Consciously building bridges: Team-teaching to merge and evolve actor training in voice and movement

Successful integration of acting, voice and movement has long been desired in theatre-arts training. Existing systems, however, often offer three distinct and separate areas of performance training – at least within US higher-education curricular contexts. But, this article proposes, in team-teaching, we gain an experience of living the integration, of challenging the ways we traditionally teach exercises and of finding new ways to rework concepts and exercises taught to us. Consciously creating bridges across areas of training enables students to grow by experiencing two perspectives in the same classroom. Integration is the aim of a new ‘Introduction to Voice and Movement’ course created and team-taught by the authors of this article, a voice professor and a movement professor. We sought not only to merge voice and movement training within our university theatre department, but to re-evaluate how we approach teaching voice and movement. The experience became more than simply integrating voice and movement into one class. The discovery of pedagogical alignment resulted in the merging of two personal pedagogies. This merging became integration as students carried the physio-vocal training into their lives and artistry beyond the classroom.