{"title":"Touch in tableau: a powerful moment to break the wall","authors":"Lu Wang","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2189876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2189876","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47608377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affective topologies and virtual tactile experiences in theatre training","authors":"Adriana La Selva","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2187874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2187874","url":null,"abstract":"My experience as a performer is largely informed by my long-term connection with the Bridge of Winds group, led by Iben Nagel Rasmussen. As a practitioner-researcher however, I am engaged on a new journey, where my embodied knowledge is guiding the construction of a virtual archive for theatre practices. During this process, one of the main issues we are facing is that of renegotiating the sense of touch in virtual spaces. As the refined tactile feedback from my masters has taught me to reconnect with the present continuously; is it possible to create this sense of learning via interactive, virtually designed spaces? While aiming at building an immersive space which one can train in and with, what tactics can we imagine to evoke touch-like experiences of force, weight, pressure, connection and above all, care? Furthermore, can such spaces shift the boundaries of what we might understand as touch? These writings are informed by an experiment which translates Odin actress Roberta Carreri’s workshop Dance of Intentions into a virtual archive. Whilst critically approaching this textural translation process and raising the social-political implications of such translations, I will suggest ways in which designed immersive environments can renegotiate tactile experiences in theatre training.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43905367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Archiving the healing touch","authors":"N. Amin","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2189884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2189884","url":null,"abstract":"During my work as an actress in one-on-one performance, ‘Seek to Seek’ (2010), produced by Cantabile 2, and created by Nullo Facchini in Denmark, I created a scene that was repeated 240 times with 240 individual spectators. The central action of the scene was holding hands with the spectator. I consider this experience as a turning point in my craft as an actress and performance maker, a turning point based in training/developing my capacities for communication, expression and empathy via touch. The scene was written, choreographed and generally devised by me, and in collaboration with the director who is an expert of his own method in one-on-one performance. The scene was called ‘Empathy’. It was entirely based on autobiographical material, and basically using the re-enactment of the events of the last night that I spent with my husband a theatre director and professor of theatre studiesbefore he died in a fire at a theatre in the south of Egypt on 5 September 2005. The fire had killed 50 people, mainly artists and critics who were the audience of the theatre play ‘The Zoo’ (by Edward Albee). The event was traumatic, and produced a lasting and revolutionary grief within the theatre community in Egypt. Revisiting that event, re-enacting the actions of the night prior to the fire, triggered the trauma in me, even after five years of the actual happening. The training and process towards the creation of the scene included sessions of retrieving and reviving the sensorial memory of touch. This kind of memory was crucial to the scene as it sets not only the physical action to be executed with each single spectator, but also the emotional and sensorial field where the scene, ‘Empathy’, is supposed to take place. The work with touch, whether as a performative tool, a channel of communication, or as a source of knowledge for the actor, remains seldom visited. It is above all a place that is not welcomed in Egypt, as touch -especially between men and womenis a dangerous territory that might contradict with some morals and ethical beliefs. For me, also trained as a","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49025863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tactile renegotiations in actor training: what the pandemic taught us about touch","authors":"Christina Kapadocha","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2187872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2187872","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws from the practice-research project under the umbrella title ‘From Haptic Deprivation to Haptic Possibilities’. The project began as a response to the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK in March 2020 and the necessary transition to online interactions. As a practitioner-researcher who has been critically investigating tactile possibilities through somatically inspired methods within and outside actor training, I identified a ‘gap’ in how we could still embody relational potentialities of touch either working remotely or while practising physical distancing. Modified physical contact in my practice research originates in my work with actors in training and widens in online sessions and in-person workshops with non-actors. This article focuses on tactile renegotiations in actor training and critical observations regarding what touch can be, challenging universal and unified perceptions. Advancing two published TDPT blog posts on the project, the discussion directs attention to how necessary physical distantiation during the pandemic expanded the use of touch in my training practice and how these tactile renegotiations can be applied post-pandemically within and beyond actor training. Inspired by phenomenological and feminist theories of embodiment, touch is proposed as an ethical renegotiation between self and other that necessitates differentiation and distantiation in nearness.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41607908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unclean, ‘touching and training’ in puppetry from Japanese otome bunraku","authors":"Caroline Astell-Burt","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2183247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2183247","url":null,"abstract":"‘Training in touching’ aims to refine the knowledge and experience of ‘touching’ in its specific application to puppet-things in motion by those who move them. It opens up unusual concepts such as virtual touch in the spectator, therefore contributing to a practical and theoretical understanding of the lived experience of the ‘puppetry ensemble’, puppeteer-puppet-spectator. An acutely perceptive haptic sensibility distinguishes puppetry from all other forms of performance. Contrary to the idea that puppeteers only use their hands to animate, ‘touch’ is a whole-body sense exemplified in the strange, paradoxical, dance-like phenomenon of the beautiful and rare Japanese otome bunraku or ‘maiden’s puppet-theatre’. Any marginalisation of female artist antecedents of otome bunraku tainted by their three centuries in the pleasure districts of Edo, was superseded in 1925 by technical and theoretical inventiveness enabling one young girl to perform one heavy, fully articulated puppet: head, legs, arms, neck and back. It was similar in appearance to the famous and more familiar Japanese bunraku operated by not one but three men in, possibly, unhealthily close proximity to each other. Currently, dangers in health implicit in the touch and breath of COVID 19 might be averted by adopting a one puppet to one puppeteer style of performance.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45843734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In touch and between: a tactile toolkit for creative practitioners to navigate touch within their creative practice","authors":"Dina Robinson","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2191985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2191985","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Touch in performance and movement practice is not a new concept, although it tends to inhabit movement therapy, partnering techniques, alignment studies, and ethics. However, this article addresses the importance of touch in creative practice with reference to holistic embodied movement, sense of self, one’s agency and situatedness. Employing a somatic methodology and phenomenological lens, this article presents tactile practice as research carried out from 2019 to 2022 with master’s students and professionals delivered in the space and online as a lecture-workshop at People Dancing UK’s Perspectives on Practice. This overarching framework highlights methods of touch prior to the pandemic demonstrating how one perceives and responds to contact from another body whilst retaining authenticity; shifts in tactile engagement during the pandemic and how it aids solo practice; and opens up conversations on reintroducing touch post pandemic with possible cross-disciplinary practice. The research investigates/investigated tactile stimulations within passive, active and intra-active touch as a listening tool in the solo body and between bodies. Through various case studies, these are examined in relation to creative inquiry and artistic identity. The article aims to challenge power relations and conventional connotations around touch and practice as well as offer new tactile engagements within solo creative practice. It also proposes touch as a collaborative mesh for cohesion and keep us in touch through a practical tactile toolkit. This will resonate with somatic movement practitioners in particular, however its inclusive nature means specific approaches may resonate with practitioners in other creative disciplines.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42890722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ha Young Hwang, Tara McAllister-Viel, L. Mills, S. Reed
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Ha Young Hwang, Tara McAllister-Viel, L. Mills, S. Reed","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2215811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2215811","url":null,"abstract":"“Touch and Training” as a special issue for Theatre, Dance and Performance Training takes up the call to (re)consider performer training for a changing performance culture as a result of recent global happenings, specifically #MeToo, #blacklivesmatter, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Out of these three quite defined moments in history, there has emerged an intertwined and complex understanding of touch in performer training studios and rehearsals. The swift response in forming intimacy coordination organizations and the introduction of intimacy practice suggests that this awareness and need was long in the making and more than ready to emerge quite robustly. Decolonizing curriculum movements across the globe further questioned power relationships and ethical principles; asking who has equal access to artistic resources; critiquing the positioning of bodies of knowledge in relation to indigenous epistemologies and lived experiences. Covid-19 then usefully pushed this awareness and focus into a different space: restriction, deprivation and absence. It seems that a mould has been cracked, if not broken and is ready to be discarded. The departure point for this special issue is that touch is simultaneously relational and personal as well as a socio-cultural event, a political act between two people. What is taking place when touch happens within a network of power positions, layers of institutional practices, systems and infrastructure? Who touches, how does/should one touch, why and when can/should touch occur? How did/do these happenings influence and cross-fertilize each other? How have recent human conditions provided us with a fundamental (re)thinking about touch in its epistemological and experiential terms? These questions when raised within performance training traditions in theatre, dance, film or television ask creative artists to critically interrogate “traditional” understandings of touch as well as propose new, other ways of (re)negotiated touch during creative exchange. As an editorial team of four we locate in three different countries: the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa, and Great Britain and are situated in different performer training institutions and freelance experiences. This augments our understandings of global happenings and their nuanced impact into a larger conversation. Our Call, placed on different listservs and platforms internationally, garnered global contributions within disciplines as varied as puppetry, actor training, dance and movement practices, performance art, and virtual performance. We encouraged contributors to intentionally layer their impulses and responses, questions and practice as research and look across disciplines and cultural contexts. For this special issue, we have selected materials which can be read as singular contributions or read in relation to each other through our structured juxtapositions and groupings, and understood as a kind of meta-narrative on touch in training at this mom","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42922678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voice (as and in) touch","authors":"Electa Behrens","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2022.2161615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2022.2161615","url":null,"abstract":"What can touch, as operational metaphor and physical method, offer to voice work for an intersectional performer in an intercultural context? This analysis considers 3 voice practices I have researched within the frame of experimental deviser training with diverse student groups, grounded in my work at the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA). The exercises work with different touch interfaces; (1) Vocal Wrestling (touching each other), inspired by contact improvisation and Grotowski diaspora trainings, (2) Follow the bubbles (self-touch) derived from anatomical voice methods, and (3) The Voices in My Voices (touching our communities/cosmologies) inspired by decolonial and New Materialist (NM) thought. The work proposes touch as generative in the process of world making via voice. Strategies include: decentring the teacher, empowering student world building, polyvocality, brave spaces, vocal risk and queer use via hybrid experience. It puts forth principle-based and practical starting points for models of touch in training which ‘meet’ today’s climate of care and carefulness proactively and with lightness. Theoretically, this work is grounded in McAllister-Viel, Thomaidis, Oram, Eidsheim, Object Oriented Feminism, aurality studies, critical whiteness and decolonial theory.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45876637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"There is no such thing as an accident","authors":"T. Wilson","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2023.2182118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2023.2182118","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Access for autistic student-actors: interrogating the role of empathy within actor-training methods","authors":"Zoe Glen","doi":"10.1080/19443927.2022.2095428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2022.2095428","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I, as an autistic actor-trainer who was once an autistic student-actor, explore some of the access issues faced by autistic student-actors. I look at the practices commonly taught on actor-training programmes, and uncover what exclusionary ‘dominant narratives’ they hold, and why these create issues for autistic students. This paper focuses specifically on the example of empathy, asking how it is used within the practices of Stanislavski and Meisner, among others. This research moves away from the deficit model of autism. Instead, I look to autistic experience – my own and that of others – to investigate what acknowledging, welcoming, and maximising upon these experiences can contribute to these actor-training practices. The result is an example adaptation, where I reframe actor-training exercises to be more accessible for autistic students and consider what benefits these changes might have for all actors within the space. This paper is timely as it follows on from other research into training actors with dyslexia and dyspraxia, and moves to address the absence of writing on training autistic actors. By positioning itself within the neurodiversity paradigm it questions what contributions autistic experience could make to the field of actor-training, if disabling barriers were removed.","PeriodicalId":42843,"journal":{"name":"Theatre Dance and Performance Training","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47862252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}