Editorial

It would be fair to say that since the mid-1980s, actor training has been waking up to its nature as a social and cultural product. In a review examining four volumes that appeared in the early 1990s, Phillip Zarrilli (1994, p. 178) identifies a series of lenses through which acting, as a process, and performing, as a temporally and spatially situated act, have been considered from the 1980s onwards; these ‘included everything from Derridean deconstructions … to cultural histories, … to re-readings of Stanislavski and his intellectual legacy in Russia and/or America …, to feminist reconsiderations of acting process, theory and history’. The scholarly production noted by Zarrilli, the volumes that he discussed in that particular review, as well as books that appeared a few years later have been instrumental in highlighting the contingent, situated character of acting. They have also paved the way for asking similar questions about actor training. If acting is socially, politically and culturally specific, then surely the training that produces and propagates any form of acting must be conditioned by these same factors.

It would also follow that, if actor training is the outcome of a specific culture, then, within Western capitalist contexts, it is also subject to and inflected by forms of economic transaction and political decision making. As Frank Camilleri (2009) reminds us, actor training in the twenty-first century is a commercial product sold by institutions and bought by students. Mark Evans (2009) has further pointed out that actor training programmes also constitute forms of ‘capital’ that will partly dictate the graduate's position within the cultural industries market. The content and structure of performer training is therefore determined by a number of forces that are oblivious to pedagogical and artistic concerns – for example: the proclivities of the entertainment industry; government policy on artistic funding; the curricular preferences and logistical limitations of training institutions; the accreditation of degrees by external bodies; primary and secondary education systems that prepare trainees in particular ways and not others. In light of these complex networks, the ‘critical turn’ noted by Zarrilli has been followed by a ‘political turn’. Earlier attempts to historicise and contextualise specific actor training regimes have been extended by a more focused interest in the economic, cultural and political parameters within which actor training operates. The most explicit manifestation of the ‘political turn’ to date is arguably Margolis and Renaud's seminal The Politics of American Actor Training (2010). In their introduction, Margolis and Renaud position the volume of collected essays in relation to the post-war boom of the entertainment industry, the gradual demise of the Political, as a loud, bold, sweeping action, and its substitution by a quieter, less ambitious sense of the political as an individual attitude. They also express their surprise that ‘there isn't already a book addressing how these developments are reflected in actor training’ (Margolis and Renaud 2010, p. 1). Their volume, of course, does just that, but since its appearance, publications with similar motives and remit have been scant. Moreover, as Mark Evans contends in this issue, ‘most professional training regimes, and perhaps more university courses and modules on actor training than we might like to admit, do not focus on their histories in anything other than terms of lineage and provenance’.

Four years after the publication of Margolis and Renaud's volume, this Special Issue intends to keep the ball rolling and capture a snapshot of the field against the backdrop of a post-industrial, post-modern, globalised and increasingly neo-liberalised world. Within the UK, the conception and realisation of this issue has also coincided with a collective moment of breath holding. Recent changes in the fee structure of UK universities, significant cuts in arts funding, as well as reforms in secondary education, suggest the oncoming of long-term effects which at the moment can only be speculated upon. If the interrogation of the political nature of performer training began as an ‘academic’ exercise in historiography and cultural analysis, it has now acquired an urgent, pragmatic and ethical dimension. Primary amongst the facts that can no longer be ignored is the certainty of debt and the uncertainty of employment that current and future trainees will face. It also begins to transpire that when employed, performing arts graduates will most likely be engaged in an industry that shows alarming signs of de-regulation, low remuneration and gruelling working conditions. In light of these developments, training, as well as education, assumes the explicit responsibility to act as a mechanism for employment. On the other hand, training appears to be the last haven of liminality – a process where experimentation is welcomed and failure permitted, a ground that enables the imagining of alternative futures, and perhaps nurtures their realisation. Against these concerns and developments, this Special Issue aims to interrogate the various ways in which training, in both theory and practice, is influenced by dominant ideological mechanisms as well as the more tangible effects of ‘politics’. It also aspires to foreground the emancipatory potential that training practices might cultivate. What are the issues that keep performer trainers awake at night? Which practitioners, thinkers and books inform a political examination of training both inside and outside the studio? How do we respond to the increasing advance of neo-liberal agendas? What is the relationship between Western canonical training practices and postcolonial/globalised societies? How do our pedagogies make us complicit in the maintenance of existing conditions and how could they offer us possibilities for resistance?

This issue begins with two articles that intend to shed light on assumptions and practices of performer training that are so deeply embedded as to become invisible. Joining the existing scholarship on ‘System-atic’ actor training methods, Broderick Chow highlights the importance of self-management as a creative resource within the ‘development of psychologically based actor training’ and draws parallels with the emergence of similar discourses in management theories and practices from the 1920s onwards. Similarly, Claudia Brazzale unpicks the notions that underpin one of the most widely used instructions in dance training: ‘cover ground’. Drawing on her own experience of globetrotting in search of a fulfilling dance technique, Brazzale juxtaposes her inculcation in this way of approaching space and wider discourses around geographical and social mobility, cosmopolitanism and nomadism. She argues that ‘this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealised notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects’. Chow's and Brazzale's respective concerns about the way training regimes propagate dominant ideologies are taken a step further in Calvin Taylor's essay. Taylor positions recent debates on psychophysical training within a wider appreciation of the role of affect as both the key mechanism of immaterial labour and a potential source of resistance. At the moment, training, in Taylor's account, is sitting on the fence, as ‘many of its own practices are being re-played back to it as an invitation to train a new generation of graduates that will perform for affect’. Taylor, however, also points out that training is infused with the pedagogical structures that could shed a critical light on the increasingly instrumentalist ethos and structure of tertiary education.

In line with Taylor's appreciation of training as a probable ground of resistance, the following three essays propose ways in which training pedagogies can offer possibilities for agency. Similarly to Brazzale, Mark Evans begins with his own formative training encounters in order to foreground ‘the political significance of the personal and somatic experience of training and of the professional practice of training others’. He thus proposes the notion of ‘foundational practices’, which ‘passes on (like a form of cultural genetics) ideological assumptions to the system or techniques that emerge from it’. He therefore argues that training ‘must not simply replicate the students’ or teachers’ habitus, but must reveal and interrogate it’ and accordingly enable the student to establish their own foundations. Echoing Evans’ argument, my article examines the notion of reflexivity as a possible source of emancipation. Drawing on the work of Carrie Noland as well as that of practitioners and scholars of contemporary performance, I suggest that reflexivity, and consequently agency, may be generated not only in instances of mastery but also in instances of misfit, whereby the body expresses its discomfort and reluctance to yield to the training. I further propose that the widespread practice of psychophysical disciplines may be giving rise to a collective somatic language, which can replace dominant models of performance analysis. Charlene Rajendran focuses on the multicultural context of contemporary Singapore and presents a form of actor training that employs mimesis and crafting techniques in order to enable the students to gain an embodied insight into the cultural Others that populate the multilingual and multi-ethnic landscape of the city-state. This process, argues Rajendran, can enhance the students’ cultural sensitivity and civic responsibility, as ‘acting becomes a space to participate in the reimagining of cultural norms, and thus interpret and resist reductive categories’. If the first six essays deal with issues of ideology, Philippa Burt's contribution on the Theatre Workshop takes us into the territory of politics proper. By drawing on recently released archival material as well as scholarship on the subject, Burt ‘cross-references the Arts Council's files with records of MI5’s systematic surveillance of the company to identify the political motivations’ behind the company's persistent underfunding.

The first section of this volume is completed by a collection of three shorter essays that approach the wider concerns of this issue by drawing on the authors’ first-hand experience of different aspects of training. Zack Fuller, a student and collaborator of Min Tanaka, offers an account of Body Weather Training in Tanaka's farm in Japan and outlines a process and environment whereby hierarchical models and ideals were decidedly resisted. Lisa-Mare Syron's essay is rooted in her ethnic identity as an Aboriginal Australian and her engagement with Indigenous actor training as a teacher, researcher and administrator. She focuses on the notion of culture and argues that an appreciation of what culture is and how it can be effectively taught is an important element of the Aboriginal actor's training. Echoing the trajectory from ideological to political concerns that marks the first section of this volume, Becka McFadden concludes this triptych by considering the effects of the loss of a permanent rehearsal and performance space on the internationally acclaimed Czech company Farma v jeskyni (Farm in the Cave).

As a counterpoint to the more scholarly tone of the essays, the Training Grounds of this issue presents the edited transcript of a roundtable event that was hosted by the journal and took place at the University of Leeds in October 2013. Catherine Alexander, Alison Andrews, Tom Cornford, Matt Hargrave, Struan Leslie and Kylie Walsh comprised a panel that responded to the title ‘Training in a Cold Climate’. Drawing on their experience as theatre practitioners and actor trainers as well as their position within key providers of performer training, they discuss the challenges they identify in the current pedagogical, professional and institutional structures, and also outline possible futures of training they would like to see realised. The TG section closes with additional versions of possible futures explicated in a series of nine postcards – manifestos written by theatre artists and educators based in the UK and/or elsewhere in Europe.

What is the sum of the concerns, analyses and comments presented in this issue? What do they tell us about the direction of the ‘field’? One point on which all the voices hosted in this issue concur is that the ideological assumptions that underpin the philosophy and/or delivery of a training regime can no longer be ignored. Accordingly, there are signs of a concerted effort to trace the operation of these ideologies in the actual pedagogy and to propose pedagogical frameworks/questions that are informed by social and ethical concerns specific to each author's particular local and artistic contexts. The decision of a number of these contributors to draw on autoethnographical material therefore comes as no surprise. By positioning themselves within the field, they acknowledge the external forces that are exerted on their practice and sift through the received wisdom of their respective lineages.

Something else that clearly emerges from this issue is a realisation that acting, and by consequence actor training, is taking place within the ‘cultural industries’. Following similar developments in the field of performance (see Klein and Kunst 2013), it is acknowledged that the performer's work not only has an aesthetic, artistic and affective dimension. It is also a form of labour with a monetary and cultural value, and, as such, subject to a wider set of political and economic transactions that are controlled by mechanisms over which the artist has little influence. As a result, a number of essays in this issue are marked by their engagement with scholarship on the cultural industries. In addition to the lenses of critical analysis identified by Zarrilli in the 1990s, scholarship on the cultural industries is offering a new set of terms, histories and contexts in relation to which performer training can be examined. In this respect, Broderick Chow's essay is significant, since it shows that correspondences between performer training and cultural industries discourse is not a hermeneutic device imposed from above, but may, in fact, underlie significant moments of the former's historical development. More importantly, Chow argues that

this ‘alternative’ historical reading of actor training allows us to question and perhaps challenge discourses of ‘transferable skills’ and ‘employability’ in higher education drama and theatre departments. When do the positive qualities of a career in theatre or performance, such as creativity and autonomy, become the same qualities required by those who can survive the insecurities, uncertainties and overall precarity of the ‘new’ flexible labour market?

A final feature that emerges from this volume is a collective appreciation of the possibility of training to challenge, disrupt and undermine dominant structures and ways of thinking. If Burt's essay on the Theatre Workshop and McFadden's article on the Farm highlight the reliance of training practices on what Burt calls the ‘Establishment’, they also exemplify that training has a ‘bite’, a subversive potential that reaches well beyond the walls of the studio and may be, in fact, feared by those in power. Acknowledging training's influence by a set of external forces and mechanisms might well be the first step towards realising and articulating whatever potential performer training has for agency, resistance and emancipation. This understanding is impregnated with a vision of the future performer as an ethically aware, socially responsible, active citizen. If new forms of actor training have historically emerged from a need to realise new forms of theatre, what is the future theatre we are imagining now?