Popular mythology suggests that our bodies renew themselves entirely every seven years, a view based on the contested notion that cell regeneration across the body averages out to that length of time. If the myth maintains for our vital organs, there must be some truth in the idea for other more transitory things subject to the same buffeting of environmental conditions: for long-term performance projects, for artists and their companies, even for academic journals. For this journal the passing of seven years marks a number of developments: not quite a full-bodied ‘reboot’ but certainly a refreshed approach and an expanded vision of what we would like to achieve in the next seven years. (Surely seven is a far more agreeable interval than the much-maligned five-year plan).
Co-editors Simon and Jonathan collaborate on a paper for the Zurich IPPT, with Associate Editor Mark Evans. Photo: Jonathan Pitches.
First amongst these developments is the launch of the TDPT blog (http://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/), announced in the last issue and now fully operational and already expanding. We are delighted to welcome back our erstwhile editorial assistant, Bryan ‒ now Doctor Bryan ‒ Brown, joining the blog as ‘comeback’ editor to complement Laura Bissell and Maria Kapsali’s excellent first curation of digital training materials. Bryan will be commissioning blog entries that return to old articles, to revise, reflect and renew their currency. ‘Comeback’ will also provide a space for dialogue on other training documents and a platform for debate on contemporary issues important to our discipline, in keeping with the aims of the blog as a whole. If there are any interventions you would like to make in this revisionary spirit, please do make contact with Bryan ([email protected]), and, in any case, please take a look at the blog itself and leave your feedback on the site.
The second development this year is the shift in balance between special and generic issues. Volume 7 will publish two special issues – Showing and Writing and Training (guest edited by Mary Paterson) and Training for Intercultural Performance (guest edited by Anuradha Kapur, Sasi Thirunulan and Phillip Zarrilli). Given the extended rhythms of publishing, both are already fully populated and near-ready and will expand thinking in two very important areas of performer training research – the challenge of capturing training in other media and the questions raised when training migrates, appropriates, hybridises and relocates. Volume 7 promises to be one of the largest yet and we are grateful to all the guest editors, past and present, who have collaborated with us to extend the specialisms of the journal. Remember that we are always interested to hear new suggestions and will be actively encouraging proposals for focused editions to take us right up to Volume 14 in 2023!
The last and most important change for TDPT this year is at the ‘top’. Simon, my co-editor and 20-year-long collaborator, mentor and friend, is stepping down from TDPT to seek out other challenges (not least to complete a book on Landscape, Performance and Ruins). Here, the metaphor of dead cells rejuvenating falls apart, as this is not just a modest exfoliation of the journal’s outer skin but a cutting off of one of its vital limbs. This journal has always been jointly conceived, jointly steered and jointly refreshed (in the hundreds of phone calls we have exchanged since that first conception) and it is with some trepidation that I consider the future of TDPT without Simon’s influence and guidance.
That sense of concern is significantly alleviated by the welcome news that Simon’s editorial shoes will be filled from autumn 2016 by Dr Libby Worth, a long-time friend of the journal and editor of the recent, and very successful, special issue on Feldenkrais. The TDPT team are absolutely thrilled to have Libby on board as our new co-editor: she is perfectly placed to build on much of the work Simon has done in the last seven years and brings lots of new connections, ideas and specialisms to help us develop into the next phase of the journal’s maturation. As a dance academic and qualified Feldenkrais teacher Libby is both historian and contemporary practitioner with a foot in both of the camps TDPT has attempted to bring together since the first volume in 2010. She will take up the reins formally from 8.1 (March 2017).
This vibrant combination of history and the present, of contemporary and archived practice, of embodied and theoretical knowledge, is very much in evidence in the essays for 7.1. In a lively re-evaluation of the roots of Australian actor training Gillian Arrighi draws on new archival evidence and some considerable detective work to lengthen the lineage of Australian formalized training into the late nineteenth century. In Arrighi’s account, women overlooked in the history of Australian acting are given new prominence and value ‒ Rose Lewis, Jennie Brennan and Minnie Everett ‒ identifying what she calls a ‘proto-feminist sentiment’ in Antipodean training at the turn of the century. Embedded researcher Sam Grogan offers a welcome and close analysis of the work of Vincent Dance Theatre (VDT), positioned here as a case study of contemporary interdisciplinary practice. Grogan coins the term ‘disciplinary synaesthesia’ to find a means to articulate ‘work that draws upon, synthesises and moves fluidly between a range of artistic means to convey the given message’. In his article ‘Can you picture that?’, dramatic writing tutor John Bray challenges the dialogue-driven bias of dramatic script writing in the United States (and surely in many other countries too). With a series of suggested prompts and exercises drawn from colleagues in a range of institutions Bray advocates for a more holistic dramaturgical sensibility to be developed in the writer and for a shift away from dialogue towards an engagement with mise en scène. Anticipating our special issue on Showing Training, Hannah Gravestock’s essay offers a fascinating method for capturing her kinaesthetic empathy with Traceurs performing Parkour. ‘Drawings of training practice’, she suggests, ‘provide new interpretations of the sensory experience and technical skill involved in moving in and around spaces and objects.’ Using the extended analogy of the pas de deux, both for the Traceurs’ relationship to the landscape and her own relationship to the page, Gravestock champions the development of a heightened rapport with our surroundings – where we might ‘move with as well as within spaces’. Foreshadowing our other special issue this year, Alvin Lim documents the intercultural training offered by Nine Years Theatre in Singapore. Using interviews and close observations as his sources, Lim identifies a nuanced and subtle negotiation process that he calls ‘Intercultural Jamming’, designed by founder members Nelson Chia and Mia Chee to help ‘combine Tadashi Suzuki’s Method of Actor Training and Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints and introduce them to Singapore-based actors’. Lucy Amsden shifts the focus of training from the tutor‒pupil relationship to the act of spectating in her examination of Philippe Gaulier’s practice. This ‘Pedagogy of Spectatorship’, as she terms it, is vital to a clown training but she is also careful to identify the roots of this spectatorial emphasis in Gaulier’s past, specifically his experience of being ostracised at school in post-war France. Gaulier’s exposing of vulnerability, and the clown’s own route to her ‘hidden stupid twin’, are, Amsden suggests, inextricably caught up in this formative history. Finally, in this larger than usual edition of TDPT is Ivam Cabral and Rodolfo García Vázquez’s inspiring paper on the origins of SP Escola de Teatro in São Paulo. Both Simon and I were privileged to hear Rodolfo speak at last year’s International Platform for Performer Training in Zurich and we are delighted he and his colleagues have written up their paper for a much larger audience. Inspired by Paulo Freire and Fritjof Capra, the paper documents the transformation of Franklin Roosevelt Square in the city from a centre of drug taking and prostitution to a radically utopian training school for young Brazilians from deprived areas. Not without its challenges in its commitment to non-hierarchical teaching and its shifting of the balance of power to the students, the ongoing project remains ambitious and winningly optimistic.
SP Escola de Teatro takes its place alongside several other radical and inspiring training institutions outlined in the pages of TDPT – DasArts in Amsterdam (in issue 1.1), Dartington College in Devon (2.1 and 4.2), The Finnish Theatre Academy in Helsinki (3.3), Borderland in Poland (5.3). There are many others: Black Mountain College, Hellerau, Attakkalari and Adishakti, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the Bauhaus. What other training places would you include? And why not write about them in TDPT – in the blog, in Training Grounds, as a main article or as a special issue?