Laurance Rudic - Career

Career

Rudic began acting in amateur dramatics at an early age and working as a dresser when he was twelve years old in Jimmy Logan's Metropole Theatre in Glasgow. This early experience of the world of variety and music-hall, created a deep and enduring fascination with theatre's potential as a space for expressing the immediacy of human existence beyond conventional approaches to text-based theatre. Intent on becoming an actor, he left school at the age of 15 and worked as an office boy at the BBC. While acting in a staff play he was chosen by director, Pharic McLaren, to play the name role in The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1969), part of the BBC's Wednesday Play series.

Rudic completed three years of formal actor training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (1969–1972). At the same time he began performing in the dream theatre of the iconoclastic theatre artist and mime, Lindsay Kemp, whose approach introduced him to what Rudic refers to as Dynamic Meditation - a heightened state of sensory awareness in which intuition and spontaneity within the moment of the performance play a major role. Kemp's physical theatre work had its root in many inspirations including the Corporeal Mime of Etienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau, and also the classical Noh theatre of Japan, in which time is non-linear and of the moment.

His work with Kemp in Flowers and Woyzeck at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh led to his being accepted as a company member of the newly established Glasgow Citizens Theatre company ('The Citz') (1969–2003), run by Giles Havergal. At that time (1972) he was one of only three Scots actors to be accepted into the young company who were predominantly English. Rudic continued to work there intermittently until 1996.