Welcome to the Training Grounds area for this issue. It is an enormous pleasure to have this opportunity to introduce and share with you the contributions that follow, which comprise a rich and stimulating breadth of reflections from practitioners and scholars from around the globe. We hope you enjoy hearing these voices extending from the Devon and Cornish coasts to London, Birmingham, Leeds, Ireland, Italy and Singapore.
In response to this issue’s Answer the Question – ‘How does nature nurture your training?’ ‒ we invited our contributors to consider nature as the ‘natural’ world, in whatever context one might train. We also encouraged reflections on the way nature might directly or indirectly shape the form and content of training; the way nature may serve as a source for tasks, exercises and/or ways of doing the work.
Many of our contributors explore ways in which nature provides a context for their training, as place and/or space, and what nature provides that other ‘contexts’ may not. Here we find examinations of nature’s impact upon the senses/sensation of training. All the texts speak in one way or another to the nature of training as well as the nature in and around training.
Ian Morgan, through the lens of his own practice and his work as course leader of MA Actor Training and Coaching at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, addresses the ‘performer’s nature’ as that which is unveiled in the moment of action and favours ‘being … as phenomenal experience … in the very situated environment of performance’ achieved through ‘micro-mastery’.
Evelyn O’ Malley, through her current preoccupation with ‘non-human nature’, examines the resistance to tree-being and tree-hugging found in interiorised forms of performer training by those operating in established forms of musical theatre. She reflects on how she has become ‘actively interested in how we make a case for drama’s place in conversations about environmental politics, ecological degradation, anthropogenic climate change and mass extinctions, perpetuated by the wealthiest few in industrialised countries, by including rather than dismissing the trees’.
Ciaran Clarke, in asking how we might train for outdoor performance based on reflections on his work as performer with Cornwall’s Miracle Theatre Company, asserts that nature obliges us to engage in ‘live adaptation’ and that therefore we must not only train for working outdoors but ‘allow ourselves to be trained by outdoor performance’.
Gey Pin Ang argues that while training outdoors can be very challenging, ‘it also nurtures an unbroken stream of awareness for the practice’. She observes how nature can stimulate ‘play’ in and with one’s environment, allowing trainees to transcend their stamina and endurance leading to a more effortless and fluid embodied engagement with themselves, each other and their surroundings.
Guided by the wider theme of this issue, Training and Nature, in responding to our postcard topic ‘Training and the wild(erness)’ we invited contributors to consider not only the external or physical wild(erness) but also states of wildness and wilderness that might emerge from their thoughts on, experiences of, or responses to training.
Jonathan Pitches shares with us the experience of being one of 800 people gathered on a Cumbrian fellside, all wearing colour-gelled head torches, and speculates, during these tumultuous times, both national and global, on what kind of training might be taking place at the top of Barrow, Outerside and Stile End.
Helen Poynor, drawing on her work in tidal sites, reminds us that ‘nature tolerates us on its own terms’ and observes how the tide serves to tutor us in negotiating the relationship between structure and spontaneity.
Jeffrey Gormly, in his performative writing, traces for us a creative training pathway that leads us from ‘an invisible force’ into a ‘vortex’, out of which ‘grows’ a state of ‘abundance’.
Finally, in our Essais section, Gavin Thatcher and Daniel Galbreath, scholar-practitioners based in the West Midlands, reflect on their collaborative work with Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s Foundry programme. In their process of making a movement-theatre piece exploring the physical/emotional effects of experiencing a stroke at a young age, they challenge the Cartesian body‒mind divide that may be reinforced in certain conventional trainings in higher education settings. They reflect on how vocal performers experience and consider what is natural in their bodies during the act of singing and how these understandings might serve the development of a more progressive ensemble training syllabus.
We hope you enjoy these reflections and thank you for your interest and support. We recommend you visit our online blog http://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/, where you will find further discussion, debate and audiovisual materials. We also invite you, if you are interested in contributing to a future edition of Training Grounds, to contact one of the editorial team. We look forward to hearing from you.