Canada Steven Rumbelow and TAT

Abstract

Note: In 1969, Steven Rumbelow started an experimental theatre company called Triple Action Theatre, or TAT as it became known, intentionally located outside of London, England. From its base in Mansfield, TAT began travelling in an attempt to find new kinds of theatre audiences and energies. In 1980, this brought TAT to Canada for the first time where it participated with Jerzy Grotowski in a special weekend of experimental theatre at York University. The play TAT performed – a 60-minute vision of Joyce’s Ulysses – attracted the attention of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille and the Theatre soon found itself playing to sold-out houses under Passe Muraille’s aegis in downtown Toronto. As a result, during Onstage ‘81 in Toronto, the company returned with a new work called Curriculum Vitae; again, reviews were strong and audiences filled the theatre. Coming to Toronto a third time in the spring of ‘82, ostensibly to do a revival of his earlier two-person Faust at Passe Muraille and staying on to do a controversial collective about Poland (Bridal Polonaise), Rumbelow began to lay the seeds for his most daring experiment yet – a theatrical study of shamans which will take TAT from British Columbia to Peru over the next two years.