Conceptualising actor coaching: talk moves as tools

Abstract

This paper offers a new analytical perspective by using concepts and methods from discourse analysis to examine the practice of actor coaching. As part of an ethnographic study, the paper focuses on the coaching practice of an experienced acting instructor during a university-level acting class in the United States. Whereas the acting instructor described his coaching practice as unrehearsed and extemporaneous, discourse analysis revealed repeated talk moves embedded in his coaching ‒ conceptualised here as technical directives, reflections, rule recounts, and eventcasts. The instructor’s talk moves were epistemic tools that organised his coaching by extending participatory pathways to mediate performance learning. The paper concludes by suggesting that discourse analysis offers a useful way for acting coaches to reflect on, and potentially refine, the repertoires of talk moves that propel actor coaching.

Keywords:

• actor coaching
• discourse analysis
• actor training
• ethnographic research

Notes

² In accordance with the qualitative research paradigm, as practised in the US, the names in this essay are pseudonyms. Professor D selected his moniker noting that the name represents a role he performs when teaching and that his constructed character is an amalgamation of past instructors.

³ Several universities in the US, UK, and Australia offer graduate degrees in performance pedagogy. For example, the UK’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama offers MA and MFA degrees in ‘Actor Training and Coaching’, the US’s Virginia Commonwealth University offers an MFA in Performance Pedagogy, and Australia’s University of Newcastle offers a PhD in Performing Arts with an emphasis in performance pedagogies.

⁴ For more on the body-mind and Cartesian dualities, see Chapter 3 in Zarrilli’s (2009) Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski and Rick Kemp’s (2012) Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Acting.

⁵ For example, the term ‘coaching’ is used in texts as varied as Robert Barton’s (2012) Acting: Onstage and Off, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s (2005) The Viewpoints Book, Joseph Roach’s (1993) The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, and the aforementioned Phillip Zarrilli’s (2009) Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski.

⁶ Of course, competition can be interpreted in several ways ‒ to compete with oneself, an opponent(s), or the broader sociocultural institution in which performance functions.

⁷ For a helpful overview of coach/athlete relationship studies, see ‘Figure 1’ in Poczwardowski et al. (2006, p. 132).

⁸ Heath’s work is foundational in educational research in the US. Her seminal book, Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983), is a cross-cultural ethnographic study which compares the language practices of two adjacent communities in the southern US that are similar in demographics, but not in race. The study traces the ways language practices learned at home transfer, with varying degrees of ‘success’, to classroom settings at a time of racial integration in US public schools. Heath went on to research language use in out-of-school youth spaces ‒ including athletics, music, dance and theatre programmes ‒ in the US and Britain.

⁹ See also the July 2012 Special Issue of Theatre Dance and Performance Training on ‘Sport and Training for Performance’ edited by Mark Evans (Evans 2012).