McLaughlin, James ORCID: 0000-0002-2146-6884 , Weston, Sarah, Turner, Jane and Condron, Aiden (2024) Special Issue: Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 15, Issue 2 (2024). Taylor and Francis Group - Routledge, Abingdon, UK.

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Abstract

This Special Issue is the output associated with a six-year research process that addressed the issue of agency in performance training in a thorough and comprehensive manner. It brought together a working group of international experts across different disciplines within this field resulting in the final peer-reviewed articles and accompanying back-pages of practitioner experience and artistic expression. It addressed questions around agency in performance training for the first significant time since the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter made this an urgent and pertinent topic for this field by highlighting structural inequalities that have gone unremarked upon within the discourse previously.

The process of convening several conference sessions and other forums, crafting the scope of the call for papers, and directing the targets of research to unify the submissions around the core concerns identified through the process contribute significantly to the substance of this research.

Agency is the concept through which we, the Guest editor team for TDPT Volume 15.2, wanted to explore the relationship between the structures of a training regime – a set of repeated and codified practices – and the individuality of the subject in training with their own thoughts, feelings and instincts. The aim of this Special Issue has been to investigate how training systems, institutions and individual practitioners find the balance between serving the discipline and rigour prescribed by training while retaining a sense of autonomy. This Issue emerges from conversations had by members of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Performer Training Working Group, which the editors of this issue – James, Jane and Sarah – previously convened. Aiden Condron was subsequently brought into our editorial team to co-ordinate the Training Grounds section of this issue. In our time with the TaPRA working group, several conference discussions between 2018 and 2022 touched on agency and related concepts, brought to the fore in our conference theme in 2021 ‘Training and Agency’, and continuing into our 2022 conference on training lineages. Agency continuously re-appeared in our research and in our practice, in our teaching, and in studio work. It permeated our performer training relationships: the relationship between teacher and student, or between practitioner and participant. Agency became a concept to help us understand the politics of the training room but also served as an unresolved provocation.

Working group events in 2019 and 2022 provided opportunities for productive discussion and debate concerning the politics of the training space. A keynote from Kaite O’Reilly echoed her work, The ‘d’ Monologues (Citation2018), observing that as performers, we all enter a space with our own particular flesh, bones and identity. As she reminded us, the body is never a neutral vessel. These events and annual conferences recorded our concerns that notions of agency, embodiment and training are resolutely political and agitational. Further questions that emerged asked:

How might training be complicit or resistant to the exercise of control?

What underlying power structures do performer training exercises enact?

Do the rules of an exercise suggest that training requires submission to authority?

How might training be involved in exercising one’s rights?

Informed by social movements such as Black Lives Matter (2013) and #MeToo (2017), the Q&A sessions and working group plenaries at the end of our annual conference schedule became notably more engaged with issues concerning individual agencies. The impact of Covid-19 provided a different but overlapping space where many scholars/practitioners were required to work differently. The impact of training alone, trying to preserve a regime, a discipline, without comrades, produced a challenge for some and for others a freedom. Freedom to practice and train in isolation afforded some space to reflect, take stock, refuse, do differently, become unruly; an opportunity to pursue different and more eclectic pathways in their training. While working without a leader, teacher, guru, master figure was for some liberating, for others not having such an outside eye – an Other – who served as a counterpoint, led to work that lacked rigour, technical precision and creative direction. As a collective we agreed that providing space to interrogate the concept of agency in more detail was timely and might be further appreciated by the wider performance community.

Item Type:	Other
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Theatre Dance Performance Training; agency; MeToo; power; inequality
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Stage and Screen
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2024 09:51
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/48083

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