Aileen Gonsalves
Company Founder & Chief Artistic Director
Butterfly Theatre Collective
Aileen trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama and has worked professionally across the industry and in theatre for over 25 years. She founded Butterfly Theatre Company in 2011, one of her many achievements throughout her impressive career.
She has worked extensively at the RSC over the years. Assistant Director to Tim Supple on Midnight’s Children, Greg Doran on All’s Well That Ends Well and also with Greg she was the Associate Director on the groundbreaking motion capture production of The Tempest in 2017. She directed The RSC’s First Encounters Tempest for The Swan and UK tour. She has also been the RSC International and National Youth Ensemble director since 2008, as well as an RSC Education Associate Practitioner.
She was Head of the MA in Acting at Artsed Drama School 2011-2015, Head of Acting at Drama Studio London 2018-19, as well as teaching actors and directors at RADA and UWL. Aileen has directed many of Butterfly’s site-responsive, immersive productions following her new method of acting/directing - “The Gonsalves Method” - she also teaches the method at various drama institutions nationally and internationally. The Gonsalves Method enables truthful, authentic, responsive acting and is useful for actors, directors, teachers, as well as professionals and students from non-performing backgrounds, due to its relevance to any form of communication. For more info please visit www.gonsalvesmethod.com.
Aileen headed up the development of Butterfly Online, which focuses on creating innovative, interactive productions for online platforms and international audiences and the Butterfly Education & Training programme, which shares the insights and practises of the collective's unique way of working, with a wide array of students nationally and internationally. In April 2021 she launched Shakespeare and Meisner, a book she co-wrote with Dr Tracy Irish, published by Bloomsbury for the Arden Performance Companions series.