NSP Members
Ozfrank Theatre Film maintains an international membership of practitioners who have trained in the NSP and use it in their practice.
You can also read about the NSP’s leading personalities John Nobbs, Jacqui Carroll, and Tadashi Suzuki here.
Robert Lewis
Robert Lewis holds a Bachelor of Performing Arts (Theatre) and a PhD from the University of Tasmania, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Monash University, Grad. Dip, Secondary Education from RMIT, and a Graduate Diploma of Dramatic Art (Voice Studies) from NIDA. Robert is a performer, director, writer and a Lecturer in Acting at Charles Sturt University. He has worked as a director, actor and voice coach for theatre, film and television. He has completed Certification of Integrative Practice from the One Voice Centre, New York, and has developed his own integrative approach of physiovocal training. Robert has published widely on the topic of integrative and transcultural practices.
Company spirit, collective Knowledge, the performative nature of the training, originality, a system that develops strength and stamina, training at a higher level, uniquely Australian with a twist of Oriental flavour. Brave, bold, structured and all-inclusive – NSP is a training method that is necessary for future-proofing the performer of the 21st century.
Jeremy Neideck
Jeremy Neideck is a performance maker who has worked between Australia and Korea for over a decade, investigating the interweaving of cultures in performance, and the modelling of new and inclusive social realities. His practice centres on bilingual musical, physical, and dance theatre.
Jeremy holds a Phd from Queensland University of Technology, where he currently teaches across the disciplines of drama, music, and dance. Jeremy also coordinates the first year of QUT’s Acting program where he is the head of the movement department. Jeremy regularly consults on the architecture and facilitation of collaborative projects and programs of institutional and community transformation.
What holds my interest is the incredibly strong formatting of the NSP exercises which harness the raw power of the SMAT, and focus it to tackle the really big questions of what it means to be an actor and to create theatre for an audience.
The nature of knowledge and mystery, the moral imperative of the artist… The dual consciousness of the actor. The power of the absurdity of the imagination to unlock something vital… Almost a life force within the actor.
Chelsea Crothers
Chelsea Crothers is a theatre practitioner and performance teacher. She holds a BA in Applied Theatre and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education from Griffith University. She currently teaches at the SOTA (Singapore) and is studying her Master of Arts by practice-as-research at WAAPA.
She has deeply studied the Nobbs Suzuki Praxis and Suzuki Method of Actor Training and allows her understanding of these pre-expressive trainings to inform her research, performing, teaching, and devising work. She regularly performs enjoying freelance work and regular connections with OzFrank Theatre Film (Australia) and Autopoetics (Singapore), of which she is a founding member.
The experiences that I have when training continue to expand my realm of performative possibilities - it seems there is no end to the learning. Like I've dropped a coin down a well but still not heard the splash yet. What is more interesting is that the deeper I get, the more possibilities seem to present themselves - in the form of new ideas to try out, different voices, movements, shapes, speeds. What is exciting about this is that I am interested in sharing the training with more people to see what ideas it stimulates in them, which in turn stimulates more ideas for me.
So perhaps the training is limitless in that it is self-feeding. I train and get new ideas, I train others and they get new ideas, I watch others and their old and new ideas inspire more new ideas for me, then I apply those when I train them and around we go. I'm interested in continuing to investigate to see where I end up. Will there be a limit? Will I get bored eventually? Will the circuit lose steam? So far, I can see no end in sight.
Frances Barbe
Frances is a performer, director and movement director. She currently coordinates the BPA Performance Making course at WAAPA in Perth and teaches movement and devising. Her approach is informed by her training in butoh as well as her training with John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll in the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and Nobbs Suzuki Praxis. She began training with them in 1992 and has had sustained contact with them ever since. She was a founding member of Zen Zen Zo, and created a number of early works for the company including Steel Flesh in 1998 for Brisbane Festival and the short works Tight Red & Deadly and Steel Ribbons for Unleashed, amongst others.
From 1996 to 2011 she was based in the UK where she created her own company, Fran Barbe Dance Theatre and produced solo and ensemble works such as Fine Bone China, Palpitation and Chimaera that toured the UK, Japan, Spain, Singapore and Italy. She performed with Tadashi Endo’s Butoh Mamu Dance Theatre in Germany from 1997 to 2008 and was founding director of Theatre Training Initiative in London, running professional workshops year-round from 2000 – 2010 and curating two international butoh festivals in 2005 and 2009. She was assistant director on the international opera project, Tojirareta Fune, which toured The Netherlands, Germany and Japan.
Since returning to Australia, she has created Exquisite, commissioned by Metro Arts in Brisbane, and directed Samantha Chester’s solo, The Astronaut for The Blue Room Theatre. She co-directed Tender Napalm with Andrew Lewis for Asia Pacific Beaureau’s Singapore Conference in 2015 as well as a site-specific movement work, The Alcott Chenin Blanc for Remnant Dance Company in Pinelli’s winery. Her work experiments on the border between theatre, dance and performance.
On the NSP, Frances has written:
It proposes questions that are not immediately or easily answered about what it means and what it takes to perform and to train as a performer.
It relies on real, practical, embodied experience to be of value. It values embodied experience.
It is technical and creative. It is demanding and prescriptive as well as accessible and open ended or improvisational.
It is different every time I do it – despite doing the same activity, I experience something very different each time.
Will Dickie
Will Dickie has collaborated internationally as a performer, director, and teacher across life art, dance, theatre and fine art photography. He uses these experiences to lead workshops for both young and established artists.
What maintains my interest in the NSP?
Moving, being still, speaking, moving and speaking.
The understanding of making exercises specific to a line of performance enquiry. Allowing for repetition, depth, and discovery.
Alicia Jones
Alicia Jones is an actor, performance maker with extensive physical training in classical dance, butoh, Bodyweather, and the NSP. Her work crosses the boundaries of performance and installation, with a strong focus on connection to country, kinship, and healing.
My interest in the NSP is multi-faceted. I experience the strength of the practice as a performer, as a director, as a tool for social inclusion and as a method for healing trauma.
The NSP (guided by Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs) has been instrumental in providing me the skills to change my life. I am now afforded the ability to support others with the same experience.
Tracy Shoemaker
Tracy Shoemaker was a member of the Ozfrank Theater Company of Brisbane in 2008 and 2009. Before this, she had been training with John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll in intensive workshops in London and Switzerland since 2004, of which she had organized many her self.
She has performed as Lady Macbeth and Jocasta in Jacqui Carrolls Macbeth – Crown of Blood and Oedipus Rex and appeared at the Suzuki Theater Festival in Toga, Japan in the Ozfrank production of The Reckoning of Badengood as well as in the Nick Cave musical production Up jumped the devil in the Queensland Performing Arts Center.
She ist the director and founder of Swissfrank Productions based in Aarau, Switzerland. For more information on Tracys current projects please visit www.swissfrank.org
Fotos by Werner Rolli, Chris Iseli and Carmen Christen; Fire by Christian Ziegler
