and Daniel in Nowhere Man.
For Buckland senior, it was an opportunity to sharpen his abilities and beef up his skills – something that a teacher, director and mentor often neglects or forgets to do.
And for someone who places an enormous amount of pressure on himself in addition to the high expectations of South African theatre goers familiar with his work, entering a foreign environment where he was anonymous and “just like any other acrobat or actor” in an 85-member company was eyeopening – and refreshing.
“I feel re-energised,” he says, still reeling a mere three weeks after returning to South Africa, having plunged straight into directing two new productions on the Fringe (Stilted and The Swimming Lesson).
During the Cirque show, Buckland donned a military uniform for the Sergeant Pepper character who “leads the audience and company into the subconscious, where imagination finds expression in spectacle”.
New skills
He learned stilt-walking and Korean rope-climbing for the part, skills that required concentration, balance, patience and cultivating his upperbody strength through stringent weight training, as well as practise, practice and more practice.
Coincidentally, his newly acquired stilt-walking ability has continued to have “legs” since his return: he was approached to help develop Richard Antrobus’s academic paper on street performance and theatre into the fully fledged physical production Stilted on this year’s Fringe.
Featuring First Physical Theatre Company member Richard Antrobus and Chris Fisher, the piece involves an actor who is not aware of the audience and a street performer on stilts, with their “fun, bizarre and curious physical interactions” enabling them to learn more about one another’s worlds.
On a more cerebral level, the production suggests that street performance should be acknowledged as an activity and art form in its own right. Buckland, who also spends one term a year as a “pretend-academic” lecturing physical theatre at Rhodes University, is also directing The Swimming Lesson, an Ubom! Eastern Cape Drama Company production written by Brink Scholtz.
Buckland describes this “beautiful story” as exhibiting a “fresh, intense, realistic, magical dynamic”, telling of a domestic worker who sets off on a voyage and encounters other lonely people on their own quests for personal redemption.
Fresh focus
He is bringing his renewed energy and focus to these two Fringe productions following his challenging stint on four-feet-high stilts at Cirque, performing in 10 shows a week where, potentially, if one puts an elevated foot wrong, “someone’s gonna die”.
“It reminded me of the things I still find exciting about the theatre – the dynamics and chemistry of the ensemble and how to be an effective part of a chorus and then step forward and be a central character before taking a backseat again.”
But, Buckland adds, “working on a big circus spectacle has affirmed my love for small theatre works. It was a sabbatical of sorts; I now feel more confident about the choices I made.”
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