Jonathan Pitches

Science and the Stanislavsky tradition of acting

Introduction: Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting Part 1. 1. A System for the World? Newtonianism in Stanislavskys Science of Acting Part 2. 2. The Theatricality Reflex: The Place of Pavlov and Taylor in Meyerholds Biomechanics 3. The System, Psychology and the US: Richard Boleslavsky and Lee Strasberg Part 3. 4. A Delicate Empiricism: Romantic Science and the Michael Chekhov Technique 5. The Laboratory as Sanctuary: The Theatre of Anatoly Vasiliev Epilogue: Genetic Modification and the Backbone of Tradition Bibliography. Index

Digital reflection: using digital technologies to enhance and embed creative processes

This paper shares the findings of a teaching and learning project (Digitalis) that investigated ways in which digital technologies can be used by teaching staff to facilitate reflection on creative practices within performing and creative arts disciplines. Two types of reflection are considered: (i) reflection on creative practice and (ii) creative forms of reflection, with five case studies from a range of arts subjects representing a spectrum of reflective activity. Drawing on a model of cooperative enquiry, simple technological enhancements were made to the design of five existing modules, and these were evaluated through student focus groups, observation of student work, and reflective interviews with the module leaders. Through a thematic analysis of the data, the paper shares the learning from these modules, along with a suggested model of digital reflection, outlining the place of capture, documentation and organisation technologies in the reflective process. The paper concludes that there are benefits to be gained from digital reflection, given its facility to aid students to ‘look again’ at their own ephemeral creative processes.

Editorial Issue 2.2

This issue marks the end of year two for Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) and signals both a sense of pleasure with what has been achieved by our authors, editorial and production colleagues since our launch in the spring of 2009, and an awareness of aspirations and tasks still fully to be realized. From now we move to three annual issues, the second of which will always have a specialist focus or inflection. To mark London’s hosting of the Olympic Games and following a very successful call for contributions to the Sport and Performance Training issue of 2012, guest editor, Mark Evans, has selected a provocative and stimulating collection of propositions whose writers are currently working to an autumn deadline. These writings span various continents and engage with tantalisingly diverse subjects from Parkour, boxing and football (the ‘beautiful game’) through to the welfare of child athletes and ballet dancers, performance art and extreme sports and the interdisciplinary nature of Olympic effort. In 2013 our specialist issue will be titled Michael Chekhov in the C21st – New Perspectives, New Sources, New Contexts and will be jointly produced by guest editors, Franc Chamberlain and Andrey Kirillov. We welcome ideas and suggestions for future specialist issues and to embark on such a conversation please contact the TDPT editors, Simon Murray and Jonathan Pitches. In our last editorial we noted with considerable alarm a developing climate of hostility from Britain’s coalition Government towards research and pedagogies within the Arts and Humanities. Since then little has happened to make us feel less concerned about such policies and their financial and cultural impact on the provision of theatre, dance and performance training. Of course, these threats are not peculiar to the UK, but represent a complex series of shifts in dominant political thinking about the purpose and nature of higher education, the role of arts practice within it, how it should be funded and for whom it should be made available. It might seem that a journal whose preoccupation with an activity called ‘training’ should feel comfortably at ease in these instrumental and market driven times, but this would be fundamentally to misunderstand how TDPT imagines the practices of training and indeed how training is multiply practiced across the world. As every piece of writing we have so far carried in TDPT suggests, ‘training’ to make and practice art is never singularly about the acquisition of skill or technique. No matter what the professed and grand lineage of any particular training regime, or experience, it is always – cannot help but be – an imaginative, fluid and open-ended series of negotiations around processes and outcomes whose parameters are never fully known, always, in part at least, to be re-invented and discovered afresh. At the centre of these political and economic pressures lies the remorseless drive for enhanced productivity and it is this dynamic which poses the greatest threat to the quality of training experiences within theatre, dance and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Vol. 2(2), 2011, 135–137

Tracing/training rebellion - object work in Meyerhold's biomechanics

[First paragraph] Lying in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts in Moscow (RGALI) is a nine-page document entitled Programme of Biomechanics, Meyerhold Workshop (1922). Though modest in size, it is an unashamedly ambitious programme, which sought to redefine acting in a post-revolutionary context and to place performer training in Russia on a par with science. ‘The task of the biomechanical laboratory is to work out through experimentation a biomechanical system of acting and of actor’s training’ (Hoover 1974: 314), the document claims, setting out a dedicated model of Practice as Research, seventy years before the term became common place in the UK.

Towards a Platonic paradigm of performer training: Michael Chekhov and Anatoly Vasiliev

To judge by what is happening in Russia [. . .] art will go to the aristocracy, will become more philosophical; it will become estranged from the people, will produce images which don’t aim at establishing contacts. In other words, new ideas and thoughts will be formed and a new aesthetic situation created. And I think that Russia will be the starting point of this process because there is a strong renaissance of the past.

Deep and Dark Play in the Alps: Daring Acts and Their Retelling

In accounts of the many cultural representations of mountains, the disciplines of theatre and performance are almost always left off the list. One overt example of shared terminology is the phenomenon of ‘deep’ or ‘dark play’. This chapter will examine these misunderstandings, prioritizing a reading of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s influential essay ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (Daedalus 10:1–37, 1972) and focusing on aspects of emotional intensity, of constructions of masculinity and of theatrical liveness. Once brought together with Richard Schechner’s notion of performative retelling, this section will be followed by a critical analysis of three cases of ‘moving mountain’ from the Alps—Mont Blanc, the Eiger, the Matterhorn—and a different technology: dioramas, telescopes and headcams.

Training and … the wild(erness)

Once a technology for survival or for more extreme forms of outdoor exploration, head torches now have a dual function: night navigation and crepuscular performance. Eight hundred people gather on a Cumbrian fellside to recreate the prayer flags so commonly seen in the Himalayas. Blue, white, red, green and yellow, they hold acetate in front of their headgear, spreading up the mountain path. What is this training for? Is it the pedestrian strain of Polish night running? A spatial ensemble game on a massive scale? More an exercise in compassion, spreading good will from the top of Barrow, Outerside and Stile End, across the UK, Europe and all the way to Nepal. Goodness knows we need it. Photo courtesy of Carmen Norman of Carmen Norman Photography. A donation has been made to the Nepalese Earthquake disaster fund. Anyone wishing to do the same can do so via the Charity Phase Worldwide: https:// phaseworldwide.orghttps://phaseworldwide. org Jonathan Pitches is founding co-editor of TDPT and an AHRC fellow researching performing mountains.

The end of the hour-glass: Alternative conceptions of intercultural exchange between European and chinese operatic forms

ABSTRACT This article discusses the findings of a large EU-supported cultural collaboration project with an experimental intercultural performance laboratory between Europe and China at its heart. It draws on interviews with artists from Shanghai and the United Kingdom, performance documentation and process observations to propose an artist-centred and individualized conception of intercultural exchange, with specific reference to the traditions of Chinese indigenous song-dance theatre and European opera. Conceived as a series of layers, the article argues for greater recognition of the necessary intracultural core to projects such as this and proceeds to examine the methodological challenges faced by artists with diverse and sometimes opposing training. In doing so it offers a further critique of Paviss hourglass model of intercultural exchange, placing this in a wider theoretical context, and concluding with some reflections and considerations for future exchange projects rooted in creative practice.

Spinal Snaps Tracing a back-story of European actor training

Cervix (C1–C7), thorax (T1–T12), lumbar (L1–L5), sacrum (S1–S5) and coccyx (Co1–4): the spine is the ‘power centre of the body’, one ‘long limb’ connecting head to pelvis (Tufnell and Crickmay 1993: 9–10). As you descend the vertebral column the spine becomes thicker and weightier, before it (literally) tails off and loses fl exibility; the fi nal two sections comprise fused vertebrae located deep in the centre of the body. Each of these fi ve spinal segments has a character and function of its own, evoked in no small way by their Greek and Latin names and on whose etymology I will draw freely to justify my range of perspectives here. The aim in this essay is to use varying understandings of the spine to help examine specifi c examples of European and Russian performer training. But to do this it is necessary to place these understandings in associative collision with other sources: ones that draw on the domestic, the documentary and the dramaturgical. What follows is a set of contrasting registers and responses to the spine in performance: snapshots, drawing structurally on the physiology of the spine itself. Given that one of the many connotations of the spine that needs questioning from a training perspective is its neat linearity, this is not a strictly predictable journey. Instead the questions of training raised here are arranged rather as an archeologist might come across a set of bones in the dirt – in fragments, which may or may not be assembled into a meaningful whole. It is a speculative attempt to ‘give voice’ to the spine. i n t r o d u c t i o n : c 1 – 7 :

A Review of From Stanislavsky to Gorbachev: The Theater‐Studios of Leningrad by Douglas Graham Stenberg

A Review of From Stanislavsky to Gorbachev: The Theater‐Studios of Leningrad by Douglas Graham Stenberg. Peter Lang, 1995, 248pp, ISBN: 0–8204–2285–1 (hardback)