Ali Hodge – 1959–2019. A luminous presence: directer, trainer, educator, author, coach, friend

I first met Ali in the late 80 s when she and Tim Spicer, co-founders of the Exeter-based story-telling company, Theatre Alibi, came to see our undergraduate end of term presentations, or ‘showings’ I think we called them, in a definite nod to the 60 s alternative drama movements on which Exeter Drama Department modelled itself. There was a frisson that surrounded Ali and Tim’s visits. Like some scene from ‘A Star is Born’ we eagerly awaited being plucked from our undergraduate corps and afforded a place in Theatre Alibi’s company. It didn’t happen for me, but instead, the future years were to see Ali become a friend, work colleague and godmother to my daughter. In that time, I saw the ‘starry’ qualities that Ali herself had as she successfully transformed into a series of roles over the next decades. Ali had presence. Wherever she was you noticed her. ‘Presence’ is hard to unpick, and we’ve been trying in performance studies for decades to determine what creates presence on stage. But off-stage for Ali it perhaps came partly from a childhood of being an identical twin. Ginny and Ali would recount how growing up they would switch school classes and even boyfriends; that surely gave way to a feeling you had the outside edge. But the rest of Ali’s presence was created through her intelligence and her ability to connect with people, displayed throughout her career and with family and friendships.

Ali’s first directing career was through establishing Theatre Alibi in 1982. Set up as she and Tim Spicer graduated Exeter Drama Department in their living room and then a church hall in Exeter, it has gone on to undertake tens of thousands of performances and become a leading story-telling company for young people and small-scale audiences. It is one of a few such companies to have won Arts Council funding for four decades. The focus on playing in non-theatre spaces, on innovation, legitimacy and intimacy, allowed Ali to pursue a particular interest in actor training which was to become her lifelong passion. This interest in the actor led her to pursue a secondment with Gardzienice to explore the boundaries of actor training, later leaving Theatre Alibi fully in 1990 to become assistant director to Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Gardzienice, founded in 1977 and based near the Polish/Ukraine border is internationally renowned for its innovative training which in the words of Ali is ‘well known for its rigorous investigation of indigenous and ancient musical traditions, its powerful physical and vocal techniques, its commitment to the creation of theatre in a natural environment, and its emphasis on principles of mutuality and musicality in training’ (Hodge 1999). Returning to the UK in 1991, Ali pursued a freelance career in London, directing a new cast of ‘Misery’ at the Criterion Theatre in the West End and teaching and directing students at Royal Holloway, University of London and at RADA and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Her second career in university teaching developed from her association with Royal Holloway. Ali moved to full time teaching from 1995 to 2006, and continued part-time for a further few years. It was here that for a decade I had the pleasure of being her colleague. And it was a pleasure: Ali brought a high level of integrity to the practical work that was undertaken in the department and a similar commitment to working with colleagues. Frequently we would second mark each other’s work and her insightfulness was striking. Even on some of my medieval drama courses, an area she knew less about, she would cut to the heart of the issues raised by student practice. Her intelligent and perceptive comments shaped the work of many students, in particular, those on the newly formed Masters in Physical Theatre which was developed in conjunction with Surrey University’s dance department. These students taught at Surrey by Phillip Zarilli and Emilyn Claid and at Royal Holloway by Ali, Richard Cave and myself were later to become the bedrock of Ali’s actor training practice. The remarkable thing about Ali’s work in universities, besides her inspirational teaching, was her ability to adapt to the university environment. Many practitioners struggle to acclimatise to the quirky, regulatory work of higher education. Not Ali. She eloquently conquered the world of learning outcomes, module descriptors, and pre-requisites and as a result, was seen by every successive head of department as a voice to be respected.

The move to academic authorship sealed her passage as a bona fide academic. 2000 saw the publication of her edited book Twentieth Century Actor Training by Routledge. A collection of essays by eminent scholars on leading theatre practitioners from Stanislavsky onwards, and including her own on Gardzienice. The book quickly became core material for all actor training programmes across the world. In the second edition, published in 2010 under the title of Actor Training, Ali argued for actor training to be seen as part of a codified system, noting that ‘…some principles are fundamental; capable of transcending their origins and therefore justifiably can be recognised as a part of a matrix of key concepts in contemporary actor training’ (Hodge 2010, p. xxv). A few months before the publication of the first edition of the book, at the turn of the millennium, we were on holiday together with our families in Portugal. ‘I’m feeling unwell’, she confided one day. It was the beginning of her twenty-year dance with bladder cancer, in which mainly she took the lead and at others, it led her.

Her admiration for the work of Gardzienice led to the publication of her second book, published with Staniewski, Hidden Territories: The Theatres of Gardzienice (Routledge 2003). This study took forward the growing disciplinary interest, part brought about by the rise of practice-based PhDs and the increasing importance in the UK of the Research Assessment Exercises at that time, with how to document practice. The gulf of simply writing about practice became too large for Ali. Central to the publication of Hidden Territories was a DVD of the exercises and interviews underpinning the publication. The experiment with this type of documentary publication might seem obvious now, but it was amongst the first such publication for Routledge’s theatre collection. To undertake the documentation of the practice Ali worked with Peter Hulton of Arts Archives, whose experience of capturing training also includes the work of Theatre Alibi and Gardzienice. Ali’s passion for the work of Gardzienice, and her championing of them in the UK, earned her the Medal of Honour for Services to Polish Culture in 2017.

In 2008 Ali began a new embodiment, moving with her family to Devon and leaving full time teaching she returned to her passion for actor training. Having set up the company The Quick and the Dead in 2005 from the body of international students on the MA Physical Theatre programme, she now worked with the company to develop her own actor training system: core training. Her system was not a rigid system but one in which ‘personal creativity and the truth of expression’ was applied to a series of training exercises. The exercises pivoted around the concepts of ground and weight, breathing and breath, working with objects and working with others. As she explains, ‘Core Training is based on a profound active awareness of the body, other performers and space. This can lead to a powerful, almost luminous presence in live performance’ (Alison Hodge Core Training 2019). Her workshop developments were embodied in production of Lorca’s ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ and in guest workshops in the UK, USA and Japan and evidenced in Core Training for the Relational Actor, published by Routledge in 2013, with a DVD including The Rego Project. The Rego Project was sanctioned by and based on the artist Paula Rego, and filmed by Peter Hulton and her schoolfriend and BAFTA-winning documentary maker, Molly Dineen.

In her final reinvention, Ali ventured into the world of management development. In 2014 she was asked by her university friend Richard Hahlo to join Dramatic Resources, a company using dramatic techniques to train business leaders. With a particular interest in leading workshops for women leaders, Ali toured to the US and Far East as well as working in the UK.

Ali’s work was marked by a number of things: her passion for the processes that lay behind actor training, an intellectual curiosity to understand the context for this and how to document it, and an allegiance with people. She was one of those rare people who had the ability to make whoever she was talking to feel like the most important person in the world. She returned time and again to work with those she felt an affinity with, her publisher at Routledge, Talia Rogers, her students come company members of The Quick and the Dead, her documentary recordist Peter Hulton, the sage eye of Dorinda Hulton, the vocalist Helen Chadwick, and Staniewski at Gardzienice. And by her side, always her family and close friends. And as a Godmother to my daughter of all the Christmas and birthday presents she sent not one was ever naff!

Ali, a ‘luminous presence’.

Ali Hodge, Master Shipwright’s House, Deptford. 2013. Photo: Chiara D’Anna.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Normington

Katie Normington is a Professor of Drama and Deputy Principal at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written several books on medieval theatre, including Gender and Medieval Theatre (Boydell and Brewer, 2004), and Medieval Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Polity, 2009) and on devising theatre with Emma Govan and Helen Nicholson, Making a Performance (Routledge 2007).