When conceiving this volume in a conversation with Richard Gough over four years ago, the original thought was to focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first- century performance training around the world that had been shaped by utopian principals and training collectives – intentional communities of practice enthused by shared beliefs, unified by methodologies and under masters of those methodologies. The laboratory theatre movement, for example, marked by Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre, which endured for over twenty-five years, and Odin Teatret (both talked about in this issue) are models of the kind of utopian training we were looking to enlarge upon in these tracings and successions. And with more and more artists seeking to train away from traditional institutional academies and conservatoires, we also wanted to investigate smaller pockets of training dedicated to enduring, alternative practices that would reshape traditions of practice. We could see a long line of utopian practice and principles stretching back to 1912 and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s and Leopold Sulerzhitskii’s First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, which itself spawned other utopian studios and practitioners who would upend and redefine Stanislavsky’s methodologies.
However, when – as the editors of this issue – we started work, we soon realised that the intersections between training traditions and practices and utopian thinking go beyond those initial ideas. Moreover, the more recent worldwide pandemic and temporary shut-down of theatres and schools caused by Covid-19 have forced us to consider the topic of this issue in radically new ways. And as we face an uncertain future, utopian practice has now been compromised by the dystopian reality of isolation and separateness. So, this issue is also framed by doubt and uncertainty, with utopianism measured in different ways that belie hope with regret but then still search for hope. Only when we come out the other side of the pandemic will we see what survives in terms of shared, creative practice and collectivism— two essential features of the utopian model.
Alongside the restriction imposed everywhere by Covid-19 has been a new political will that has compromised and is fast changing many notions of training worldwide. The #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, indigenous critiques of performance studies, and the urgency surrounding climate change – among others – have made many of the training patterns (and, indeed, the certainties) that we once held as fundamental subject to deep rethinking and cancelling. So many of the principles we felt were fixed in the shaping of training now seem suspect, fraught and frankly nostalgic.
Historically, utopia was always an imaginative invention, and, like the word itself, its history was the history of an idea only, leading to the fictive possibilities in other ideations. It posited a golden age, an Edenic village of equality and justice that we would all like to believe is possible, however doubtful historical reality has proven utopias to be. Invented by Thomas More in 1516, in his text Utopia, the title itself is a made-up word, an inverted joke, a playful neologism, a pun on the word ‘eutopia’, a ‘good place’ and a ‘nowhere’ … and yet the joke was taken seriously, positively, and has lasted as a proposition to change things, despite the change ultimately taking us nowhere. Furthermore, to the same extent that the word became synonymous with ideas of political progress such as Universal Human Rights, the conceptual architecture of utopia served as a place for the European mind to toy around with the physical bodies and material identities of the indigenous populations massacred in the pursuit of the colonial project. Indeed, we cannot think of utopia without the dystopia that engendered it – a wave of planetary extinction in the name of racist (in)justice and (im)perfection.
The concepts of utopia and dystopia have intermingled in fractious ways, with utopias shifting into dystopias more often than not. Dreams and nightmares, one fusing into the other, create massive anxieties of influence, especially in the political and social world. When we look at such utopian theatre training phenomena, like the various studios of the Moscow Art Theatre, the blending of philosophical, breath and physical perfection in various Asian training methodologies, or theatre at Bauhaus, we also see those instances filled with the seeds of their destruction and demise through time, either at the hands of a political change like Soviet Communism or Hitler’s National Socialism or by rampant gurism – always a danger in utopian training scenarios. The guru teacher is emblematic of a kind of powerful endemic neglect that not even this issue has gone into in sufficient detail. Some utopias eat other utopias, dashing dreams, ambitions and even careers. Utopias start as promises and end with warnings.
The editors of this volume are each teaching theatre and performance in Southeast Asia, where cultural contestation and the effects of postcolonial modes of training is a daily habit and anxiety. We regularly work here with training contradictions, particularly in the uneasy dialogue between the different cultural specificities, biases and privileges inbuilt into existing training traditions. The utopian desire in such an enterprise is, of course, to unpack and address these dichotomies through continuously crossing through the diverse layers and cultural intersections that we experience, embody, and teach in. Training in these contexts is in itself an exercise of deutopia: What other training discourses can simultaneously embody the multiple cultures and histories that form the twenty-first century, postcolonial body? How do we articulate the decolonial impetus in tandem with the need to (re)frame a (re)newed aesthetics in order to pursue a training methodology that integrates digital platforms into our modes of delivery?
The contributions to this issue each map a utopia, offering readers a wide variety of possibilities for understanding how the notion of perfection (and its contestation) come into play where training is concerned: from theatre and performance to police, from queer futurities to twentieth-century nostalgia, and from promise and potential to obituaries and eulogies. This issue has not sufficiently come to terms with the reinvention of training for a digital future. However, it tries to begin this dialogue in several essays by reflecting on a present that is stuck squarely amid a pandemic that is likely to continue, if only in pockets, after this issue is published. And yet, if the issue has one central point to make is that we ought to appreciate utopia as diversity and be able to appreciate the overlaps, conflicts, tensions and benefits of the interlockings between its many versions.
We have divided the issue into four sections: Manifestos, Institutions, Ideals and Tributes. These categories are on the one hand somewhat arbitrary in their intent to package the contributions to the issue along lines of commonality and intent. Yet, on the other hand, the flow of each of the sections into the next also attempts to map a temporal logic for utopic thinking: from the expression of a position and intent in the form of manifestos, to the institutionalisation of such vision, to the ideals that keep institutions going, and lastly, to the demise of utopia as it was once embodied by its thinkers. In framing the contributions this way, we also wish to say, if only in sotto voce, that utopia may follow other timelines and trajectories. Indeed, the contributions already shout that point quite loudly by themselves.
The manifesto section of the issue includes contributions that insist on the collaborative, multi-authorial, transtemporal and political potential of performance pedagogy and training. In ‘Decolonizing Performance Pedagogy: A position paper from Bangalore, South India’, Shabari Rao establishes a position from where to critique performance pedagogy and advocates for decolonial practices that consider training as a process and therefore as a collaborative task that renounces the petrification of any one single authority – colonial or otherwise. Electa Woodbridge Behrens follows suit in her ‘This is Not a Manifesto’, where she eloquently shares how she does not present herself as a master to her voice students but rather invites them to ‘find their own voices’ by themselves. The emphasis on the political potential of practice-oriented epistemologies that Rao and Woodbridge Behrens point at becomes crystallised in the contribution by Adriana La Selva, Marije Nie, Andrea Maciel and Patrick Campbell. In their ‘Parliament of Practices (PoP): No-topian tactics for praxical dialogue’, they call for a ‘practice-oriented ontology’ that moves on from the speculative realism that has dominated materialist thought in performance research during the last years to think instead of processual assemblages that are such only to the extent to which they are practised. ‘We are not a parliament’, but ‘we practice a parliament’, they argue. Taking this angle, the last two contributions to this section, ‘Untraining the Bauhaus: A non-linear workflow for the new (post-hu)man’ by Moritz Frischkorn and Thomas Pearce and ‘Resisting to Dystopias of Bodily Control: Dance training and anorexia/bulimia’ by Cecília de Lima, each offer provocative accounts about the power of control and repetition, offering their visions for more multidimensional and inclusive training utopias.
The second section, Institutions, includes contributions that address the utopic power of institutionalised training and pedagogy. Peter Zazzali and Ilaria Bessone argue, for example, that actor and circus training carry utopic projects. Their contributions, titled ‘Utopia
in Actor Training: The possibilities of an intercultural curriculum’ and ‘Circus Training in the Time of Coronavirus’, offer readers a dual perspective on training and contemporary performance training as this might relate to intercultural understanding and to the binary of stability and instability. Continuing with the emphasis on contemporaneity and training, Laura Bissell, Gary Gardiner, Sarah Hopfinger and Rachel O’Neill use their piece ‘Training Artists in Times of Crisis’ to reflect on the drastic changes the programme they teach in had to face as a result of the restrictions brought about by the pandemic. What they would normally plan as an opportunity to engage ecological grounding in their curriculum became instead an exercise of social resilience and care. Ben Spatz, on the other hand, takes the conversation about grounding training to doctoral education, and in his piece ‘Earthing the Laboratory: Speculations for doctoral training’ he calls for a laboratory-based approach to doctoral artistic research that is grounded on ecological, epistemic and decolonial grounds. Spatz’s contribution is important for readers who are currently doing or advising doctoral projects or programmes. The last two contributions to this section think performance pedagogy and training beyond theatre and performance studies per se. In ‘Communicative Utopias: Training English-speaking subjects in US-occupied Philippines’, Oscar T. Serquiña offers a fine analysis of the opposing utopias found in his study of how English was ambivalently instrumentalized as a national language in the US-occupied Philippines, while Natalie Alvarez shares with us a very strong case for training utopias in the context of police training. What if police officers could perform actions and think of the consequences in safe spaces?
The next section of the issue is on Ideals, and it brings the thinking back to the original intent of this issue, mentioned above. In this section, we turn towards the ideals that prevail in contemporary traditions of training initiated by what are commonly (and not unproblematically) known as the masters of training in the twentieth century. In ‘Between Craft and Metaphysics: Ideals and idealisation of acting process at Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre’, Duncan Jamieson brings us back to Grotowski’s explorations on working on the self. Jamieson’s piece throws new light on aspects of Grotowski’s work that many will find rather compelling. Similarly, in ‘The Viewpoints and the Secret of the Original Anarchist: Mary Overlie and the Undercommons’, Tony Perucci brings us back to the core of the original Viewpoints and thinks rather carefully and lovingly through Mary Overlie’s ideal of the radical anarchist. Richard Gough follows suit in ‘Utopian Training: The secrets, “schools” and continents of Edward Gordon Craig and Eugenio Barba’, offering a thread that masterfully brings together the utopias of teaching and publishing, of schools and journals, through an account of the parallels between Eugenio Barba and Gordon Craig. Moving forward in the timeline and closer to the twenty-first century, in ‘Dark Utopia, or sleeping through Marten Spångberg’s Natten’, Jonas Rutgeerts addresses the now-common non-place of contemporary society – that is, a space that escapes the forces of production – and finds that utopia in interplays between sleeping and dancing. This section would not be complete without remembering the work of José Esteban Muñoz. His thinking informs the work of Felix Rose Kawitzky and Franziska Bork Petersen who, in their pieces ‘Magic Circles: Tabletop role-playing games as queer utopian method’ and ‘A Non-Optimized Utopia: Johannes Paul Raether’s education of desire’, continue to cruise towards the ne plus ultra utopic promise of performance theory: other worlds and other ways of being exist. The section closes with a very special piece by Göze Saner, who brings the Arendtian ideal of freedom in touch with clown training.
Lastly, this issue is also a goodbye to utopia. Performance Research has kindly given us added space to celebrate the lives and innovative work of three vital and indelible trainer/practitioners who changed the vocabulary of utopian training and whose passing in 2020 followed close upon one another: Kristin Linklater (1936–2020), the consummate voice trainer who developed her own Linklater methodology and training centre in Scotland, is remembered by Joan Mills; Mary Overlie (1946–2020), whose invention of Viewpoints is her lasting memorial, is celebrated by Tony Perucci; and Phillip Zarrilli (1947–2020), whose ongoing thoughts and deep practices about psychophysical performance that fused different training traditions are fulsomely explored by Richard Gough, editor of Performance Research. What Kaite O’Reilly, Phillip Zarrilli’s life partner, wrote about him could easily be said as an appropriate parting to all three: ‘I keep thinking of the Tagore line: “Let it not be death, but completeness”.’
We cannot let this issue go without acknowledging, once again, the dire straits we faced and continue to face in our voyage forward. This issue was delayed by more than six months due to the blockages brought about by the pandemic. And yet, what has become all the clearer is how strong the collaborative and truly translocal ethos of performance research is. Perhaps there is something to continue saying about the utopic power of dystopia itself. In the meantime, however, all we have left is to continue training our utopias. If we see theatre and various modes of dance and performance as progressive and imbued with liberalism (especially in the way performers are trained to share with one another and with communities), training institutions, for the most part, begin as hopeful enterprises. But even those institutions are being rocked by the present moment. The number of institutions that have had practices of systemic abuse and prejudice denounced and scrutinised, and whose histories, and tales of neglect and abuse towards students, have been sorely contested, mark an inevitable disruption – no smaller than the one brought about by COVID – that urges us to rethink how detrimental the ideal of a perfect place, a perfect body and a perfect way of being can be to the social promise of performance.