Unusually for me, this year I have attended four events across the country and beyond, partially or totally concerned with performer training: the second gathering of the International Platform for Performer Training (IPPT) held in Zurich, a Centre for Performance Research (CPR) conference on the Laboratory Theatre Network in Falmouth (reviewed in this issue of Training Grounds), the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s (TaPRA) interim (day) event for the Performer Training Working Group which focused on ‘Remediated Training’ at Leeds University, and the TaPRA annual conference at the University of Worcester in September. My tolerance threshold for conferences is lower than many of my colleagues so it is with some surprise that I reflect on no fewer than four events in 2015. Each of these occasions contained, of course, their own priorities, inflections and force fields, but reflecting on all four for this editorial I am struck by how all of these gatherings devoted a significant amount of time to the context(s) of training; the ‘how’ and in what circumstances, rather than the content and the ‘what’ of the multiple training practices under the microscope. Of course, the danger of pursuing this thread is that I fall into the banality of positing form and content as immutable binaries. This is not my intention, yet nonetheless it seems worthy of note that each of these events was happy to devote considerable time to matters that contextualise and inform how training is conceived, practised and experienced. Of course, these issues are in a dialectical relationship with the actual substance of the skills and dispositions taught. A pervasive question, it seems, of to what extent (and how) the training regime in question should look outside and beyond itself. And are such questions ethical and political ones, or do they also address the wider project summed up in the deceptively blunt question, ‘for what are we training’?
In Zurich, in addition to a focus on voice, there were papers and conversations around twenty-first-century curricula and to what matters it should attend. Pauliina Hulko from the University of Tampere in Finland summoned us to consider performer training in the age of climate change, inviting reflections and proposals around the deep ecologies of training regimes. Rodolfo Garcia – to be published in a future issue of TDPT – spoke powerfully of a recent initiative in Sao Paulo where a theatre and actor training academy (Escola de Teatro) has been established in the area around Franklyn Roosevelt Square, a hitherto violent centre of drug trafficking, crime and prostitution. Unapologetically, this is a school with a social as well as an artistic agenda, or rather for Garcia and his colleagues the two agendas dissolve into one. A non-hierarchical project working with a cyclical rather than linear temporal rhythm (see below) asks students and the community from which they come: ‘what would your dream theatre school be like?’ Anton Rey and his colleagues – our hosts from Zurich’s University of the Arts – told of an exercise his team had been working on, namely a root and branch overhaul of the acting and theatre programme so as to give students far greater agency over what and when they learn; here again, a different engagement with time and its accumulation can be practised in a way that is unheard of in most conservatoires and drama schools. In a triangular and interactive performance presentation, your editors, along with Mark Evans from Coventry University, dug into history – Meyerhold, Copeau, the Bauhaus and the now deceased colleges of Black Mountain and Dartington, for example – so as to construct training and learning manifestos for the twenty-first century. Although each manifesto was singular in its conception, all shared an explicit commitment to look beyond the studio and the seminar room to seek strategies for engaging with and opening up to the world beyond. In all these contributions there was an explicit refusal to imagine training systems which only attended narrowly to the skills of acting, dancing, music, voice and movement. There had to be something more…
At Falmouth University in February, Richard Gough, CPR’s helmsman for over 30 years, brought together artists, academics and companies to review the state of theatre laboratories today in order to mark the end of a Leverhulme Research project. As this is reviewed in our Training Grounds section I shall say little here, merely to note that the social, political and community dimensions of laboratory theatres were always explicitly or implicitly central to the discourses articulated at this stimulating event, as, too, were recurring and pervasive issues of time and the generative power of conviviality as a central dynamic of theatre training. At the University of Leeds in June an interim day event organised by the TaPRA Performer training working group under the title of ‘remediated training’ considered the role of digital media in training, rehearsal, documentation and dissemination. Behind the different practices described, the day raised a host of tantalising issues, not least of which was the question of how digital technologies and their function in theatre training and its documentation offer a recalibration of time and how we ‘use’ it. One of the nagging thoughts which troubled me throughout this and other such engaging events was the issue of ‘an excess of knowing’ that digital media seems to offer us. Multiplicity as threat or promise? And linked to this was the concern that we generalise at our peril. Using digital media as a vehicle for training, as a ‘remembering’ tool in rehearsal and as a mode of translation for documentation and dissemination all possess different – though sometimes overlapping - logics and imperatives. In relation to the digital each needs to be imagined, planned and assessed differently.
The TaPRA 2015 annual conference in Worcester was the largest ever – over 300 participants, all preoccupied with the academic industry and business of research. And what an ‘industry’ it is. The Performer Training Working Group engagingly and expertly led by Libby Worth, Konstantinos Thomaidis and Mark Evans had explicitly foregrounded the issue of time as a central thematic for the group’s endeavours. Kate Craddock spoke of a sense of ‘real time’ being in suspension during the many festivals in which she has participated, Tiffany Strawson reflected on the challenges of an ageing body within repetitive training systems – in her case Balinese Mask Drama – and noted her own developmental journey of 15 years in such training. A voyage, not yet ended, marked so far by unfolding phases of adulation, frustration, rejection and hybridisation. I wonder how many of us can trace a similar passage over time in relation to our own originary training experiences. Mark Evans showed us an image of himself at the Lecoq School in the early 1980s and one taken two months ago in exactly the same location. A time lapse of over 30 years, youth captured in time, training which must divide the experience of time. Jacques Lecoq said that it might take at least 10 years for the body-minds of his students to understand deeply what they had learned in the converted boxing gymnasium at 57 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. A schematic distinction emerged in many of our conversations about training regimes which work to a linear temporal rhythm marked by a finishing line, a point of closure and those which enjoyed a more cyclical beat with no apparent conclusion or termination ‒ the latter offering a journey of unlimited openings, a celebratory sense, perhaps, of the generative power of unknowing, undeciding and still becoming. The need, as Winston Churchill once remarked (albeit in a rather different context) to ‘keep buggering on’. (Note to ourselves as editors: certainly the first and probably the last time this journal will ever quote Sir Winston Churchill.)
So, these four encounters offer a snapshot over a nine-month period; a tentative sense of the spirit of these (training) times, an atmosphere, a mood and a hesitant articulation of shared preoccupations at this moment, 15 years into the twenty-first century. There’s no ‘science’ to this and no desire to offer proof; rather, for me, an opportunity to reflect on the zeitgeist, or what in terms of cultural production Raymond Williams might have called our contemporary ‘structures of feeling’. In this issue of TDPT at least three of our authors reflect on meta-training questions, those matters and events which exist beyond the purposes specified by the training practices themselves. Hannu Tuisku intriguingly looks at the sometimes uneasy relationship between the work done by the Finnish youth theatre movement and the professional training for actors and theatre makers which many of these young people go on to pursue. Here, Tuisku notes some very different expectations placed on the students between the more playful youth theatre activities and the narrower and more defined parameters of actor training regimes. Probably for Tuisku the jury remains out as to the extent to which these disconnections are inevitable, fruitful or counter-productive. Deborah Leveroy, as she has done before in the pages of this journal, considers the implications for actor training regimes of learning differences (such as dyslexia) for the pedagogies employed. Leveroy suggests that the use of visualisation and multi-sensory methods so important for dyslexia sufferers might productively be spread across teaching approaches to all students. Alissa Clarke challenges the received wisdom of much performer training to ‘leave all giggling, jokes, social chatter … outside the workspace’ and instead looks at how ‘private forms of fun’ can be hugely generative in creative learning. Taking John Britton’s argument in his essay for the first-ever issue of this journal that although fun should be valorised and affirmed in training it should still be intrinsic to the work in hand, Clarke, aided by Bakhtin’s depiction of the carnivalesque, suggests that a joking and playful questioning of training processes can be immensely productive in developing group awareness and collaboration. With welcome attention to contemporary performance practices, Luk Van den Dries and seven co-writers – as editors we would be fascinated to hear more of how eight authors collaborate to construct one piece of writing – examine the training and rehearsal methods of Belgian performance artist and dance-theatre maker, Jan Fabre. This piece is especially intriguing as Fabre’s narrative ‒ on the surface at any rate ‒ flies against a conventional wisdom that artists operating in the realm of live art and experimental performance are resistant to training. This has probably always been a rather callow mode of thinking and the seriousness with which Fabre addresses training for himself and his performers offers a useful redress to such prejudices. Finally, as a continuous reminder of this journal’s commitment to interrogating non-Western training practices, Arjun Raina digs deeply into Kathakali training and considers how these regimes negotiate the idea of the ‘disappearing body’ and contribute to the pursuit of an embodied on-stage presence.
We finish with news about the editorial team, future special issues and the launch of a TDPT blog this very autumn. As the Training Grounds (TG) editorial attests, we are delighted to welcome Royona Mitra from Brunel University in London to join the TG team of associate editors. With Dick, Kate and Thomas, Royona will be working on postcards, ‘answer the question(s)’, essais, reviews and any new developments. We have noted in recent issues how proposals for our themed special issues have begun to multiply during the last three years. This has posed a (pleasant) quandary around the balance between generic and specialist issues in any one year. At a meeting of Associate Editors in London last February a policy decision was made to allow for the possibility of two special issues per volume in every other year. The alternative was to agree to a number of highly auspicious special issue themes as many as eight or nine years ahead. This seemed an absurdity and risked losing these propositions entirely. Thus in 2016 (Volume 7) Issue 7.2 will be devoted to ‘Showing and Writing Training’ (guest editor, Mary Paterson), while 7.3 on ‘Intercultural Training’ will be guest edited by Philip Zarrilli, Anuradha Kapur and Sasi Thirunalan. In 2017, Olly Double from the University of Kent will lead a small team of guest editors on ‘Training for Popular Theatre’, while in 2018, Campbell Edinborough from Hull University will edit a special issue on ‘Training for Interactive and Immersive Theatre’. Between 2018 and 2020 we are also contemplating possibilities around Laban, Lecoq and Dartington College of Arts, although all three of these are tentative at this moment.
Joining us, too, we are happy to announce, is Maria Kapsali, already a TDPT stalwart having edited a special issue last year and now working closely with Laura Bissell on the plans for the new blog (Laura is overseeing the blog as a whole and Maria is developing the multimedia space, ‘the Studio’). The blog will allow us to realise one of our enduring aims with TDPT: to establish an ongoing conversation around performance training and to reflect the most current issues affecting our discipline. It’s a natural extension of the kinds of writing we have been publishing in Training Grounds for five years and we have ambitious plans to increase the blog’s audience and its content steadily over the coming years. A call for contributions has recently been issued and we are on schedule for an autumn launch, enticing writers to provide content in a number of separate sections including ‘Comeback’ (a space for reflections on previously published articles) and the ‘Studio’ (a platform for training videos and multi-media). You can check us out and join in the debate at http://theatredanceperformancetraining.org