Amidst the current disruption the Training Grounds’ section of Theatre Dance and Performance Training Journal continues its search for responses to our regular themed Postcards feature. This regular feature attempts to collect different perspectives of training from a variety of people via short responses on a given theme. Our next theme (for the Winter 2020 issue) is:

Training and Buildings

Call out for TDPT’s regular, themed, Postcards feature. This regular feature attempts to collect different perspectives of training from a variety of people via short responses on a given theme.

We are interested in receiving responses from anyone engaged in thinking about/doing training for performance in all its myriad forms.

You could be a formal ‘Trainer’, a doer, a student, a practitioner, a provider, a supporter, or a thinker about training. You could work in theatre, dance, music, circus, live/performance arts, design or construction for performance, or any other connected discipline.

We are not interested in formal academic prose, but rather a way of writing and speaking that captures the different ways people speak and think about training. This could be the voice you use in the studio, the voice you use explaining the work to your friends, the voice you use in your own notebooks – as long as it captures the nature of training from your perspective.  

Format 

Responses should reflect the form and intent of a postcard, and as such a Training Grounds Postcard,  

• is usually no more than 120 words (150 at the very most!),
• can be pithy, poetic, or prosaic,
• can be direct or oblique,
• should get to the heart of one single idea about the theme & training that you feel is worth saying,
• may, or may not, be accompanied by an image,
• could just be an image (with a pithy caption). 

Prompts for this issue’s theme might include:

• How do buildings, as architecture, material and atmosphere, shape or relate to the way we train?
• How do buildings as the embodiment of institutions shape the way we train?
• How do we make a building a ‘home’ for our training?
• Who or what is visible in our training buildings? Who and what is invisible?
• Who or what haunts the buildings in which you train? Do you respond?
• Sheds, churches, heated studios, windows: what are the ingredients of a building that inspire creativity in training?
• ‘A room of one’s own’ — how do we navigate training in domestic buildings?
• What are the questions of access raised by the buildings in which you train?
• How do we think and re-think the use of buildings in/for training?

If you are interested in submitting a contribution, or you wish to informally discuss the possibility of a contribution, please contact Associate Editors Roanna Mitchell ([email protected]) and Thomas Wilson ([email protected]) by 1^st July 2020.

The deadline for final submissions is 1^st September 2020 

A note on style

In Training Grounds we encourage contributors to use the kind of language (style, vocabulary) that seems most appropriate to their own practice and/or to their own experience of receiving or giving training. From our point of view, there is no need to adopt the conventions of scholarly prose. If such a thing exists, then we are after Practitioners’ prose – and if it doesn’t yet exist let us create such a way of writing!