Ingemar Willy Lindh,
is born in Gothenburg, Sweden, on the 21st of February 1945. His search for a concrete base for the work of the actor, a question ignored by the Swedish theatre of the time, takes him from theatre school (Skara Skolscen) and some work at the City Theatre of Stockholm, to dance school (Stora Teaterns Ballettskola of Gothenburg and Ballettakademien of Stockholm), and, eventually, on to L'Ècole de Mime of Etienne Decroux in Paris. He studies with the founder and master of Corporeal Mime for two years and then becomes his assistant.
(...) "You can be captured only by what is already latent within you; for this same reason, encountering the theatre laboratories in Wroclaw and Holstebro was also of great importance for me. (...) In Paris I had met the refined result of a long process. In Wroclaw, brutal enchantment as a price that had to be paid. In Holstebro, the first hesitant steps of long-term patience."(...)
Lindh founds Studio II, together with three other students of Decroux’ (Yves Lebreton, Maria Lexa, Giselle Pelisson), who then work in Holstebro (Denmark) for a year and a half. He gives seminars for actors in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland and, little by little, a desire to create his own theatre laboratory grows into an ever increasing urge.
"(...) I had three objectives: firstly, to find a way, my way; to liberate myself from the weight of my heritage, and not get stuck in repetitions of what I already knew but, instead, to see how it would be possible to carry things further. Secondly, to push the actor-training to its extreme and thus examine what it really was; and so, to find what was even more essential than having learnt it, namely, to see what I had learned, learning it. And thirdly, to open the actor towards eternity through all this knowing and not shut him into a blind alley with it: thus increasing his creative freedom to arrive at the improvising actor."(...)
Back in Sweden, Lindh first works in Stockholm as a pedagogue at Teaterstudio and as head of the Mime Faculty at the State School of Dance.
In 1971 he founds the Institutet för Scenkonst in Storhögen, Sweden.
In addition, in1995 he is a co-founder and the director of the research programme xHCA (Questioning Human Creativity as Acting), established at the University of Malta.
He dies in Malta on the 26 th of June 1997, aged 52.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Ingemar Lindh
source: book, “Stepping Stones”