In Training Grounds we encourage contributors to use the kind of language (style, vocabulary) that seems most appropriate to their own practice and/or to their own experience of receiving or giving training. From our point of view, there is no need to adopt the conventions of scholarly prose. If such a thing exists, then we are after Practitioners’ prose – and if it doesn’t yet exist let us create such a way of writing!
Welcome to Training Grounds, now beginning its sixth year as a forum for the practitioner's voice, a place where reflections on training can take alternative formats to the standard articles in the front section of this journal. This issue includes the reflections of a range of specialist practitioners from the disciplines of dancing, acting, sound, and voice.
We begin with our regular invitation to Answer the Question. Inspired by our most recent special issue, Vol. 5.2 ‘Training, Politics and Ideology’, we ask the question: ‘How do power dynamics in the studio affect training?’ This has prompted responses revealing a series of interesting ways that practitioners are currently wrestling with the overt and subtle power in the hands of teachers and students. Joel Anderson opens this section with a personal insight into his experiences training at Ecole Jacques Lecoq, particularly noticing the ways in which Lecoq embodied his chosen role as a ‘reference point’ for the training in the school. Kane Husbands reflects on a slightly different approach to the trainer's power in the studio, an approach that uses the power in asking specific questions, alongside the admission that he doesn't know the answers, to train young actors and directors. Reflecting on the nature of training institutions Rachel Cockburn argues that artists in training might embrace and challenge the unspoken power dynamics of spaces outside of the studio. Closing this section, Mark Evans' answer is a slightly longer response than usual. In this he outlines several methods that he uses to resist and reveal the power dynamics in his own teaching practice.
Our Postcards section continues to seek out contributions of around 100 words, and this issue's postcards are in response to the title: ‘Training and Image/Imagination'. John Hall opens with a definition for each term, definitions that are themselves freewheeling provocations to imagine. Dancer Ana Barbour muses on how for her imagination begins in the body rather than the head, and Franc Chamberlain reflects on Michael Chekhov's view of imagination in the creative process. Voice teacher Bernadette O'Brien provides a sense of her way of journeying into the imagination and its effect on the voice. Finally, David Harradine brings us back to the real world with his call that ‘You don't have to imagine anything. It's all just there’.
Having outlined in a previous issue's Answer the Question where his training began, we were so intrigued by the work of Foley artist Tom Espiner that we offered him an opportunity to reflect on his training in more detail. In his essai he provides an account, not only of the process of training Foley artists, but also the sensibility and physicality of working with the world of live sounds. The second essai in this issue, by Will Schüler, is a provocative reflection on Ancient Greek chorus training, in particular the ways in which this training prepared the young Athenian male citizen for both the theatre and the battlefield.
Rounding off this issue is Ian Watson's review of Roberta Carreri's new book On Training and Performance: Traces of an Odin Teatret Actress. Watson identifies this as a (successful) hybrid of several different approaches to writing about training, whilst serving several different constituencies.
We are always seeking contributions from practitioners across disciplines for all of the sections. The joy of Training Grounds is the flexibility of the format, so if you would like to propose something please make contact with us.