Articles Available Online

Notes from a workshop   At first, there is nothing but a yellow curtain at the back of the stage It is not particularly big, perhaps three-by-three metres, but it glows like the sun in the bright heat of the floodlights In front of it the black, bare surface of the stage stretches out towards the audience, leaving a space for possibility, imagination and expectation   There are around sixty people gathered in this theatre in the north of Oxford Most of them are young actors but there are also directors, university students, artists, an IT specialist and an anthropologist among the group While some are from Oxford and London, others have made their way here from Spain, Germany and even Australia, to learn first-hand the methods Ariane Mnouchkine, director of the Parisian theatre collective, the Théâtre du Soleil   Here, in the auditorium, begins our first lesson: you must learn to respect the stage, Ariane tells us, you must respect the yellow curtain  She is standing by the first row of seats in front of the stage, the group gathered around her A tall figure dressed in white linen and a grey vest, her curled silver hair flaming around a watchful face Her expression is mild and her voice calm, but her whole bearing commands attention   Here are the rules of imagination Nothing is allowed on the stage that is not part of a performance, it must remain a pure place The stage can only be entered from behind the yellow curtain, which will be opened for you by specially trained curtain openers When you want to enter the stage again, you have to walk offstage and enter through the yellow curtain These are the boundaries and rituals of performance, crucial to the formation of an imaginative space   ***   The Théâtre du Soleil was founded in 1964 and has been run by Ariane, its co-founder, for the last half-century Ariane, born on 3 March 1939 to a French-Russian film producer and a British actress, has devoted most of her life to the theatre collective After studying at the Sorbonne and Oxford she trained with