Gunduz Jem Kalic is concerned with the remaking of theatre as a popular art, as a meeting place for ‘all the people’, in Arthur Miller’s words.  Towards this end, over the past two decades, in Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, he has created a practice of theatre that restores the actor as player. The main ingredient in this kind of creation for the actor is not technical virtuosity in inhabiting or becoming the role but rather the capacity to play it and the script openly as a game with fellow players and the audience.

Audiences made up of non-theatre goers – people normally not interested in plays - find the Kalic style of theatre highly attractive. In the tradition of Lorca and Fo, companies of players – most notably, Taking Liberties Theatre Company - taught and/or led by Kalic have over the past fifteen years travelled across Northern and Outback Australia, playing the works of Shakespeare and other classic playwrights as well as their own original creations in pubs, clubs and workplaces, on stations and homesteads and for and with aboriginal communities. Australia’s SBS TV has documented the joyous response of such audiences to this work.

A former leading trainer of stage professionals (including a number of stars and many journeymen and women) for the UK and Dutch stage and screen, Kalic is greatly concerned at the fact that people’s main experience nowadays of performance is predominantly via pervasive media and not live. We live in a time when a saturating, ever-shifting presence of disembodied images, sounds and texts generated from elsewhere; seemingly, from all points on the planet. Kalic feels that not only does this bombardment cut the ground out from under the local, the immediate and the lived; it also scripts and directs much of our lives, making people like actors who do not know they are acting.  For Kalic, the plays of Jean Genet, which contain characters who are nothing but layer upon layer of illusion containing no inner core of personality, offer a poignant and terrifying reflection of the social world coming into being.

Kalic’s contention is that one remedy to this state of affairs is a renaissance of theatre as a popular cultural form. There are identifiable functions served by theatre when it is an institution at the centre of social life, he argues, and these are inadequately served by electronic media, however much media content and presentation may draw upon theatricality. Theatre played to broad cross-sections of ‘all the people’ can provide a communal meeting place wherein social reality can be explored via illusion in an integrated fashion because the public as a whole (or a more or less accurate representation of the public) is present in the audience. The live and alive, here and now ingredient in such theatre is a particular affirmation of life  - and of social participation. This is the Kalic approach to theatre-making.

Influenced by Wilhelm Reich, Anatolian popular vagabond-theatre, Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl, the French neo-Brechtians of the 1960s, the Commedia del’arte, 1930s German cabaret, Jerzy Grotowski, F. Laban, Lenny Bruce, Medieval foolery and Roman comedy and DW Winnicott, Kalic is Artistic and Executive Director of Taking Liberties Theatre Company. Formerly, he was Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts at the Northern Territory University and previously, co-director of East 15 Acting School, London.