“McLean’s work as an actor trainer brings powerful transformation to students conducting them into the deepest expressive parts of themselves through intense physicality and play, ceaseless attention to ensemble, vocal release, and impulsive bravery.”
“Life-changing! Unforgettable! Magical!”
“I cannot think of a greater summer!”
ACT International Voice & Performance Intensive 2027 on voice and performance to be held at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research, Pondicherry, India from Feb 20 – 26, 2027
The intensive workshop is based Integrated Voice & Performance Practices which is a toolkit of physiovocality developed by Anna-Helena McLean.
Lead Practitioner: Anna-Helena McLean
ACT International Voice & Performance Intensive
A week-long residential laboratory exploring acting, physiovocal craft, and psychophysical approaches to scenework with director, musician, and researcher Anna-Helena McLean (ACT International, UK/Italy).
Designed for theatre and music theatre performers, directors, pedagogues, artist-researchers, and acting students, the intensive introduces McLean’s Integrated Physiovocality® Toolkit: a six-stage compositional framework bringing together spinework, breath, voice, song, ensemble practice, embodied consent practices, and text.
The programme draws on post-Stanislavskian laboratory actor training, including practice research deriving from Stanislavskian perezhivanie, Grotowskian verticality, and Gardzienice’s mutuality, while reframing these traditions through contemporary feminist and ethical approaches to difference, access, and relational practice across identities and media.
Participants work through voice, role, and scenework to explore how craft can support presence, listening, intentionality, and fluency within a devising ensemble. Drawing on ancient, classical, and new writing texts, the intensive supports performers to connect self, role, music, and theatrical form in ways that speak to contemporary interdisciplinary practice.
About Anna-Helena McLean
Anna-Helena McLean is a director, coach, composer and actor-musician. She specialises in research into ethical practice tools for contemporary performance practitioners and has extensive experience working in a psychophysical methodological field. Currently completing a Ph. D focusing on her experiences within laboratory ensemble theatre supervised by Andy Lavender (Vice Principal and Provost of Research and Professor of Theatre at Guildhall School of Music and Drama), Tara McCallister-Viel (Head of Voice and Speech and Research Dept Lead at Uni of Essex) and Niamh Dowling (Principal of RADA). In 2010 Anna-Helena set up an International Theatre and Music Exchange called Moon Fool. It was developed to create a single platform through which to host a diversity of collaborative practices taking place between UK, Europe, India and USA. After 4 years developing an original approach to collaborative theatre making by combining core contributions from leaders in Opera, Psychophysicality, Classical Acting, Puppetry and Immersive Theatre, Moon Fool became a host organisation for performances, educational work, music events and multimedia collaboration. This research started out in partnership with Trestle Touring. Overtime ACT INTERNATIONAL, the educational arm of the company’s activity, moved into the foreground and in 2023 ACT became the organisational name for Anna-Helena’s original methodology for acting, voice and performance. ACT highlights the particular relevance of Anna-Helena’s expertise in voice and performance practices, integrating contemporary ethical frameworks with industry concerns, taking a special interest in representation, diversity work and transdisciplinary praxis.
Combining research with her background in business coaching (Eurotas, Mindapples, iDiscover, Sonata Software), Anna-Helena will be launching a new corporate strand of her practice under the banner name Transcending Leadership in Summer 2025 in partnership with Alef Trust. This programme takes the form of virtual and one on one coaching complemented by retreats at the international base in Northern Italy. Clients will be drawn from pools of leaders and entrepreneurs associated to partners from within Alef Trust, Sarah Nichols Voice, VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association), Norwegian Theatre Academy, MIT Boston, Yale School of Drama and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Anna most recently ran the voice practices for the BA Acting Studies course also at Guildhall School and has secured over £200 K funding to develop a community project called A Voice Lesson, which is both a performance and educational offer running over 5 years. A Voice Lesson draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography combined with ancient texts and new writing. The latter was commissioned through two Britten Pears Arts Residencies (2022 and 2023), a VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association) partnership (2022) and Arts Council England funding (2023 and 2025). A Voice Lesson is also the title of Anna’s thesis in which she unpacks an ethical toolkit for actors, making the role of breath, vocality and listening core to the future of theatre. This recent research highlight the imortant place of embodied awareness as a vital contribution to transdisciplinary and posthuman research in the arts.
Brought up in a travelling theatre company to a violin maker Father from Copenhagen, Anna found her way to Poland after graduating in Music, Theatre Studies and Drama (Performance) at Royal Holloway Uni of London in 2000. Further to initial collaboration with the renowned Song of the Goat (Piesn Kozla) Theatre in Wroclaw, Anna went on to become the principal in Wlodzimierz Staniewski’s interpretation of Euripides’ ‘Electra’, touring extensively with the Gardzienice Theatre Company and leading its training around the world (Yale, New Haven; MIT, Boston; Columbia Uni, NYC). Anna lived and worked in the rurally Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices situated on the border between Poland and the Ukraine from 2000 to 2007. As a young woman she was a senior voice coach, music director and composer within the legendary ensemble company. During this time she also led the Ancient Greek Orchestra and the Academy for Theatre Practices. These experiences have been formative to Anna’s unique approach to theatre making, coaching, community practice and research. Anna’ originality contributes to core knowledge within the Grotowskian Diaspora Laboratory tradition. Anna brings an embodied love of theatre, literature, music and new materialism toward the political power of theatre. She shapes collective consciousness across diverse settings and unite different worldviews and communities in her ACT practices, research and Transcending Leadership programmes.
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