Laurance Rudic - Travels in The East

Travels in The East

Throughout his years at the Citz, Rudic travelled frequently to cultures beyond Europe in order to understand more about holistic process in the oral tradition. In 1975, on his first visit to the Dalai Lama's refugee headquarters-in-exile in the Himalayas, he was invited by the Dalai Lama's private office to teach acting to the young refugee performers of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (T.I.P.A.) who were preparing for the first Tibetan cultural tour of Europe and the Americas. He also experienced life as a Kathakali acting student at the leading school for Kathakali actors in Kerala, South India - the Kerala Kalamandalum. These travels and others in cultures with a strong oral tradition (Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco),contributed greatly to his understanding of his own transient process.

In 2000, intent on developing himself as a ‘stand-up’ theatre artist, he was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant to travel to Egypt and observe the dying tradition of epic storytelling. As part of his research, he based himself with El Warsha Theatre Company, a group of young Egyptian actors, dancers and singers, working in downtown Cairo. Through the company he got to know the old generation of traditional performance artists such as Sayed El Dowwi, the improvising epic storyteller from Upper Egypt, and Hassan Khanufa, a traditional street performer and Aragoz puppeteer from Cairo, who died in 2005 at the age of 74.