Embodiment and the Holistic Storyteller

My approach to theatre - and life - has grown out of my experiences as actor, traveller and explorer of holistic process. I was never interested in being accepted as an actor within the conventional terms of the word. Being an actor has always been part of a state of internal rebellion that rejects thoughts and identities based on past experience; and for me, being a conventional actor would mean abandoning my need to live in the present and continue creating new selves. 

I started to travel out of a desperate need for reassurance that there was somewhere beyond the grim Calvinist Glasgow of my childhood. Entwined with that search was my obsession with theatre. As a young teenager I had worked in variety and music hall, experiencing the magic of transformation that became the basis of my work and my model of existence. As an actor I wanted to create new inner worlds through storytelling and transformational theatre; but though there were a few artists then who possessed that living hypnotic ability on stage - particularly my early teacher, the iconic Lindsay Kemp - most UK theatre seemed only to be a drab extension of the educational tradition: academic, cerebral and virtually ignoring the embodied-emotional self. 

I was 19 when I began travelling - Morocco, Central Asia, India - hoping to find clues to the puzzle of my own dualistic nature that I felt hampered my efforts to discover the psychology of Being Present. I discovered that some other cultures had an intuitive existence that contrasted sharply with Scotland’s repressive compartmentalising and self-censorship; and that though every culture has its special taboos and restrictive mindsets, some were considerably more organic and non-linear in their approach to everyday life. For a long time, I moved back-and-forth between India and my long-term artistic refuge at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where I was a company member for almost twenty-five years. There at least I found a personal and artistic freedom, translating these other-cultural experiences into my psychological approach to drama as a living and personal expression of self.

As I grew older I wanted to be closer to those traditional performance cultures in India and North Africa where the living storyteller was valued as a repository for universal wisdom and experience. In 2000, I came to Cairo on a Ford Foundation grant - to observe in performance the dying breed of improvising epic improvising storytellers; but also seeking the means to move beyond the world of the text-based actor onto the next level of performance, as a creative improviser. Since then, I have returned to Scotland to present the first of my unscripted autobiographical works, "And God Created…" 

I am endlessly fascinated by the art of the improviser as a physio-philosophical way in life. I liken it to an ephemeral and embodied meditation and I call it, "Writings in Space"

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"​Fragile, vulnerable and all but reliving past pleasures and pains, Rudic swoops nervily from moment to moment with reckless honesty, but without afflictions of confessional indulgence of the worst kind. Exposed as he is, Rudic's warts-and-all self-portrait is a thrillingly intimate experience."

Neil Cooper - The Herald

"There's no "play" here to review or criticise, just a man opening his heart to an audience, using his skill as a performer to charm us, sober us, hold our attention. The questions Rudic raises, though, are so significant, and are handled with such honesty and vividness, that the experience is intensely moving."

Joyce McMillan - The Scotsman

Neil Cooper The Herald