As we teeter on the verge of becoming a teenager next year, welcome to the last issue of volume 12 of TDPT, the largest ever generic issue we have produced with nine longer essays and a rich seam of Training Grounds materials. That we have such a broad range of articles to share with you, as we anticipate a second anniversary of Covid-affected research in our disciplines, is testament to the creativity and dogged resistance of the community of academic practitioners publishing within our pages. While the pandemic has definitely impacted people unevenly and at times heightened inequities, there is still a manifest need for, and capacity in, performer training research, one measure of which can be found in the new journal metrics published on our Routledge website. We still maintain a proud footprint in the print camp of journal publication, but inevitably most of our content is read in digital format and this download activity has grown significantly over the last few years, along with year-on-year growth in international reach. The latter metric is perhaps the most important for us, as it means the breadth and diversity of performer training research is genuinely expanding, amongst our readership and authorship.
In that spirit, we were delighted recently to appoint Proshot Kalami to our community of associate editors who has a designated remit to encourage new contributions from underrepresented areas in the journal. Proshot has already begun exciting conversations with training colleagues in the Middle East and Central Asia, forcing us to confront the challenges of training translation and access to academic knowledge head on, bringing a delightful humour and lightness of touch to such serious subject matter. With the growth of the journal, the complexities of sourcing peer reviews and of developing our review processes to strike an appropriate balance between nurturing and scrutiny are evermore present. Christina Kapadocha has joined us to lead on this and has already had a remarkable impact, leading the Associate Editor team in a thought-provoking workshop on peer review in the summer, and actively widening the range of voices we draw on as reviewers. Both appointments, and the enthusiasm and energy of the entire editorial team, speak volumes about the power of collegiality, even in the straightened circumstances we are all experiencing.
As we observe the entrance of two new colleagues, we must also mark the final exit of Noel Witts, an editorial board member of TDPT from the very beginning of the journal 12 volumes ago. Noel died almost a year ago but the cruelties of Covid have blocked attempts fully to celebrate his enormous contribution to theatre and performance scholarship and practice. As I (Jonathan) write, his excellent book on Kantor sits behind me, alongside the entire set of Routledge Performance Practitioners, edited by Franc Chamberlain. On my right are three editions of the landmark C20th (and C21st) Performance Reader, all with Noel’s indelible stamp on them. Plans are now afoot for a gathering in Leeds so that those who were familiar with his mischievous and infectious love of life, and those who simply inferred it from his books, can gather to pay their respects.
It is a sign of the times that all of the articles we are publishing now in 12.4, have already been published online first, as we seek to reduce the time from submission to publication as far as possible for researchers. Nevertheless, collection into a volume gives us the opportunity to draw together important threads and meeting points, and in doing so perhaps to encourage digital readers to go beyond their immediate interests and to take a wider view. Imojen Aujla’s ‘Opening pathways to training for young disabled dancers’ takes on the important subject of how dance syllabi in private studios may be made more accessible for young disabled people, recognising that currently there are limited opportunities for disabled dancers to develop their technical proficiency. Aujla’s action research points to the manifest and multiple benefits of improving access in private studios, including growth in confidence and independence, and her article is a rallying cry to the industry to open its pathways to progression further. Bruno Tucunduva, poses the converse question in his article: ‘An integrative methodology for circus training based on creativity and education on physical expression’. Drawing on circus pedagogies practiced in his native Brazil he asks: what alternatives are there to skills acquisition-based learning and how are the aesthetics and poetics of circus best taught? Reporting on a four-year research project into the development of a learning methodology based on creativity and body expression, rather than what he terms ‘circus-gymnastics’, Tucunduva argues for an artistically-centred approach to teaching new learners the essence of circus. In ‘Flipping the creative conservatoire classroom’, Anna McNamara considers the currency of ‘flipped’ classroom approaches in relation to studio practice. Applying a revised version of Bloom’s famous taxonomy of learning to actor training, specifically Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen, McNamara provokes the actor trainer to consider some of their students’ preparatory work as ‘lower order’ – that is associated simply with understanding and remembering. ‘Higher order’ activity, on the other hand (analysis, evaluation and creation), may get short shrift she argues, if too much time is spent within the studio on preparatory exercises and on developing familiarity with text. Viewed through the lens of COVID-19, the article asks: what might we want to retain from the steep learning curve experienced by conservatoire teachers blending their studio teaching?
Looking backwards not forwards, Fabio Polanco and Lionel Walsh reconstruct a little-known exercise by one of Stanislavsky’s most lauded pupils, Michael Chekhov, offering new documentation of pedagogue Slava Kokorin’s interpretation of ‘The corridors exercise’, weaving it together with other classic Chekhov exercises such as the Psychological Gesture. What they reveal, however, is far from historic, but a dynamic and highly contemporary approach to exploring given circumstances through the construction of what the authors term ‘physical dramaturgy: revelatory, immediate and efficient’. Andrej Mircev is also in the business of reconstruction in his essay ‘Reenacting pedagogies of socialism: auto-analysis of a critical practice’. But again he has one eye on the present. Speaking from a Visual Arts background, Mircev examines a Croatian teaching project conducted with his students using discarded Civil Defence ephemera from the former Yugoslavia as prompts to devise site specific performances and interventions. The result, he argues, was an emerging critical pedagogy where ‘reenacting the training material of Civil Defence in a society troubled by post-war problems and the processes of suppressing traces of socialism resulted not only in an experimental educational format but also intervened into the existing socio-political order’.
Continuing a strong theme in TDPT of acting/performing and well-being (and anticipating a forthcoming Special Issue on this subject next year in Vol 13.2), Christophoros Panoutsos asks why there is an ‘absence of the cool-down for actors following a theatre performance’. Working from empirical evidence gathered from actor interviews, Panoutsos identifies a disjuncture between the level of academic interest in actor’s post-performance conditions and the relative dearth of ‘cool down’ practices and methods in the industry. Given the likelihood of more damaging solutions to managing the post-performance rush of adrenaline, such as alcohol abuse, the article anticipates a healthier future ‘where the warm-up, the performance and the cool-down will be seen as inseparable’.
In this movement-rich issue of TDPT, three further articles examine dance practices, all of them thematically connected to the recent Special Issue on Independent Dance and Movement Training (12.2). Jennifer Essex argues for new perspectives on mature dancers in her article ‘Tracing the impacts of informal dance training: a case study of falling on your feet, a programme for dancers over 65′. Through her study of Helix Art’s ‘Falling on Your Feet’ dance programmes in Teesside, UK, Essex compares the relative merit of quantitative and qualitative research, suggesting both are necessary to ensure broad evidence that represents participants’ diversity of experience. In order to resist ageist societal attitudes, Essex commends variety and nuance in the employment of research methodologies. She demonstrates how this approach can reveal the impact informal dance can have for older citizens for artistic expression, social well-being as well as physical health. Karen Wood focuses on the other end of the age spectrum in ‘UK dance graduates and preparation for freelance working: the contribution of artist-led collectives and dance agencies to the dance ecology’. Wood’s historical context and political analysis of dance agencies and collectives sits alongside her detailed insider knowledge as co-founder of Manchester Dance Consortium and Associate Director of Birmingham Dance Network. She highlights how emerging artists could be offered greater preparation for the precarity of freelance work through mentorship and participation in models of cultural leadership and collective working practiced by artist-led networks and dance agencies. Essex, Wood and Mo Pietroni-Spenst, in this third dance article, link with Aujla’s call for a more progressive and accessible dance training landscape. In
‘Somatic work and independent training as an invisibly disabled performer’ Pietroni-Spenst, directs attention to the obstacles encountered by dancers in training who are ‘in a liminal state of disability identity, which acts as a form of resistance to the standard binary of able-bodied or disabled’. In traversing the rocky experiences of her own dance training in her research, Pietroni-Spenst provides an intimate view of how such issues as energy limitation or fluctuating condition are a poor fit with many intensive teaching forms. The personal narrative is embedded in discussion of current debates on dance and disability and in combination these act as an urgent call for sensitive and appropriate adjustments to be made within dance training.
This issue’s Training Grounds materials respond to the theme of ‘Training and… Buildings’, inviting reflection on the role that buildings – their materiality, connotations and atmospheres – play in the training process. This is necessarily inflected by the present moment of transitioning and re-negotiating our relationships with buildings as a consequence of a global pandemic. In Darren Daly’s ‘Resistance Training’, domestic building walls become ‘resistance bands’, developing resilience within constraints to perform magic beyond them. Bob Whalley hones in on a ‘Dramaturgy of Corners’, discovering the impetus for creative scores in domestic architecture. Tessa Rixon’s couplet of contributions on Designing in Virtual Buildings offers a Speaking Image on how her virtual studios rethink the ‘building’ in design training during lockdown, along with a Postcard from her practice of teaching designers to listen to the real spaces they are in. Mark Evans’ evocative Speaking Image, as a re-membering return to the Lecoq School, activates the sense of temporal resonances in the buildings in which we train. Aiden Condron meanwhile sends a postcard from beyond the institutional space as he embarks on ‘Leaving the Building’. Our reviews cover both books and events: Joyce Lu tackles Sinéad Rushe’s: Michael Chekhov's Acting Technique: A Practitioner’s Guide, Jeremy Neideck reviews Annie Loui’s: The Physical Actor: Contact Improvisation from Studio to Stage and Juliet Chambers-Coe reconstructs the Rhythm in Acting and Performance event held earlier this year.
The editors
Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds and Head of School of Performance and Cultural Industries. He specialises in the study of performer training and has wider interests in intercultural performance, environmental performance and blended learning. He is founding co-editor of the TDPT and has published several books in this area: Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003), Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2006/9), Russians in Britain (2012) and, Stanislavsky in the World (with Dr Stefan Aquilina 2017). His most recent publications are: Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau Guthrie (sole editor, 2018) and the monograph, Performing Landscapes: Mountains (2020). He’s currently working on The Routledge Companion to Meyerhold, (again with Dr Aquilina)
Libby Worth is Reader in Contemporary Performance Practices, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a movement practitioner with research interests in the Feldenkrais Method, physical theatres, site-based performance and in folk/traditional and amateur dance. Performances include co-devised duets; Step Feather Stitch (2012) and dance film Passing Between Folds (2017). She is co-editor of TDPT and published texts include Anna Halprin (2004, co-authored), Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist (2012, co-edited), Jasmin Vardimon’s Dance Theatre: Movement, Memory and Metaphor (2016). Chapter contributions include on clog and sword dancing for Time and Performer Training (2019, she co-edited) and ‘Improvisation in Dance and the Movement of Everyday Life’ for the Oxford Handbook of Dance Improvisation (2019).
Training grounds editors
Aiden Condron has been an actor, performance maker and actor trainer for over twenty-five years working across the UK, Europe and the US. Aiden was founding artistic director of Nervousystem, a Dublin-based international performance laboratory from 2002–2012. Recent work includes a solo stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho which he co-created with for Mouth on Fire and performed at Theatre X Cai, Tokyo and Thalhya Lapse, a live art performance intervention he performed and co-curated with artist Paul Regan in Zurich for Manifesta 2016. Aiden’s current research activity investigates processes and practices of actor and performer training within the domain of presence, play and action, examining the actor’s dramaturgy as a field of autonomous creation.
Chris Hay is a Lecturer and Drama Major Convenor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. His current research examines knowledge transfer in creative arts training, with a particular focus on embedding diversity. Some preliminary findings of this research was published in the monograph Knowledge, Creativity and Failure (Palgrave, 2016), and his work also appears in the edited collection New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts. Chris is also continuing his research projects examining the early days of Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT), and Australia’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Roanna Mitchell is a performance-maker and movement person, co-director of the Chekhov Collective UK, and lecturer at the University of Kent where she is course leader for the MA Physical Acting. Her work explores performance and training in the intersection between acting and dance, and applications of Chekhov technique beyond the theatre. She has directed/created/movement-directed performance internationally, often working site-responsively and including collaborations with Richard Schechner (Imagining O, UK/India/US), Platform 7(Resting Place, Ramsgate/Charing Cross Station/Folkestone Seafront) and Accidental Collective (Here’s Hoping, Theatre Royal Margate/Oval House London). www.roannamitchell.com www.chekhovcollectiveuk.co.uk
Sara Reed is an independent academic, researcher, writer, project manager and a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner. With a career that has spanned a wide range of dance, performance, arts and education contexts, she has published widely in the area of embodied-movement, dance, somatic practices and pedagogy. Her experience includes interdisciplinary teaching across art forms. Sara is an Associate Editor for TDPT Training Grounds and on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices and Dance, Movement & Spiritualties. She is Co-chair for Independent Dance and a trustee for Wriggle Dance Theatre - for children and families.
Thomas J. M. Wilson is a Module/Year Coordinator for BA (Hons) European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Initially training in Equestrian Vaulting he competed at European-level in the mid-1990s. Subsequently he has engaged in practices rooted in the intersection between dance and theatre methodologies, working as both a performer and director/choreographer in a range of contexts. Thomas served on Oxford Dance Forum’s Steering Group (2008–10) and has regularly contributed to Total Theatre Magazine since 2001. He is an Associate of Gandini Juggling working as their Archivist and Publications Author. He is the author of Juggling Trajectories: Gandini Juggling 1991–2015, which was shortlisted for The Society of Theatre Research Book Prize 2016.