Nothing seems to stay still in the production of an academic journal, and in the short 12 years we have been publishing TDPT we have witnessed waves of change stimulated by a variety of causes: reader behaviours, the growth of digital and online access, external drivers such as the need to reduce plastic, and a policy landscape moving more and more towards open access. Although our Special Issue editors think deeply and creatively about their curatorial oversight, treating the reading experience of an issue with great care, we also know that our content is seldom viewed from cover to cover now, and that there are large discrepancies of interest, even within a tight area of specialism. These discrepancies often map very directly onto whether an article is open access or not, and as things develop further in OA, we hope that the breadth of ideas represented in the journal can reach ever-wider audiences, as the opportunities become clear. The most recent manifestation of these changes is in the abandonment of page budgets, now seen as an out-of-date legacy of print-driven publication. With most of our content being delivered digitally, the notion of a page taking up physical space in a material issue held in one’s hands is now outmoded. We must confess to a certain nostalgia in relation to print, and I, (Jonathan) for one, continue to relish the full complement of TDPT covers arranged carefully on the bookshelf in issue order. But there are material advantages to this for us as well. From 2023, there will be no upper limit on articles, the measure of our size based instead on minimum expectations of academic content. Gone are the difficult decisions over whether we can include an article at the end of a Volume, and gone is the feeling of guilt (expressed to our Managing Editor, Lucy Sheach), when we go over page budget. The future is open! And ultimately this new scope and flexibility has to be good for our readers and good for our authors.
In the steady shift away from hard copy I (Libby) share Jonathan’s sense of loss but find this balanced by the pleasure of being able to click directly from an embedded article link to illustrative digital videos and material placed on the TDPT blog. Increasingly, we are finding that authors enrich their written submissions with supporting material that reaches the reader more directly from studio, interview or performance. This includes other online platforms that have open access, although the TDPT blog additionally and significantly allows for subsequent threads of discussion in response to all journal submissions.
There are changes too to our Associate Editors’ team. Mark Evans stepped down at the beginning of the year, after being with us from the very start. Moving into the team, are two exciting new appointments: Lisa Peck, shoring up our understanding of critical pedagogy, and Misri Dey, with a specific brief for positive action. Misri will be working with us to identify barriers to diversification and to help us take positive steps further to decolonise our content and working practices. We remain so grateful as co-editors for the energy and commitment colleagues are prepared to make to TDPT, even in the context of rising workloads and a highly volatile external environment.
The 13.1 TDPT editorial opened with a celebration of the International Platform for Performer Training (IPPT) 2022 (Estonia) and when this issue (13.4) goes to press, we will be just two months away from IPPT 2023 to be held in Tuscany in Italy. Since its inception, we have always enjoyed a very close relationship with the Platform, and in this issue we continue to cement our relationship, this time in the form of a postcard series, stimulated by the presentation we made at IPPT 2022: New ways of being, living and training. This was a fascinating exercise in speed writing, (just 10 minutes to create a postcard) and, as you will see, the Tallinn delegates responded in creative, imaginative and thought-provoking ways. If all goes to plan, two of us (Libby and Jonathan), will be attending IPPT 2023, to kickstart the first ever special issue we will edit together - on Green Training. Libby noted in the last general editorial a number of pieces already published in TDPT which have been broadly in this field and with this special issue (slated for September 2024) we hope to concentrate colleagues’ attention wholly on the ever-pressing issue of sustainability in theatre, dance and performance training. A formal call will be published early in the New Year.
As we publish online all of our content for our general issues as and when it comes in, the articles in this issue have been available on our website in advance of their collation here in Vol 13.4 for a little time. Indeed, as we publish this edition they will have been viewed nearly 1000 times collectively. That statistic in itself is testament to the benefits of the online-immediately policy, with contributors’ research reaching the TDPT readership far quicker than in the past. With some of this issue carrying very current thinking in performer training, that responsiveness is all the more important. Both Dermot Daly and Anna McNamara take on pressing debates in the UK conservatoire sector. In ‘Actions speak louder than words. An investigation around the promises and the reality of representation in actor training’, Daly examines the relationship between statements made by Federation of Drama Schools members in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and later actions taken by them. He asks what changed as a result of the BLM-supporting words? And focuses in on final showcases as ‘a first indication of … a tangible commitment to greater, more diverse representation in the core business of the school’ to find an answer. Viewed through the lens of the racialised identity of the directors working on final showcases, the findings are patchy, with some improvement in the diversity of representation but not visible across-the-board. His conclusion turns to proposals for sustainable, long-term change, including a call for diversification of leadership roles and a plea for the curriculum to be more representative of non-white students. McNamara reports on her own work at the Guildford School of Acting, in her essay: ‘The locus of control in higher education, a case study from performer training’, occupying similar territory of equality diversity and inclusion. She too is committed to change, describing a project unambiguously titled Being the Change which, she explains, ‘seeks to identify and articulate opportunities to enable change and equity in the creative industries through action at HE level’. Drawing on a suite of ideas in relation to what she calls the ‘locus of control’, McNamara champions the redistribution of power away from a dominant Industry-led model to a more distributed, shared agency across student, training provider and industry. Viewed together McNamara and Daly’s essays speak productively to one another, with both of them reflecting deeply on past inequities, and future opportunities for transformation.
In Jamieson Dryburgh’s ‘Approaching pedagogical arts research from within the studio’ the challenge of being an insider-researcher is addressed head-on. Working from the premise that the studio is a ‘situated cultural site’, Dryburgh constructs an ethnographic methodology, using his own dance pedagogy as case study. This ‘Interpretive ethnography’ has the possibility of ‘holding together multiple features of shared experiences’, and as such is well suited to the diversity of the practice-based studio, where race, sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity, education and personal histories are in constant dialogue. Reflexivity and ‘remaining alert to the experience of learning as it unfolds’ are key, Dryburgh argues, to balancing effectively the intertwined roles of teacher and researcher. Evi Stamatiou uses Pierre Bordieu’s concept of ‘bodily hexis’, to get a handle on the power dynamics in clowning. Again, with a strong imperative to discuss the mechanisms for decolonising actor training, Stamatiou argues that tools from Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine’s directorial practices (in Oh What a Lovely War and Les Clowns, respectively) can help actors explore their unconscious biases. Her prevailing point is that clowning in both traditions ‘offers opportunities to identify and tackle misrepresentations that manifest unconscious negative dispositions’. As such, she suggests, the contemporary decolonial agenda in training can learn from these past practices in a spirit of misfit and subversion.
Steeped in different strands of Laban’s movement praxis, Melina Scialom pursues what she calls a ‘thinking soma’ in her essay ‘Performer’s dramaturgy: Developing dramaturgical thinking through choreological practice’. In this context the dramaturg is not the offstage collaborator familiar to us through the European literary manager model. Instead, they are integral to the making, thinking and weaving of the performance text in real time. Laban’s movement principles and Valerie Preston -Dunlop’s choreological practice are here considered as enablers of a ‘movement-thinking’, which Scialom positions vividly as a ‘performer’s dramaturgical consciousness’. Finally, for the longer form pieces in TDPT, Joshua Sofaer argues for coaching techniques (such as a person-centred philosophy, clean language, and active listening) to be considered as key contributors to an ethical framework for performers. In ‘Relational Dynamics: the use of coaching techniques in participative performance’, Sofaer draws on a case study from Opera Helps, an innovative project involving singers listening to participants’ problems in their own houses and diagnosing an aria in response. From this, the power of relational dynamics in the rehearsal room is evaluated, and the possibilities afforded by a shifted audience-performer power dynamic are debated. Sofaer concludes that there may be wider societal benefits in the practising of these techniques, as much now as when person-centred approaches were first developed post-Hiroshima.
In this issue’s Training Grounds contributions, Xia-Bing Chi and George Belliveau’s essai ‘Between tradition and modernity: Developments in Xiqu (Chinese Opera) actor training’ outlines recent shifts in Xiqu training and it’s dance between preserving cultural heritage and responding to contemporary cultural dynamics. The theme of reflecting between present, past and future is picked up in the IPPT (2022) Postcard series ‘New ways of living, being and training’. Here, missives from colleagues in the field reflect on the after-taste of the pandemic (Esa Kirkkopelto); on the pandemic as climate (Maarit Rankanen); on the potential for liberation in online voice workshops (Rachel Karafistan); on vulnerability and ‘thin skin’ (Oliver Mannel); on teaching and learning how to be with love (Lisa Peck); on being linked and hyper-linked (Olivier Van Den Hende); and on the effects of technological platforms for training on our thinking and being (Samuli Nordberg).
Finally, Chris Hay reviews Peter Zazzali’s Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present and Future, while Juliet Chambers-Coe with Olu Taiwo, Sinéad Ó Connor, Maira Milolidaki, Nicola Herd, and Catherine Pestano provide an innovative co-authored Events review of the International Conference: Rhythm in Body on Stage: The Return Beat – Interfacing With Our Interface. In the latter, stimulating written and visual reflections are offered on contributions from presenters across the globe sharing insights from their practices related to the notion of rhythm and musicality as a bodily and performative phenomenon.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jonathan Pitches
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 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). Recent book publications incliude: Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau Guthrie (sole editor, 2018) and the monograph, Performing Landscapes: Mountains (2020). His most recent publication is the co-edited Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold (2022) (again with Dr Aquilina).
Libby Worth
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).
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.
Roanna Mitchell
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 & Spiritualities. She is Co-chair for Independent Dance and a trustee for Wriggle Dance Theatre - for children and families.
Aiden Condron
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. 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. Aiden is currently pioneering an actor training initiative in Saudi Arabia working in collaboration with the Theatre and Performing Arts Commission of the KSA Ministry of Culture.
Chris Hay
Chris Hay is Professor of Drama at Flinders University in South Australia. He is an Australian theatre and cultural historian, whose work examines subsidised and mainstage theatre practice for what it reveals about national preoccupations and anxieties. His most recent book is Contemporary Australian Playwriting: Re-visioning the Nation on the Mainstage (2022), co-authored with Stephen Carleton. Chris is also a historian of training, and he has written chapters and articles on the evolution of a distinctively Australian training praxis. He also co-edited the special issue of TDPT on Performer Training in Australia (12.3, 2021).