When building my character in Royal Hunt of the Sun I always asked myself if my choices were portraying the most authentic/ truthful version of Old Martin. Since then I have had a growing interest in how actors achieve truth in their performance. After my supervisor introduced me to the idea of Taksu, my interests branched out from the western actor training into exploring eastern theatre training as well. However, I had my ‘aha!’ moment when I realised the two have influenced each other, and this transformed my question to instead focus on the interconnectedness of the eastern and western theatre practices. I am currently trying to figure out my ‘so what?’, which I think I will discover as I start writing. The difficult part of this process has been to narrow down and select which eastern theatre tradition I want to focus on, as all of them have played a part in influencing western theatre practitioners in different ways.
