Carole Pluckrose leaves Arc and launches Jasmine Street!

This month we bid a fond farewell to Arc’s co-founder, who leaves the Company after almost thirty years as Artistic Director and CEO.

Having co-founded Arc with Clifford Oliver in 1984, Carole has now launched her brand new venture ‘Jasmine Street Creative Lab’, which, she says, “is a place and a space for new creative and intellectual capital and a laboratory for practice and collaboration with fellow artists, particularly theatre makers, visual artists, musicians and collaborators from other fields who are curious about working with artists on new ideas and initiatives”. Based at The Granary building, next to The Malthouse in Barking’s new Creative Industries Quarter, Jasmine Street is now open for exciting new collaborations and initiatives.

We wish Carole every success with Jasmine Street and all future adventures!

You can keep up-to-date with Carole’s latest work by visiting her Blog at Blogspot, or contact her direct to develop new ideas together at jasminestreetlab@gmail.com

Read more about Carole’s departure from Arc this summer in The Barking & Dagenham Post, 6 June 2013

Carole’s biog

Carole trained as an actor at Exeter University and got her first job with Triple Action Theatre, touring internationally playing such roles as Molly Bloom in Ulysses and Mephistopheles in Faustus. She also spent six months with TAT in Poland, working with Grotowski’s company at the Teatr Laboratorium in Wroclaw. Carole’s early training had a bias towards physical theatre, with her greatest influencers, in addition to Grotowski, being Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Joan Littlewood and choreographer Pina Bausch.

Carole went on to work at the Theatre Royal Stratford with Actor’s Shop, developing her improvisation skills and naturalistic performance, before co-founding Arc with writer Clifford Oliver in 1984. Arc’s first new theatre piece was her solo performance, Fallen by Polly Teale, directed by Julia Bardsley, which won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 and went onto a London run and national tour. Carole’s second solo show was Candles in My Eyes by Mike English – the story of Pauline Cutting’s work as a doctor in war-torn Beirut.

Carole moved into directing in 1993 and directed most of Arc’s plays for the next twenty years. She has a passion for actor training and has developed her own method of working, which is actor-centred and focused on using the fluency of theatre process to uncover the layers of a text.