Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal (TDPT) Special issue: Performer Training in English as an Additional Language To be published in June 2026 Call for contributions, ideas, proposals, and dialogue with the editors
Guest Editors: Dr Evi Stamatiou, University of East London ([email protected]) Hansel Tan, Villanova University ([email protected]) Dr Mario Moya, University of East London ([email protected]) Training Grounds Editors: Aiden Condron and Proshot Kalami
Training in English as an Additional Language (Issue 17.2) Over the past 15 years, performance training has increasingly focused on fostering inclusive practices that embrace diverse and intersecting identities within Higher Education (HE) and other training settings. Among the barriers faced in performer training, English as an Additional Language (EAL) has emerged as a central concern for many practitioners and scholars. This special issue will explore intersections between performer training and EAL in a variety of settings, including laboratory-style studios, ensemble-based practices, devising, circus, applied theatre, community theatre, and interdisciplinary and intercultural forms.
Please find below calls for two opportunities to join the Theatre Dance and Performance Training Journal team. We are looking for a new Books Reviews Editor as well as a new Editorial Assistant(s).
Call for Book Reviews Editor Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), Routledge
The co-editors of the international journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Professor Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) and Dr Libby Worth (Royal Holloway, University of London) and incoming co-editors Dr Sarah Weston (University of Manchester) and Dr James McLaughlin (University of Greenwich) are seeking to recruit a new Book Reviews editor, to fill the shoes of Professor Chris Hay who is stepping away from the role after 5 years. Now in its 15th year, the journal is quarterly and attracts contributions from scholars and practitioners across the globe. It also has a very active blog site, hosting multi-media content.
The drive towards becoming “anti-racist” institutions or practitioners has taken on renewed energy in recent years. In 2020, responding to alleged and substantiated claims of abuse, discrimination and oppression spanning decades, theatres and institutions of theatre and performance training seemingly acknowledged the systemic racism that underpins the field. Action plans were put in place, committees were formed, and policies were drafted and approved. The question, however, of whether theatre, dance, and performance training itself has moved towards becoming anti-racist, or even what anti-racist training is, remains unsettled.
In 1990, Paul Gilroy suggested that “there is a crisis of the political language, images and cultural symbols which [the anti-racist movement] needs in order to develop its self-consciousness and its political programme. This problem with the language of anti-racism is acutely expressed by the lack of clarity that surrounds the term ‘anti-racism’ itself” (1990: 72). This leads to anti-racist actions being seen as ineffectual or at worst, patronising and infantilising. In theatre and performance education and training—as in everyday life—the specificity of racial oppression often becomes an “add-on” to a wider conversation on equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. If, as Ramon Grosfoguel states, racism is “ a global hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human” (2016: 10), any training that claims to be “anti-racist” must reckon with what Sylvia Wynter (2003) defines as the “coloniality of being/truth/freedom/power”, that is, the ideological project of defining Western “Man” against indigenous, Black, Global Majority and subaltern peoples that emerged with the European empires’ colonization of the “New World.” Efforts to “decolonize” or “decentre” the field, as Royona Mitra (2019) and Swati Arora (2021), among others, have pointed out, often adopt an “additive” approach, which “does not aim at structural change but works within it” (Arora 2021: 13). As the 2020 open letter “White Colleague Listen!*” suggests, theatre and performance has traditionally privileged colonial knowledge systems and therefore, this produces both racist pedagogical and epistemological structures and racism in everyday interactions in rehearsal studios, classrooms, and corridors.
The aim of this special issue is to examine different perspectives on what an anti-racist theatre, dance, and performance training might be. It seeks to:
Explore various ways anti-racist concepts and practices are embodied in contemporary theatre, dance, and performance training.
Build/construct understandings of developed and developing anti-racist performance praxis.
Provoke conversations that challenge and contest traditional Western hegemonic performance practice methodologies.
Debate what new forms of anti-racist practice might emerge and how they can be sustained.
Physical inactivity is increasingly being linked to chronic health conditions and all-cause mortality. But despite a growing global interest in physical activity promotion, the varieties of movement and physical activity experienced by those who participate in performing arts training are rarely included or considered in policy documents and public health recommendations.[1]
This special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training will explore how performer training can be understood to offer opportunities for physical activity, movement education and exercise. It will analyse, evaluate and critique the ways in which performer training provides individuals and communities with unique and diverse opportunities for movement, exercise and play – providing an account of the ways in which performing arts participation might be understood as a valuable, alternative context for promoting and facilitating movement, physical activity and health from childhood through to older age.
Through exploring examples from professional training, participatory arts practice and education, the special issue also seeks to explore the critical and methodological questions that performing arts practices raise in relation to wider concepts of physical activity, movement training and health. The volume will provide space for analysing the ways in which paradigms of embodiment from the performing arts can be understood to provide alternatives to those found in the fields of public health, sport and exercise – articulating how performer training challenges deficit models of various health conditions and produces a more complex, and less isolated, view of health and wellbeing.
Contributions are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes and/or topics:
The historical intersections between performer training, movement education and health. The editors seek contributions from scholars looking at the intersections between histories of physical education, health, and performer training. Contributions in this area could include: analyses of the historical use of performing arts in the context of physical education and health (e.g. Margaret Morris, Rudolf Laban and global folk dance traditions); performing arts training that draws on knowledge from physical education (e.g. Georges Hebert’s influence on Jacques Copeau, the relationship between gymnastics and dance, or the influence of martial arts on traditional East Asian and South Asian performance forms); and the use of somatic education in performer training (e.g. Yoga, BMC, Feldenkrais and Skinner Releasing Technique in post-modern dance, or F. M. Alexander’s influence on acting).
Mixed mode analyses of how performing arts are used in promoting and facilitating physical activity and health in community and participatory contexts. We are particularly interested in submissions that investigate the specific qualities and characteristics of performing arts activities when implemented as physical activity, physical education and health interventions. The focus here may include how the performing arts encourages embodied self-awareness, relationality, ownership, and autonomy across the life course through creativity, artistry, and self-expression.
Analyses of performing arts as a means of promoting inclusion in physical education and physical activity. Key points of focus here could include: analysis of dance as a context for encouraging participation in movement education and physical activity amongst girls and young women; theatre and dance as non-competitive contexts for moment and play; and the performing arts as a context for older people to keep active and develop movement competencies.
Critical analyses of how dance and creative movement is used/taught/experienced within physical education curricula in schools. Contributions here might consider the challenges and benefits of including dance and creative movement within physical education curricula.
Pedagogical analyses of classical dance and theatre forms as life-long processes of movement education and bodily entrainment. (Examples might include: ballet, Kathakali, Khon and Noh).
Autoethnographic accounts of performer training as processes of movement education and physical activity. We are interested in hearing from performing arts practitioners who can reflect critically on their training through the lenses of health, embodied experience or movement education.
We welcome submissions from authors both inside and outside academic institutions, from professional practitioners and those who are currently undergoing training or who have experiences to tell from their training histories.
To signal your intention to make a contribution to this special issue in any one of the ways identified above please email an abstract (max 250 words) to Campbell Edinborough ([email protected]), Rebecca Stancliffe ([email protected]) and Andy Pringle ([email protected]). Training Grounds proposals are to be made to Zoe Glen ([email protected]), copied to Campbell, Rebecca and Andy.
Our deadline for these abstracts is January 8th 2024
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training has three sections:
“Articles” features contributions in a range of critical and scholarly formats (approx. 5,000-6,500 words)
“Sources” provides an outlet for the documentation and analysis of primary materials of performer training. We are particularly keen to receive material that documents the histories and contemporary practices associated with the issue’s theme.
“Training Grounds” hosts shorter pieces, which are not peer reviewed, including essais (more speculative pieces up to 1500 words); postcards (up to 100 words); visual essays and scores; Speaking Images (short texts responding to a photo, drawing, visual score, etc.); and book or event reviews. We welcome a wide range of different proposals for contributions including edited interviews and previously unpublished archive or source material. We also welcome suggestions for recent books on the theme to be reviewed; or for foundational texts to be re-reviewed.
Innovative cross-over print/digital formats are possible, including the submission of audiovisual training materials, which can be housed on the online interactive Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal blog: https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/.
Issue Schedule
8th January 2024: proposals to be submitted.
Early March 2024: Response from editors and, if successful, invitation to submit contribution
March to July 2024: writing/preparation period
July to early October 2024: peer review period
October 2023 – January 2025: author revisions post peer review
June 2025: publication as Issue 16.2
We look forward to hearing from you.
[1] None of the proposed strategic actions from the WHO’s GAPPA mention the potential and existing roles that arts and cultural activities play in promoting and facilitating physical activity. Likewise, the UK’s 2017 All Parliamentary Report, Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, mentions physical activity only four times within ninety-nine pages (referencing participation in dance and music).
Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), Routledge
The two editors of the international journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,Professor Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) and Dr Libby Worth (Royal Holloway, University of London), announced their intention to step down from their roles from the end of next year (Autumn, 2024) at the annual TDPT associate editors meeting this April.
A recruitment appointment panel has been convened and it is seeking to appoint two new co-editors from all disciplines related to the field of performer training, for this very successful journal published by Routledge and in its 14th year. The journal is quarterly and Taylor & Francis will provide remuneration for the role to cover any journal-related expenses. TDPT has contributions from scholars and practitioners across the globe and has a very active blog site, hosting multi-media content.
As the journal has grown in stature and in size, the editorial team has expanded, and the editors will lead a group of associate editors and blog editors numbering over twenty individuals.
The successful candidates will bring strategic ambition and vision to the journal, taking TDPT into the next phase of its development with energy and imagination. The role will offer you unique insights into academic publication and provide you with opportunities to expand your own networks with scholars and practitioners. You will steer the journal’s direction, ensuring it keeps up to date and responsive to current ideas and movements in performance training. It gives you the opportunity to work closely with one of the world’s leading academic publishers.
You should be:
Invested in contemporary debates in training and performance and committed to the principles of ethical research.
Visionary and creative with clear ideas about how the journal can continue to develop and prosper and diversify its contributors and content.
Highly organised and efficient with excellent communication skills.
At your best when working in a tight-knit, collegiate team of editors and associate editors.
We are living in a time of an unprecedented global environmental crisis. Scientists have developed a sophisticated understanding of the Earth’s climate system and we know with high confidence that climate change is happening today as a result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity. Negative impacts from climate change, including extreme weather events, the acidification of the oceans, declining glaciers and sea ice, and rising sea temperatures are already being felt and will continue to increase into the future. Radical action to limit future global greenhouse gas emissions is essential if we are to restrict future changes in the climate system. A key target emerging from COP27 (November 2022) is the pressing need to effect the shift from pledging to implementation. In this time of climate emergency we must collectively accelerate, scale up, replicate success stories and bring about transformative action. Conscious of the ubiquitous, and iniquitous acts of greenwashing and virtue signaling, this call for transformative activism must at the same time be expressed honestly with open acknowledgment of the barriers to change, the impediments, and potential failures and the need for persistence – to try and then to try again.
In the last 20 years, there has been an increase in arts-based training for environmental awareness, and a rich history of practitioners working outside, drawing for instance from paratheatre, somatics and bodyweather. There has been a concomitant process in Fine Art – Suzi Gablik’s The Re-enchantment of Art (1991) is a key frame of reference and Natalie Loveless’s How to make Art at the End of the World (2019), has also been very influential more recently. Their focus on pedagogy, responsibility and ethics is instructive for thinking across disciplines. In parallel with this movement there has been a too-late acknowledgement of indigenous/first peoples’ training methods, and the capacity they have to spark new thinking about old training methods, and thus to decolonise the training studio – Te Rākau’s Theatre Marae for instance in Aotearoa/NewZealand (Pearse-Otene, TDPT 12.1) or Cricri Bellerose’s ecosomatic attentiveness through which she becomes an ‘apprentice to the land’ (TDPT 13.2).
In the UK and the US, there have been logistical and industrial responses to the crisis, with a focus on finding ways of operating more sustainably and with less waste. The emergence of the Theatre Green Book, now complete at 3 Volumes, provides free guidance for theatre-makers on what everyone can and should be doing to change their practice, and is evidence of the UK theatre sector’s commitment to creating a common standard for sustainable theatre. Similarly, in the US, the Broadway Green Alliance has paved the way for an initiative dedicated to educating and inspiring producing theatres to implement environmentally friendlier practices, with their Green Captain programme providing advocacy and support for professional theatres and college theatre departments. In the UK, some institutions have adopted Green Captains, highlighting their commitment to future sustainable practices. These programmes are, however, almost exclusively focused on theatre production, buildings and operations. If we look to the training methods of performers employed in these contexts, there is scant (published) evidence of sustainable, or ‘green training’ practices.
Cognisant of the urgent need to address the often problematic issues around responsibility for engagement and action, our discipline is provoking ways to respond. For example, the 9th edition of the International Platform for Performer Training (Chiusi, Italy, January 2023), where this Call for Papers was first developed, included New Creative Ecologies: Non-anthropocentric Spaces, Geopoetics and Climate Change in Performer Training as one of its four key themes for exploration, while RiDE’s forthcoming Special Issue, Confronting the Global Climate Crisis: Responsibility, Agency, and Action, seeks to ‘confront the climate crisis with a revived interest in the diverse pedagogical, ethical, aesthetic, and sensory qualities’ of applied theatre research and practice.
In this Special Issue of TDPT we seek to discover green trainings’ roots, to document forms of green training which already exist, and to debate what new forms might emerge. As such, our questions for this special issue may be conceived in three interrelated parts – sources, contemporary practices and imagined futures:
Training could be thought of as a regime. A repeated practice with structures and boundaries, which the subject is required to conform to. Yet, this subject is an agent with their own thoughts, feelings and instincts who needs to both serve the discipline and rigour prescribed by training while retaining a sense of autonomy. In this Special Issue, we will be exploring performer training in relation to the idea of agency. Developed out of the TaPRA Performer Training Working Group 2021 Conference, the issue will examine to what extent the subject has agency within frameworks of training, through a variety of themes including: agency and creativity; the drama school or training institution; agency and consent; and the possibility of subversion within the structures of performer training. Contributors will come from a wide range of performance disciplines such as actor training; critical pedagogy; applied theatre; opera; studio practice; circus; and dance.
Agency, the ability of the subject to act according to their own will, is temporal: dependent on the past, present and projected future of the subject (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). The capacity for agency is often defined in relation to structure, the social, economic, cultural or other circumstances in which the individual acts. Moving beyond believing purely that subjects operate entirely according to their freewill, or an approach that argues humans have no independence and their behaviour is entirely determined by circumstances, it is possible to conceive of structure and agency’s power as interlinked. In this sense, structure and agency could be argued to work in tandem: as structures increase, agency recedes, as the agent is empowered the structural power decreases.
The relationship between structure and agency is significant for any pedagogic practice as with the interplay of rules against the emergence of self-determination familiar to many learning processes. Performer training as an over-arching practice is highly contingent on the connection and tension between a training structure (the institution, the practice, the exercise) and the agency of the individual. In response to Maria Kapsali’s editorial to the Training Politics and Ideology Special Issue (2014), this issue directly addresses the notion of agency in relation to the external forces that surround practice. Kapsali describes how the content and structure of performer training is subject to many forces outside of individual control, such as the entertainment industry, government funding, education systems and curriculum, and limitations of particular institutions (ibid, 103). Yet alongside this, she writes, it is often within training practices, that we find the ‘last haven of liminality’ through experimentation, and the acceptance of failure as a strategy that can lead to new possibilities (ibid, 104). This precise tension highlights the ways in which the structures of training, or a training as a structure, can also provide the circumstances for the agent to push back.
Within this conversation, it is important to acknowledge the historic and cultural circumstances in which training structures emerge and have become dominant. Mark Evans (2014), for instance, discusses the extent to which training structures emerge in accordance to the subject’s own history, with the relatively privileged trainee less likely to come up against limitations to their agency as their history reflects the prevailing order. Similarly, Royona Mitra (2022), through her discussion of contact improvisation, highlights how power (particularly that of whiteness) operates through practice, and the danger of invisible power structures permeating activity; this also includes those practices that claim to be determined by subjective agency. Emma Gee and Matthew Hargrave also outline systems of performer training that require disabled students take on practice that mirrors the structures of a disabling society (2011, 36). They offer a difficult set of propositions to make us question the fine line between training as a liberatory activity, against training as perpetuating social discrimination and inequalities:
Clearly, it is problematic to require any person to ‘normalise’ what is not possible for them to ‘normalise’, for example requiring an actor with a lisp to refrain from lisping. Conversely, this ‘problem’ may be an ingrained set of habitual behaviours that have gone unchallenged and assumed to be impairment. We then hit upon the double barrier that learning disabled actors face: assumptions about ability go untested and habitual tropes are reinforced in an attempt to be ‘enabling’. (2011, 42)
Accordingly the authors ask whether performer training needs to be radically different: do we require ‘more an undoing of repressive social mechanisms than a goal-driven acquisition of a set of formal skills’ (Gee and Hargrave, 2011, 34)?
This special edition will investigate how training structures impacts on the agency of the trainee, and vice versa. Some of the questions we would like to explore are:
Are the boundaries of training necessary in order to define the individual agent?
Can performer training traditions, repertoires, canons, or training institutions, impede the creativity, imagination or abilities of those in training?
Is agency significant in relation to codified training practices, particularly non-western traditions, such as Noh Theatre or Kathakali?
Does training conform and/or perpetuate pre-determined requirements set out by the entertainment industry, in tension with the performer’s agency?
Are the social, economic, cultural and political structures that correspond to institutional power erasing social and cultural difference, or even preventing access to training? Or, are training structures an essential part of an individual’s journey to the realisation of agency?
Could the empowerment of individual agency subvert, counter or challenge the structures of training regimes?
Contributors may wish to explore the following themes:
Performance training in negotiation with existing power structures: from the specific power of the institution, for example, to broader structural operations of power in terms of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, disability, nationality and more.
Performance training and the implications of a neutral stance promoted by some forms, such as Lecoq training and the neutral mask. Does this notion of neutrality erase individuality and autonomy and point to questions of disabling or double-disabling practices in an attempt to ‘normalise’?
The challenges of working as an autodidact to achieve self-development and personal training; does this approach offer different questions concerning the role of individual agency?
Access to performance training, particularly in terms of class, socio-economic deprivation, race and disability.
Agency, empowerment and/or liberation through the subversion of traditions of performer training, such as radical practice within existing frameworks or institutions, or approaches of decolonization in terms of performance training canons.
Agency as the use of personal, social and ethical values to foster personal responsibility, ownership and a self-determining artistic trajectory to animates one’s practice.
We welcome submissions from authors both inside and outside academic institutions, from professional practitioners and those who are currently undergoing training or who have experiences to tell from their training histories.
To signal your intention to make a contribution to this special issue in any one of the ways identified above please email an abstract (max 250 words) to Dr Jane Turner, Manchester Metropolitan University ([email protected]), Dr James McLaughlin, University of Greenwich ([email protected]) and Dr Sarah Weston, University of Bolton ([email protected]). Training Grounds proposals are to be made to Aiden Condron ([email protected]), copied to Jane, James and Sarah.
Our deadline for these abstracts is January 9th 2023
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training has three sections:
“Articles” features contributions in a range of critical and scholarly formats (approx. 5,000-6,500 words)
“Sources” provides an outlet for the documentation and analysis of primary materials of performer training. We are particularly keen to receive material that documents the histories and contemporary practices associated with the issue’s theme.
“Training Grounds” hosts shorter pieces, which are not peer reviewed, including essais (more speculative pieces up to 1500 words); postcards (up to 100 words); visual essays and scores; Speaking Images (short texts responding to a photo, drawing, visual score, etc.); and book or event reviews. We welcome a wide range of different proposals for contributions including edited interviews and previously unpublished archive or source material. We also welcome suggestions for recent books on the theme to be reviewed; or for foundational texts to be re-reviewed.
Innovative cross-over print/digital formats are possible, including the submission of audiovisual training materials, which can be housed on the online interactive Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal blog: https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/.
About Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT)
Special Issues of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) are an essential part of its offer and complement the open issues in each volume. TDPT is an international academic journal devoted to all aspects of ‘training’ (broadly defined) within the performing arts. It was founded in 2010 and launched its own blog in 2015. Our target readership comprises scholars and the many varieties of professional performers, makers, choreographers, directors, dramaturgs and composers working in theatre, dance, performance and live art who have an interest in the practices of training. TDPT’s co-editors are Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) and Libby Worth (Royal Holloway, University of London).
Issue Schedule
9th January 2023: proposals to be submitted.
Early March 2023: Response from editors and, if successful, invitation to submit contribution
March to July 2023: writing/preparation period
July to early October 2023: peer review period
October 2023 – January 2024: author revisions post peer review
June 2024: publication as Issue 15.2
We look forward to hearing from you.
References
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mische, Ann. 1998. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 962–1023.
Evans, Mark. 2014. “Playing with history: personal accounts of the political and cultural self in actor training through movement.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5 (2): 144-156.
Gee, Emma and Hargrave, Matt. 2011. “A proper actor? The politics of training for learning disabled actors.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 2 (1): 34-53.
Kapsali, Maria. 2014. “Editorial.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5 (2): 103-106.
Mitra, Royona. 2022. “Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste, and Gender.” Dance Research Journal 53 (3): 6-24.
This is an invitation to come together to pass on and archive the work of Sarah Davey-Hull who passed away in June.
Image courtesy of Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Sarah was a teacher, trainer and director. She had a real passion for theatre and over many years developed her own approach creating innovative, sometimes flamboyant, experimental and always exciting work.
As a teacher she inspired many who attended her classes with her own company BOLD, during her 15 years of teaching actors and actor- trainers at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and as a freelancer all over the world.
Her teaching was infused with her own playful spark, an incredible eye for detail and desire to always bring out the best in those she worked with.
Whilst Sarah’s teaching has influenced many it was never documented. This wonderful creative has left us with a body of work which we would like to archive and pass on to other practitioners, actors and teachers. We will gather and curate examples of Sarah’s teaching to share on the Critical Pedagogy Theatre Dance and Performance Training open access blog strand during the months of September and October https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/category/critical-pedagogy/
To share your experience of working with Sarah you can submit any of the following:
An exercise.
Reflection of her teaching.
Exchanges in the rehearsal room.
Any wise words given as feedback.
The post should be no more than 800 words. It may be useful to follow these guidelines:
Time and place and project/class.
Purpose of the exercise.
What happened.
Why it was important to you.
Submit to: Lisa Peck at [email protected] who will curate and upload twice a month. Title the email: Sarah Davey-Hull – passing it on. We hope that this sharing might result in a small publication mapping Sarah’s extraordinary ability as a teacher and her contribution to acting pedagogy.
Amanda Brennan
(course leader, MA Acting for Screen, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)
bell hooks said, ‘Talking about pedagogy, thinking about it critically, is not something most folks think is hip and cool.’ (1994, 204)
Thankfully hooks was not of this mindset and her engaged pedagogy reveals the complex passing between and production of power and love in the teaching and learning exchange. Like hooks, I am compelled by the alchemy of pedagogy – the dance between teacher and student which unites theory, practice and praxis. Too often pedagogy is implicit in scholarship. What if the extraordinary beauty and complexity of pedagogic training practices became a field of research in its own right? What if at the heart of this was trying to support each other in practicing freedoms within our teaching? At a time when certain pedagogic practices have been called to account it seems vital that we join together to build a community of practice, that repositions and re-thinks what training is.
It’s time to talk about pedagogy – to dive deep into the processes of teaching and learning – What are we teaching? How are we doing it? And why?
The December 2021 edition of TDPT (12:4) reflects a movement towards working with educational research methodologies to interrogate our pedagogies – McNamara’s work with Bloom’s taxonomy (528-540), Aujla’s action research (482-499) and Mircev’s critical pedagogy (540-554). Harnessing this momentum, I propose we make space to think about our work as embodied critical pedagogy or liberatory pedagogy or post-critical pedagogy (more on this later). We know that what we offer students goes far beyond technique. That, at its best, it can open up questions about how to be, how to see, how to feel; to nurture what Anne Bogart describes as ‘civic responsibilities’ through the practice of art (2021). It is a great privilege to share in this deep discovery yet, at the same time, a great responsibility that has become increasingly complex – an entangling that can feel like treading on eggshells, can steal energy and sap joy.
I’d like to talk about pedagogy and mine the potential of embodied knowledge intersecting with educational practice. I’m sure, like me, you have many questions. Let’s work together to find some answers or to ask better questions.
On Freedom and Pedagogy:
Here’s a biggie to start with:
At this cultural moment what does freedom mean in relation to training practices?
In Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint she problematises the word ‘freedom’ whose meaning is not universal or self-evident, citing Foucault’s call for ‘practices of freedom’ as the ongoing work needed to agitate against the mechanisms of Advanced Capitalism (2021,6). The current outcry against systems of oppression and acts of abuse in actor training institutions demands a radical revisioning of what training is, who it is for and how it happens; it is time to look for different ways to navigate, different architectures and different materials. Paulo Freire noted that ‘Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.’ i.e. not by the teacher gifting the student knowledge but by the student taking control of their process of learning (2000,29). Whilst I recognise that you can’t give someone freedom, set someone free, I am driven by the idea that teaching performance practices might enact practices of freedom.
When I use the term critical pedagogy I am drawing on the work developed by Paulo Freire, first in Brazil with oppressed communities, which paved the way for teaching approaches that foreground marginalised groups, including, but not limited to, feminist, queer and race pedagogies. A liberatory pedagogy allows us to critique oppressive power structures in order to activate alternative ways of being. Recognising that any overview can be reductive, certain tenets can be seen to characterise this learning exchange:
Students critique the mechanisms of power at work in language, behaviour and representation to understand how oppressive marginal positions are constructed and to re-imagine the status quo
The negative view of ‘the other’ is challenged to seek empowerment where there is difference
How you teach something is as important as what you teach
There is the aim to flatten power structures
There is a commitment to develop the individual’s political, personal and social awareness
To recognise the complexities of problems as opposed to seeking conclusions
To take notions of difference and particularity as productive sites for resistance
When we shift our focus away from ideas of technique in training and focus on the ‘hidden curriculum’, the personal and social knowledges, or dispositional qualities produced beside technique the developmental learning exchange of performer training can be re-considered as critical pedagogy.
Looking beyond methodologies, pedagogic research offers us ways to re-examine the effect of our co-constitutive praxis. Over the last decade my research has mapped an alternative female genealogy of training, looking at the work of women practitioners through the lens of feminist pedagogies. I want to address the lack of alternatives to the dominant white male lineages in the canon; the lack of visibility of women’s practices; the historical absence of focussed research into pedagogy. My book Act As A Feminist: Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy interrogates the matter of training, with chapters on women working in voice, movement, acting and directing (2021). My focus is the politicising potential of training, working from Eve Sedgwick’s alternative ‘beside thinking’ (2003,8) to consider the personal and social knowledges of acting learnt beside technique. What, for instance, happens when we consider gender as technique?
Returning to a central idea in critical pedagogy, that how you teach is more important than what you teach, certain tenets of feminist thinking, observed through the pedagogies of women practitioners, shape some alternative architectures which enable practicing freedom in training. For example, working with feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative position to harness the potential of the ‘positivity of difference’ and ‘vital materialism’ can be seen as a practice of freedom (2011,161). Translating this into what I term the via positiva, an alternative position to learning through play and failure, based on love and support, takes Braidotti’s theory into pedagogic practice. Another possibility is to work with feminist physicist Karen Barad’s concept of ‘agential realism’ (2003,814). This offers a powerful alternative to the fetters of mimesis and representation that have troubled feminist thinking. Guiding students to recognise diffraction as a liberating alternative to reflection, where every interpretive action offers us choice in how to represent multiplicity and changeability, challenges hierarchical thinking and reveals our biases. In the studio or rehearsal room this can explode the possibilities when working with narrative, character and text. These are just a couple of alternative positions that can give momentum to practicing freedom in our pedagogies.
The work of the women practitioners I have had the privilege to observe has opened up exciting possibilities for alternative training curriculums and ways of teaching. What if we did things differently? What if, instead of teaching the same canon the students explored Kristine Landon Smith’s ‘intracultural actor’ or Niamh Dowling’s ‘nomadic actor’ or the late Ali Hodge’s ‘relational actor’ (Peck, 2021). What if movement, voice and acting were taught beside each other to synthesize the knowledges of acting, investigating what ‘readiness’ means for example in each of these domains? I’m excited to be part of a new era in training, with possibilities and opportunities to develop new ways of thinking through our pedagogies as practices of freedom.
20 Questions:
In the Comeback section of the Blog, a group of practitioner/scholars responded to the Special Issue (TDPT 11.3) titled: Against the Canon. The editors thought through how studio practice could work with the edition as a stimulus. One statement stood out to me:
Don’t just decolonise the curriculum, decolonise the pedagogy.
We need to make space to talk about how to do this.
Let’s play 20 questions. I’d like to find ways to work through these with others:
(Big umbrella question)
What works? What doesn’t?
What research methods can we use to analyse and evaluate our pedagogies?
How does research in education intersect with training pedagogies?
How do we understand the term critical pedagogy in relation to training?
How can we capture and write about the teaching and learning exchange?
How do we foreground the politics of identity in our work?
How can assessment be decolonised?
What do we mean by a safe space and what do we do to try to create and maintain it?
How do we manage the power dynamic in teacher student relationships?
How is pedagogy about love?
What are the types of language that we use in the teaching/learning exchange?
How has the language we use changed and how might it continue to change?
How can working with time and space affect the learning exchange?
How do we work consciously with choice in the learning exchange?
How do we perform teaching? How does teaching perform us?
What is feedback?
How can peer learning be effective?
What are examples of assignments?
What are learning intentions and how can we make them useful?
Who are the teachers on whose shoulders we stand?
And that’s just for starters. I’m calling on all those who want to talk about pedagogy, who want to build a community of practice that grapples with difficult questions about teaching and learning to gather in. To start with, let me know what questions seem most urgent, intriguing or troubling; what questions I’ve missed. Come and join the TaPRA Performance Training event at the University of Sussex on May 20th, where we will be thinking through how we work with structures of choice in our training practices to enable critical embodied pedagogy. You can view details of this event on the TaPRA website:
Tickets are free to TaPRA members, but numbers are limited. Non-Members of TaPRA will have to obtain membership to attend (£18 standard rate, £10 concessions for postgraduates and non-affiliated researchers). Please book via Eventbrite at:
Conference: 12-14 September, 2022, University of Essex.
Training isn’t easily contained within a single person. Although the individual subject is often the nexus where training is realized, it generally depends upon a community for its sustenance, upon trainers to pass the disciplines on, upon trainees to carry them forward, and upon successive generations to rediscover and renew the practices. The focus of this year’s meeting of the working group is about these processes of passing training on.
This discussion leads on from our focus in 2021’s conference on Training and Agency. From one perspective the genealogies and legacies of training might represent the structure against which individuals assert their agency. However, from another point of view these ideas might provide alternative structures that empower individuals through collectivity, tradition and community. What might be the narratives of training through which an individual ascribes meaning to their own practice? Could these narratives offer people and communities a site of resistance to an individualizing capitalist culture?
Special issue: Touch and Training to be published June 2023
Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors
Guest editors Dr Ha Young Hwang, Korea National University of Arts, School of Drama, Seoul, South Korea ([email protected]) Dr. Tara McAllister-Viel, East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, London, UK. ([email protected]) Liz Mills, AFDA The School for the Creative Economy, Cape Town, SouthAfrica ([email protected]).
Training Grounds editor Dr Sara Reed, Independent researcher, writer and project manager ([email protected])
Touch and Training (Issue 14.2) Global happenings throughout this past decade, such as ♯MeToo, ♯blacklivesmatter, Asian Spring, Arab Spring, the Marriage Act (2013 UK) and Russia’s “Gay Propaganda” law (2013), and COVID-19, have radically repositioned touch in performance and performer training. Touch is a socio-cultural event, a political act between two people as well as a network of power positions and layers of institutional infrastructure: who touches, how does/should one touch, why and when can/should touch occur? These questions when raised within performance traditions, theatre, film and television rehearsal and performance spaces and performer training studios ask creative artists to (re)consider the ways we think about, talk about and stage touch: for instance, the rise of the “intimacy coordinator” in response to concerns about the inequitability of touch during re-enactments of intimacy is only one of a number of recent developments in performance-related fields (re)considering the role of touch during the creative process.
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 would like to announce the call for proposals for the Performer Training Working Group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Annual Conference : 6-10 Sept, online & co-hosted by Liverpool Hope University.
The Performer Training Working Group’s theme is Training and Agency.
For full details of the call, details concerning submission, costs and bursaries, please visit our TaPRA page:
Please do share to anyone else who you think would be interested in joining us.
Please note, deadline for submitting proposal is Friday, April 9th.
In addition, look out for an additional email call to an exciting online interim event that we are putting together and will share with you in a couple of week’s time.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us (the Working Group convenors: Sarah Weston ([email protected]), James McLaughlin ([email protected]) and Jane Turner ([email protected]) should you have any queries/questions.
Special issue: Martial Arts Re-Visited to be published in September 2022 Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors
Guest editors: Prof. Paul Allain, University of Kent, Canterbury ([email protected]) and Prof. Grzegorz Ziółkowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań ([email protected]). Training Grounds Editor: Thomas Wilson, Rose Bruford College, London ([email protected]).
Martial Arts Re-Visited (Issue 13.3)
This special issue wishes to reinvigorate discussion about the applicability and usefulness of martial arts in actor, dancer and performer training. It opens the door particularly wide to contributions which intend to critically re-evaluate and re-examine martial arts’ role and place in performing arts training approaches and schemes.
Following in the footsteps of proponents of the newly established scholarly discipline of martial arts studies, such as Paul Bowman, Benjamin Judkins and Sixt Wetzler, we see the widely used and discursively constructed notion of “martial arts” as inclusive rather than exclusive, embracing traditional martial arts, competitive combat sports, military and civilian self-defence systems, as well as many activities straddling the boundaries between these. Moreover, for us the term “martial arts” denotes not only those practices and techniques which when skilfully executed may prove effective in physical struggle/contests, but also a vast pool of adjunct activities related to health, wellbeing, meditation and performance broadly construed that have their roots in or are connected with combat methods. Borrowing from Wetzler, we advocate that “martial arts” activate several dimensions which often interrelate and intersect, including: (a) physical and psychological preparation for confrontation with violence, usually carried out according to systematic and reproducible protocols and schemes, (b) combat competition adhering to set rules and frameworks, performed for fun or to determine a prize winner, (c) the display of martial skills and techniques in front of others, (e) pursuit of transcendent goals, consisting of cherishing specific philosophies and worldviews as well as character formation, (f) therapies and illness prevention. Furthermore, we note that martial arts cannot be reduced to their Asian or – more narrowly – East Asian incarnations since the phenomenon pertains to every corner of the world and as such strongly questions the dominant East-West axis, just as it unsettles the South-North axis too, with highly influential forms such as capoeira practised worldwide.
We are therefore open to proposals which confront not only the practices most commonly associated with martial arts and most frequently employed in performer training contexts, such as Japanese aikido and Chinese taijiquan, but also lesser known styles and schools as well as other non-obvious manifestations of martial arts’ approaches, attitudes, ideas and techniques.
In the turbulent 1960s, with a hunger for alternative models of organizing socio-political realities and related fascination with Eastern philosophies and practices of bodymind cultivation, elements of various (mainly East Asian) martial arts started to populate various Western actor, dancer and performer training programmes and regimes carried out both in academia and professional studios. Over time, as Robert Dillon observed in 1999, “the notion of ‘martial arts for actors’ has gone from being alternative in every sense of the word to being mainstream” and presently martial arts are a well-established component of many theatre, dance, circus or performance training routines, often part of a larger programme of psychophysical activities and approaches. Different artists, practitioners and scholars (sometimes in one body, as in the case of theatre scholar and practitioner Phillip B. Zarrilli) have listed the numerous physical and/or psychological benefits of employing martial arts in the formation of performance artists. The most often cited examples include: (a) heightening psychophysical awareness, sharpening perception and a sense of being here and now (presence), (b) cultivation of bodily and mental flexibility, (c) integration of body and mind, (d) development of focus, rootedness, balance and a sense of timing, (e) elaboration of respect for discipline, (f) improvement in terms of stamina and movement capacities, etc. This long list of advantages, however, does not dispel doubts which arise when considering the presence of martial arts in performer training and should not make us overlook related questions. These dilemmas comprise, for example, risk of injury, the presence of violence (even in a nascent form) and the subjugation of critical thought in confrontation with (often mythologized) practices and attitudes enshrined in (often esoteric) traditions. In an age when hierarchies are being acutely questioned and overturned, in life as much as in the training studio or classroom, when inclusivity and equality determine our every move, how do the structured forms of martial arts and their related pedagogical or dissemination models speak to such concerns? Can they only reinforce authority, or can they overcome such binary models? How might martial arts help shape the performance revolution that is yet to come? And how do martial arts impact on wider notions and practices of gender and sexuality? Are they purely conformist, homogenizing, or can they offer possibilities for transgression and transformation? We are convinced that these problems and issues deserve attention and careful scrutiny.
We would also like to highlight the following questions to be – potentially – tackled by contributors to the special issue: • Are martial arts in performer training gender, race, class, age, (dis)ability determined? If they are, how does this manifest itself and what are the implications of this? • How do cultural, political and social contexts play out in martial arts as part of performer training? Amateur and youth involvement in martial arts is extensive; how does this feed into performer training? • How do social distancing and isolation as consequences of the global pandemic affect martial arts’ presence in performer training curricula? • Which style(s) or school(s) are better/worse suited for performer training? Are any not suited at all? If so, why? • Are martial arts primarily used as a movement training substitute? Are other dimensions of martial arts, such as meditation, work with energy, ethical dimension, etc., included in performer training regimes as well? How might work on martial arts support vocal practices and training?
Other important problems which we think could be addressed in this issue include: • Strategies, consequences and risks of adaptation of martial arts or their elements for performance training needs; • Interrelations between martial arts and other training systems within one curriculum (the problem of syncretism); • Martial arts in training for a specific performance type in terms of aesthetics and/or philosophy; • Martial arts’ performance pedagogy and its organizational milieus: drama school, university, studio theatre, workshops, etc. • Usefulness of the martial arts’ pedagogic strategy of dialectics of form and improvisation in performing arts training contexts; issues around imitation, form and discipline in martial arts – how do these aspects prepare performers for rehearsal and creative processes, if they indeed do?
We welcome submissions from authors both inside and outside academic institutions, from professional practitioners and those who are currently undergoing training or who have experiences to tell from their training histories. To signal your intention to make a contribution to this special issue in any one of the ways identified above please email an abstract (max 250 words) to Paul Allain and Grzegorz Ziółkowski at: [email protected] and [email protected]. Training Grounds proposals are to be made to Thomas Wilson ([email protected]), copied to Paul and Grzegorz.
Our deadline for these abstracts is 16th June 2021.
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training has three sections:
“Articles” features contributions in a range of critical and scholarly formats (approx. 5,000-7,000 words)
“Sources” provides an outlet for the documentation and analysis of primary materials of performer training. We are particularly keen to receive material that documents the histories and contemporary practices associated with the issue’s theme.
“Training Grounds” hosts shorter pieces, which are not peer reviewed, including essais, postcards, visual essays, speaking image (short text responding to a photo, drawing, visual score, etc.) and book or event reviews. We welcome a wide range of different proposals for contributions including edited interviews and previously unpublished archive or source material. We also welcome suggestions for recent books on the theme to be reviewed; or for foundational texts to be re-reviewed.
Innovative cross-over print/digital formats are possible, including the submission of audiovisual training materials, which can be housed on the online interactive Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal blog: https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/.
About Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT)
Special Issues of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training(TDPT) are an essential part of its offer and complement the open issues in each volume. TDPT is an international academic journal devoted to all aspects of ‘training’ (broadly defined) within the performing arts. It was founded in 2010 and launched its own blog in 2015. Our target readership comprises scholars and the many varieties of professional performers, makers, choreographers, directors, dramaturgs and composers working in theatre, dance, performance and live art who have an interest in the practices of training. TDPT’s co-editors are Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) and Libby Worth (Royal Holloway, University of London).
Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), Routledge.
The two editors of the international journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,Professor Jonathan Pitches (University of Leeds) and Dr Libby Worth (Royal Holloway, University of London), are seeking to recruit a coeditor to join them on this very successful journal, published by Routledge. Now in its 12th year, the journal has just moved to publishing 4 issues annually and attracts contributions from scholars and practitioners across the globe. It has a very active blog site, hosting multi-media content.
As the journal has grown in stature and in size, the editorial team has expanded, and we now have a group of associate editors and blog editors numbering over twenty individuals. True to our ethos of publishing and practising training, we seek someone who might be an ‘editor in waiting’, not necessarily fully versed in all the details of journal publication but with a deep-seated interest in performance training and with some experience of editing others’ work and engagement with academic journals.
While you may not be a fully fledged editor, you will need to bring strategic ambition and vision to the journal, helping us take TDPT into the next decade of its development with energy and imagination. Working on TDPT will offer you unique insights into academic publication and provide you with opportunities to expand your own networks with scholars and practitioners. You will be a key contributor, helping steer the journal’s direction and ensuring it keeps up to date and responsive to current ideas and movements in performance training.
You should be:
Invested in contemporary debates in training and performance and committed to the principles of ethical research.
Visionary and creative with clear ideas about how the journal can continue to develop and prosper.
Highly organised and efficient with excellent communication skills.
At your best when working in a tight-knit, collegiate team of editors and associate editors.
Editor’s responsibilities include:
Working with the other two co-editors of TDPT to set the strategic direction of the journal.
Upholding the highest levels of integrity in dealing with the journal’s contributors and content.
Liaising with the journal’s publishers, Routledge.
Collaborating with the TDPT extended team of associate editors (including blog and Training Grounds editors)
Sourcing (and liaising with) peer reviewers.
Becoming familiar with the the submission of manuscripts through the web-based peer review tool ScholarOne and the production platform CATS.
Commissioning and responding to proposals for Special Issues.
Sharing the writing of TDPT Editorials with the other editors.
Attending and helping to organise the Assistant Editors’ AGM and annual Training Grounds team meetings.
Supporting launch events for Special Issues and actively disseminating news about TDPT through social media.
Acting as an advocate for the journal at conferences and symposia.
TDPT is committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, respect and equality of opportunity for all. We will select candidates on the basis of merit, and ability and aspire to further diversifying our community. We particularly welcome and encourage applications from candidates who have historically been under-represented in our journal including, but not limited to: Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people; gender non-binary, transgender or gender fluid people; and people with disabilities.
To apply please send a maximum two-page statement identifying how you see the journal developing over the next five years, plus an up-to-date CV. You may also want to include an assessment of your skills and interests along with a statement of what you would like to learn from working as co-editor. These can be sent directly to Jonathan Pitches and Libby Worth (details below).
For more information and an informal discussion please contact: Jonathan Pitches [email protected] and/or Libby Worth [email protected]. Our consultant editor Simon Murray is also available for advice [email protected]. Finally, please feel free to contact any one of our international editorial board members, who can offer a more distanced but invested perspective on the journal’s culture and operation.
The post is unpaid but all expenses incurred in working for the journal are covered.
Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), Routledge.
TDPT has an international profile and wide remit covering a range of arts training. For instance recent special issues have expanded to include training for: Popular Performance, Voice, Live and Performance Art, Immersive Performance, Independent Dance and focus on training places such as Dartington College of Arts. Current political and cultural issues that impact on, and that are generated by, training for performance, are regularly addressed in both open submissions and Special Issues such as ‘Training Politics and Ideology’, ‘Intercultural Acting and Actor/Performer Training’ and most recently ‘Against the Canon’.
As the journal has expanded over the years to full quarterly status in 2020, the number of submissions to both the Special and open issues has risen substantially. This welcome enthusiasm for writing on and from performance training comes with additional demands on the peer review process. The journal operates a single blind anonymous review process (i.e. reviewer’s name is not revealed to the author) with two reviews for each article. Given this growing need, the TDPT editors see that there is an opportunity for a new role within the journal for an Associate Editor (Peer Review), to lead on the journal’s strategy for peer review and to help us ensure its continuing rigour and supportiveness.
The Role
As this is a new editorial position, we invite you to contribute to its development and shaping. We expect that you will gain valuable experience in editorial processes within a highly respected and lively journal. Contact with a wide range of peer reviewers will increase your network substantially and has the potential for you to offer mentoring. Given both the numerical increase in submissions and expansion of fields of interest we envisage the role as follows:
Researching internationally for appropriate reviewers for the wide range of articles submitted.
Expanding the pool of peer reviewers the journal can draw upon and developing a clear system for access.
Encouraging new scholars and practitioners unfamiliar with the reviewing process to contribute. This is an extension of our current practice in mentoring practitioners and new writers to submit to the journal and the blog.
To contribute to actions and discussion on peer reviewing that support the further diversifying of our contributor base. In particular it is important to invite engagement from those who have historically been under-represented in our journal.
To reach out and engage with related journal editors in the current lively debates on the ethics, challenges and potential of the peer reviewing process.
To work closely with the editorial team and with Routledge.
You should be:
Interested and fully engaged in many aspects of performer training.
Very well organised with strengths in preparing spreadsheets or similar for easy retrieval of information.
Keen to participate as part of a close team and excellent at communication.
Interested and able to contribute within the wider related scholarly/artistic community on peer reviewing.
Eager to learn or develop your skills in editorial work within TDPT.
TDPT is committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, respect and equality of opportunity for all. We will select candidates on the basis of merit, and ability and aspire to further diversifying our community. We particularly welcome and encourage applications from candidates who have historically been under-represented in our journal including, but not limited to: Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people; gender non-binary, transgender or gender fluid people; and people with disabilities.
To apply please send a maximum one-page statement identifying how you see the journal’s approach to Peer Review developing over the next couple of years, plus an up-to-date CV. You may also want to include an assessment of your skills and interests along with a statement of what you would like to learn from working as an Associate Editor. These can be sent directly to Jonathan Pitches and Libby Worth (details below).
For more information and an informal discussion please contact: Jonathan Pitches [email protected] and/or Libby Worth [email protected]. Our consultant editor Simon Murray is also available for advice [email protected]. Finally, please feel free to contact any one of our international editorial board members, who can offer a more distanced but invested perspective on the journal’s culture and operation.
The post is unpaid but all expenses incurred in working for the journal are covered.
The Practice Diaries Exchange is now launching a new topic for discussion. We welcome the proposal of questions from all artists, practitioners, researchers, students and blog readers who are interested in training or practicing processes of performing arts. The questions related to training/practice could come from your experiences, something you have been contemplating, or from a sudden creative idea. We welcome questions arising from or responding to the current pandemic era that has greatly influenced and/or changed artistic training/practices. However, questions are not limited to this suggestion. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.
Please send a proposal to the section editor, I-Ying Wu, at [email protected] before 10 December, 2020. The proposals that are not selected for this session could be scheduled to post in following sessions.
The Laban for Actors and in Acting is an International Conference held under the auspices of The Makings of the Actor, the Michael Cacoyiannis Foundation, the Labanarium and Hellinoekdotiki, organized by Post-doctoral Researcher Dr Kiki Selioni, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.
The Makings of the Actoris organising a series of conferences based on books from international research practitioners discussing in theory and presenting in practice their works. Practitioner’s books are always a difficult task due to the struggle they have transferring practice into the written form of a book. Although there is always the possibility of recorded documentation with regards to practical work however this is unsatisfactory for practitioners to present their work in a complete way. Current practices like webinars offers a better understanding but still there is no immediate communication that can offer debates, questions and finally exchange of knowledge.
To submit a proposal, please visit the conference website:
Image: Arvin Singh Uzonov Dang, July 29, 2020. Performance: Magnat, V. (2020). ’alhut (Hul’q’umi’num’ word meaning to honor, to look after, to be very careful with, to restore).
An Embodied Land Acknowledgement honoring the Sc’ianew First Nation’s traditional, ancestral and unceded territory (V. Magnat, 2020).
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT)
Special issue Performance Training and Well-Being to be published June 2022
Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors
Guest editors: Dr. Virginie Magnat, University of British Columbia, Canada ([email protected]) and Dr. Nathalie Gauthard, Université d’Artois, France ([email protected]).
Performance Training and Well-Being (Issue 13.2)
Conceived as a way of foregrounding the relevance of performance-based artistic practices in response to the current health crisis caused by the global pandemic, as well as a way of challenging neoliberal conceptions of creativity and performance as hallmarks of capitalist productivity, adaptability, and efficacy, this special issue will explore the relationship between performance training and the notion of well-being, broadly conceived, to reignite, reconfigure, revitalize, renew and/or reimagine their inter- and/or intra-action.
We seek contributions by performance and theatre studies scholar-practitioners, artists, educators, and activists committed to critically and reflexively investigating the cultural, social, political, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of performance training modalities that have the potential to promote, enhance, restore, and sustain the well-being of practitioners, audiences, and other/more-than-human participants and collaborators.
We are committed to integrating the perspectives of non-Western and Indigenous scholars and artists, and welcome contributions examining the ethical implications of conducting research on performance and well-being in the neoliberal academy, as well as decolonizing approaches to performance training that take into account the well-being of culturally diverse communities.
This special issue will therefore respond to the urgent need to acknowledge and to include multiple ways of knowing and being within Eurocentric paradigms that still inform dominant knowledge systems.
The contested term “well-being” is intended as a generative provocation. In this light, potential contributors are invited to engage with topics and questions such as:
This MA/MFA course, now in its tenth year, is designed to provide a flexible programme of study and an environment of rigorous creative enquiry, supporting practicing artists in their further development. Studio practice is accompanied by reflective and theoretical study; modules are devised to be conversant with one another, allowing for an interdisciplinary approach individual research. Areas of study range across perspectives, including theoretical and philosophical underpinning of arts practice, in visual art, film making, writing and embodied practice and other disciplines.
To be able to apply for a bursary, you must have applied and been accepted onto the MA/MFA Creative Practice: Dance Professional Practice Pathway. For all information about the bursary, please see click here.
International and UK-based students are eligible for bursary awards.
DEADLINE Deadline for bursary applications for 2020/21: Monday 22 June, 5pm. On time deadline for course applications to be able to apply for the Gill Clarke Bursary: 15 June 2020. Applications to the course can be submitted after this date, but won’t be eligible for the Gill Clarke Bursary.
Other bursaries are also available from Trinity Laban. Click here to find out about more funding opportunities.
Anyone interested in applying is welcome to have an informal conversation: please email Independent Dance at [email protected]
Given the Covid-19 dramatic changes to life over the last weeks, we have extended the deadline for proposal submissions to the guest editors for the special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training on ‘Independent dance and movement training to 24th April 2020.
Please would you circulate widely amongst Independent Dance and Movement academics and practitioners?
Special issue on Performer Training in Australia to be published as TDPT Vol 12.3 (September 2021)
Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors
Guest editors: Dr Chris Hay, University of Queensland ([email protected]) Professor David Shirley, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University ([email protected]) Dr Sarah Peters, Flinders University ([email protected]) Training Grounds editor: Dr Soseh Yekanians, Charles Sturt University ([email protected])
Conjoined with blood and tears, the axiomatic price of supreme rigour and achievement. Sweat (water, ammonia, salt, sugar) is deemed a noble and miraculous secretion, yet we habitually strive to disguise it. […] In the unapologetic seclusion of the training space, it becomes the proof of our proud status as grafters, as corporeal, visceral, present, working.
As described in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training’s “A Lexicon of Training Terms” (3.1), sweat is a constituent part of training — a synecdoche for the tension and effort that underpin it. Sweat is also a precondition of living and training in Australia, from our corporeal engagement with a heating continent to the metaphorical ‘she’ll be right, mate’. This no sweat, laissez-faire acceptance of the status quo finds its way into training through “a willingness to ‘have a go’; a refusal to be cowed by received authority […] a characteristically Australian suspicion of influence” (Maxwell 2017, p. 326).
The image of sweat also brings with it metaphors of fear, tension and anxiety, often drawn out or extended. This sense of determination over time pushes back against a conception of Australia as the rushed continent, whose artists seek to take short cuts to success. Hugh Hunt, the inaugural director of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, cautioned as much in a 1959 public lecture:
We sometimes expect theatre to be made too quickly. Australians are impatient people, who would like their theatre to be made as quickly as wool grows on a sheep’s back. It takes many years to make it; it takes time to train and develop actors and producers. (Hunt 1960, p. 4)
What has changed since Hunt’s proclamations? What is the labour of training in Australia, and how do we train an “impatient people”? In a country where sweat comes easily, do we mistake the by-product of hard work for the work itself? Hunt, like many others in Australian performance history, speaks only for white Australians: how do (or might?) the distinctive temporalities, collaborative modalities, and lineages of practice of First Nations training and performance inflect performer training in Australia?
Despite the diversity and range of its performance ecology and the prestige in which its major training institutions are held, Australia’s influence in and contribution to key debates has, until fairly recently, remained surprisingly marginal. While much doctoral-level work has considered training in Australia, there is no authoritative, published history of Australian performer training. The history of training is thus another iteration of what Ian Maxwell terms “Australian theatrical bricolage” (2017, p. 338), its history an assemblage of sometimes contradictory facts, uncertain pathways, and unsubstantiated anecdote. In this special issue of TDPT, we endeavour to provide an update to Meredith Rogers and Elizabeth Schafer’s special issue of Australasian Drama Studies “Lineages, Techniques, Training and Tradition” (vol. 53, 2008). We also seek to curate a companion to the roundtable discussion “Training in a Cold Climate”, published in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5.2, by considering training in a hot climate.
The Makings of the Actor: The Actor-Dancer is an international conference held under the auspices of the Michael Cacoyiannis Foundation, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama,and the Labanarium, organized by Post-doctoral Researcher Dr Kiki Selioni.
The Actor-Dancer conference will be the first of a series of international events under the aegis of The Makings of the Actor. The mission of The Makings of the Actor project is to gather international practitioners and researchers, from diverse fields of performance practice and scholarship, to develop and disseminate (through conferences and workshops) an evolving performance pedagogy that addresses the needs of present and future actors.
Prof. Vladimir Mirodan FRSA, Emeritus Professor of Theatre
Prof. Rob Roznowski Head of Acting & Directing, Department of Theatre, Michigan State University
Prof.Frank Camilieri Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of Malta.
Juliet Chambers-Coe Director of Labanarium; Laban tutor Rose Bruford College (FDS); Drama Studio London (FDS); PhD researcher University of Surrey www.labanarium.com
Katia Savrami Associate Professor of Choreology at the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Patras, Greece.
Ramunė Balevičiūtė Associate Professor in Theatre Studies, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre
Dr. Evangelos Koudigelis Med. Orthopadisch-Traumatologische Darstellung in den epen homers, University Essen Germany.
Dr. Kiki Selioni Affiliate Research Fellow Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London.
Call for papers, teaching demonstrations and performances
Stanislavsky asserted: “[o]ur kind of theatre is fragile and if those who create it don’t take constant care of it, don’t keep moving it forward, do not develop and perfect it, it will soon die.” (qtd. in Toporkov, 2004:106). The Makings of the Actor project seeks to explore how those who create theatre can continue to move it forward and develop it, with a particular focus on the training of the actor.
Training Grounds Editor: Dr Sara Reed, Coventry University [email protected]
Independent
Dance Training (Issue 12.2)
This special issue guest edited by Henrietta Hale, Nikki Tomlinson and
Gitta Wigro draws from our roles at Independent Dance, an organisation that
supports and sustains independent dance artists to develop dance as an art
form. The ‘independent dance artists’ that ID engages with can be many things.
They may produce or perform in choreographic works in theatres, galleries,
digital formats or outdoor / informal sites. They may work as facilitators or
teachers with other professionals or in community settings, engaging untrained
people in dance. Or they may be practitioners from other disciplines such as
fine arts, architecture or science who engage in an embodied movement practice
to complement and bring new knowledge to their field.
The aim of this issue is to consider and map how movement practices that
have evolved from specific traditions or situations are used and re-articulated
for other purposes; and show how this plays out in inter-related, international
networks of practitioners.
Movement Symposium on Saturday 18th April 2020at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London
RADA invites you to submit proposals for contributions to a One Day Symposium on:
Why Movement Matters
We are holding a one day Symposium with Industry Professionals and Movement Practitioners, directors, teachers and educators, to offer opinions, experiences and ideas about “Why Movement Matters”.
The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the vital contribution movement practice and movement direction make to the industry. We intend to explore movement’s past and its future as a creative maker of meaning in the theatre and hope to create the opportunity for open discussion and professional networking. On a practical level the event will generate opportunities for emerging and established artists to share their work with the possible option to write about and to interrogate questions around practice through journals and other publication outlets.
The idea for this event came from a panel discussion at the Dorfman Studio at The National Theatre in November 2018 to discuss the legacy of Jacques Lecoq and to launch TheRoutledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. What emerged from this event was how wide ranging the influence of movement is but how little is known about any of the details of its development and about the variety of practices now available. This event provides an opportunity to share, to interrogate and to celebrate this powerful aspect of how theatre is made and how it continues to shape developments in production and in training.
Annual Conference hosted by the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta In cooperation with the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK
11, 12, 13 March 2020
Confirmed keynotes: Professor Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburg) Professor Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The seventh Annual Conference of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta) considers knowledge in relation to performing arts practices. More specifically, the conference aims to explore, question, and discuss the different types of ‘knowledges’ that emerge from or are involved in performing arts practices including creation, production, performance, and spectatorship.
The conference’s focus on performing arts practices—dance, theatre, and music—acknowledges an affinity with Performance Studies, which originated in American universities as a new ‘knowledge formation’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999) with the aim to integrate performance into interdisciplinary scholarship and offer a counterbalance to the emphasis on texts and literature within cultural studies. The conference focus on practices is also strongly connected to developments originating around the same time for artistic research in the context of European higher education. The debates about artistic research have posited basic questions about the constitution of knowledge and its valorisation (Borgdorff 2012). The conditions and opportunities for artistic research in higher education continue to evolve, but many questions about its status and relevance, in connection to knowledge production in particular, remain.
The aim of Performance Knowledges is to offer an opportunity to refresh some of these discussions and debates through a focus on performing arts from the perspectives of transmission, composition, and praxis. This is a chance to include research cultures working at the borderline with the social and cognitive sciences, where the vantage point of the performing arts should provoke a robust discussion of embodied and relational forms of knowledge. It also encourages participants to rethink how in composition and transmission processes knowledge is diversified into different types, including tacit knowledge—with emphasis on process and experience (Polanyi 1958). This should include addressing the question of skill—which is so often overlooked in academic debates about the subject.
We are looking for presentations that engage with questions of varieties, generation, transmission, and implications of performance knowledges. We are looking for inter- and multidisciplinary approaches that might contribute to the analysis of ways of knowing in the performing arts, and to the scholarly study of collaborative encounters between directors, choreographers, composers, performers, designers, and spectators. We are particularly interested in alternative and diverse conceptualisations of practice-generating knowledges, as well as knowledge-generating practices,
Presentation topics might include, but are not limited to, issues and themes of performance knowledges in relation to practices, methodologies, and technologies. We welcome submissions across a number of areas that address the multifaceted understandings of knowledge as emergent in theatre, dance, and music, including but not limited to:
– the artist’s perspective on languaging and documenting practices – embodied cognition and moving beyond dualism in the practice of the performing arts – problematising hegemonic knowledges, implications for performing arts – training processes and compositional strategies as intangible heritage – practice turn in contemporary theory, communities and ecologies of practice – habits, skills and contexts for tacit knowledge acquisition and transmission – perspectives on and from diverse atypical modes and mixed abilities – historical, analytical, and theoretical understandings of embodiment in the performing arts – case studies of creators, performers, spectators, and other agents of performance – technologisation and the impact of digitisation on performance practices – translation, transformation and/ or appropriation of performance forms
Abstracts of a maximum of 300 words should be submitted in Word Doc by 16 December 2019 to the conference convenors on these addresses: Lucía Piquero (lucia.piquero -at- um.edu.mt) and Scott deLahunta (aa9576 -at- coventry.ac.uk). Acceptance will be confirmed in January 2020. If an official invitation is required earlier for research funding purposes, please contact the convenors and ensure that you submit your abstract as early as possible. Abstracts should include a brief biography (additional 125 words maximum), presentation format whether conventional 15/20-minute presentations or lecture-demonstrations (participatory elements are welcome), and any technical equipment you might require.
Important dates: Deadline for submissions: 16 December 2019 Notification of acceptance by 20 January 2020 Dates of the conference: 11-13 March 2020 Conference website: https://www.um.edu.mt/events/performanceknowledges2020
The
Practice Diaries Exchange will begin the first discussion session on
the concept of training based on the question contributed by Prof.
Mark Evans:
Does
History Matter?
If
I am training myself or undergoing training, does the history that
underpins the exercises that I do matter to me or have any meaningful
impact on the efficacy of the training? Training typically takes
place ‘in the moment’ and the immediate experience of the
exercises is often what seems to matter the most. But what about the
background to those exercises, their provenance and ‘heritage’?
Can exercises come with baggage – either ideological, gendered,
colonial or otherwise? And if so, how do we as trainers and trainees
address that baggage and deal with it?
This
question reminds us of the significance of history, background, or
heritage of training approaches as we often tend to focus on the
immediate, perceptible experience during training. It inspires us to
consider looking back to or remembering the foundational nature of
training approaches that influence our training processes and the
results. In our responses, let us go beyond dualistic appraisals with
regards to advantages or disadvantages related to the question.
Rather, as we train, it is worth pondering how we think of, and what
we do with ‘heritage’ encompassed by a training practice, whilst
also considering that the ‘heritage’ may have changed over time
when a practice moves from one cultural realm to another.
Everyone
who is interested in this topic is welcome to send reflections,
responses or findings to the editor of the section, I-Ying Wu, at
[email protected]
any time before the session is closed on 31 July.
The material can be in any forms such as writing, video, audio, or
other creative forms that are suitable to present your ideas or
arguments clearly on the blog.
The Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Blog has launched a new section, The Practice Diaries Exchange. The Exchange is a place to explore, discuss, debate and rethink the concept of training/practice in order to give weight to training/practice as a ‘deep-going’ process of cultivation that can lead to to profound understanding and realisation of embodied knowledge in performing arts. In order to create an open space where everyone may share their opinions, this section will run like a forum – calling for a question as a theme first and then collecting contributed articles for follow-up discussions. The question will serve as a stimulus to not only attract and invite various views from known or experienced knowledge but also to encourage people adopt a practice-as-research process for exploring the offered question.
To begin the first discussion session, we welcome the proposal of questions from all artists, practitioners, researchers, students and blog readers who are interested in training or practicing processes of performing arts. The questions related to training/practice could come from your experiences, something you have been contemplating, or from a sudden creative idea. If you are interested to raise a question for the first session, please send your proposal to the section editor, I-Ying Wu, at [email protected] before 29 April, 2019. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.
Originating
from ‘Answer the Question’ in the Theatre, Dance and
Performance Training journal, this new section, The Practice
Diaries Exchange, offers a chance for all people who have
experience or are interested in performing arts training, including
practitioners, artists, researchers, students and readers to
(re)think about, explore, and discuss issues related to
practice/training. It aims to emphasise the significance of long-term
training and practicing processes in the performing arts.
In
order to enable people to have a common ground to share and exchange
varied training experiences, The Practice Diaries Exchange
focuses on topics related to concepts of “practice” in diverse
backgrounds and contexts. The Exchange, will periodically
raise particular themes such as: What is training? What is a
practice or practicing? What does training/practicing mean to you?
What is the most difficult in training/practicing? How do you face
difficulties in practices? These discussions may expand into a myriad
of creative questions that could begin artistic explorations or small
practice-as-research projects. For instance, what would you want to
ask or tell “Practice” if “Practice” was a person capable of
responding to you? Similarly, how might “Practice” teach?
While
the Exchange will hopefully provide useful discussion,
answering a question does not imply the end of a discussion but
rather marks the beginning of a new exploration in training/practice.
The approach of practice as research tends to see research not only
as a way to arrive at answers but also as a way to explore, a pathway
to future enquiry. Practitioners may never find an answer that is
forever right for some questions. They have to persist in questioning
themselves so their training will continue. In other words, because
there are always hidden aspects of meaning to uncover that differ
from stage to stage of training, practitioners can never see the end
of their practice, regardless of how long they have been practicing.
The Practice
Diaries Exchange aims to serve as a global, interactive, and open
space for knowledge exchange, exploration, and discussion in a
fashion more akin to a forum than a one-way question-and-answer
session. Blog readers are encouraged to suggest and present questions
on this webpage. Similarly, all readers are welcome to respond to the
questions in a range of ways which may not necessarily be in the form
of an answer, but might take the form of thoughts, ideas, arguments,
or even other questions that expand from the original one. Beyond
being an open forum, invited guests will be asked to respond to
specific themes so that readers can also learn valuable embodied
knowledge from experienced practitioners.
Because
we regard training/practice as a long-term, ongoing learning process,
all readers from diverse cultural backgrounds, training approaches,
fields, experiences, and training stages are equally valuable on this
platform for knowledge exchange. Emerging artists and performing arts
students are encouraged to use the questions proposed here in the
Exchange as exercises or provocations for one’s own artistic
research methodology, and to share their findings or arguments rather
than try to arrive at “correct” answers. By means of inviting
dialogue amongst varied artistic areas, training methods, cultural
contexts and perspectives, and practice phases, we can expect that
the ensuing multi-layered constructive debates and rethinking will
lead to broader conceptualizations of training/practice as research.
The Practice Diaries Exchange, with its emphasis on sharing
embodied knowledge, holds the ethical premise of respecting the rich
knowledge of masters, yet at the same time maintains equality by
recognising that anyone could potentially be our teacher.
Every two months, The Practice Exchange Diaries will pose a question to initiate a discussion session. Prior to posting the question for each two-month period, the TDPT blog News Page will post a call to solicit proposals for the question to be discussed in the next session. A proposal could include a short description to expand on the question.
In
addition to articles, contributors are encouraged to present their
findings to merge various methods including text, speech, sounds,
pictures, videos, actions, and other forms of documentation specific
to their practice-as-research projects to illustrate innovative
methods of training. Because the projects will be displayed on a
website, please carefully consider how your ideas might be presented
in ways that are suitable to displaying online.
To submit a
proposal for a question or a response to a posed question to The
Practice Diaries Exchange, please contact the section’s editor
I-Ying Wu at [email protected]
The Performer Training Working Group has been meeting for thirteen years and has produced several collaborative outputs, including a variety of contributions to the thrice-yearly journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), dedicated to training in all its manifestations, and this blog.
The Context – ‘Exercise’
Performer training is often conducted through and made up of
‘exercises’. These short activities, put together in a particular structure are
the substance of what the trainee undertakes in the studio. And yet, what is an exercise? The most obvious definition from the Oxford
English Dictionary is ‘a task set to practise or test a skill.’ However, the many meanings of the word imbue
it with a host of connotations including physical training, military drills, or
the use of one’s rights.
Exercises to train performers are documented in the Natya
Sastra (500 BCE – 500CE) and Zeami’s treatise (14th Century CE) and have
proliferated around the world in the wake of Stanislavski’s systemization of
acting at the start of the 20th Century. Exercises are the core of performance
training; books about performance in all its forms commonly contain catalogues
of exercises; workshops and masterclasses are often structured around
engagement with and critique of exercises.
And yet, possibly through the blindness of familiarity, this fundamental
building block of our work usually escapes interrogation.
We are seeking contributions that add to our understanding
of what exercises are, the different ways they have been used in performance
training, what their limits are, and what might be beyond them.
We Invite:
We invite contributions in a variety of formats from
practical demonstrations and workshops (30-60 minutes), traditional academic
papers (20 minutes) and provocations (10 minutes). Practitioners and researchers without
institutional support are encouraged to apply and may contact the convenors to
discuss ways that we might facilitate this.
Contributors may also wish to make use of the TDPT Blog as part of their
presentation.
