WHAT TRAINING – FOR WHAT THEATRE?

(New Theatre Quarterly, Volume XI. Number 42. May 1995)

In former times training for the theatre was a pragmatic process, learned on the job. Actors have
always been deeply concerned with their craft, the learning of skills, and have written often very
learned treatises on the philosophy behind their work. Though acting was never easy, there was little
confusion about how one became an actor: you joined a company or you attached yourself to an
experienced actor, and you learned by watching, by hands-on tuition - or from the advice Sarah
Siddons gave to a young actor: 'Always study your roles'. The main preparatory work of the actor was
to amass configuration of roles, learned by heart appropriate to his or her character type and standing
in the profession. A place in provincial theatre or touring company was sought, and the roles were
polished and increased.

In this way, theatre flourished for many centuries without academies - although we might describe as
a proto-academy the large number of theatrical families who handed on the secrets of their craft from
generation to generation, and jealously guarded them. Children picked up the elements of the craft by
osmosis, although there were also hard training classes throughout their childhood, until acting
became second nature. The strength of the families was strong and persisted, so that the Kembles, in
dire financial trouble in 1829, could call upon one of their number, who at the age of twenty had never
appeared on any stage, and cast her as Juliet at Covent Garden. Inbred ability saved the day and
launched the career of Fanny Kemble. Other theatrical trades were left to take care of themselves.
Painters moved over to become scene-painters, taking on apprentices. Managers learned their trade
in business and then applied it to the theatre.

This notion of 'learning the business' is based on a very clear concept of theatre as evolving through
time at a pace that each individual can recognize and assimilate. Kemble may differ from Garrick,
Kean may differ from Kemble, and Macready may differ from them all - but the choice was not
between entirely differing concepts of how the actor worked but between differing styles and
approaches. Charles Kean was a different actor to his father Edmund in the choices he made, but he
did not invent a completely new approach to performance.

By and large we can trace a developing line through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries right
down to Irving, who refined the work of his predecessors. After this the line becomes hazier and
harder to trace - a fact illustrated by the founding of academies, and by Olivier's remark that in the
'twenties he and his generation had no models to follow. Though allowing Du Maurier a certain style,
Olivier claimed that his generation had to invent their own models from scratch (a pragmatism
perhaps also borne out by Noel Coward's advice to the young actor: 'Learn your lines, don't trip over
the furniture, and don't stand in front of the star').

One further point needs to be made here. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries strands of
the theatre were kept apart, although there were many actors who could function in dramatic theatre
who could also dance, tumble, and clown. The refinement and reduction of theatre style at the end of
the last century left some areas of performance skills redundant and made the compartmentalizing of
theatre more rigid. It was considered unreasonable in the 1950s to ask an actor to sing or dance, and
those who tried usually did it very badly.

The Experimenters and the Pupils

The world changed, the theatre changed. And from the time that Stanislavsky, beginning his
monumental work of investigation into the actor's craft, wondered why musicians practised every day
while actors sat in cafes and gossiped - while Craig was considering a theatre which would be better
off without the actors - theatre artists had begun to devise new training programmes specific to the
theoretical position or vision of theatre the masters held. The years between 1890 and 1930 were full
of a rich range of experimentation which not only questioned (and often rejected) what had gone
before, But also tested the basic assumptions about performance and the nature of the actor's craft.
Scant attention was paid to most of this work in England until the 1950s, with the exception of the
work of Michel Saint-Denis through the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic School.
The people who most influenced my own generation included Craig, Appia, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold,
Vakhtangov, Reinhardt, Piscator, Brecht, and their pupils, Barrault, Saint-Denis, Vilar, Strehler, and
(for me) Joan Littlewood. It has been their teaching and practice which formed the basis of any of our
ideas about theatre, and about our own pedagogy.

In the 1950s, it was still relatively easy to comprehend such a range of approaches to theatre training.
During that and the next decade the texts of Stanislavsky, Artaud, Brecht, and Laban became
available and began to penetrate the teaching of the established drama schools, while the opening of
the Drama Department in Bristol University in 1947 added a new pathway into the theatre, going
beyond the narrow concerns of the acting school. But this was also the age of the autodidact. We
studied the masters, absorbed their ideas, and constructed our own programmes. When more texts
became available, and new ideas emerged from Grotowski, Barba, Brook, and others, we were well
placed to understand their work and to fit it into our pattern of theatre. Encore, the little magazine of
the late 'fifties and early 'sixties, deserves a lot of credit for both promoting new ideas and for
providing a forum for debate.

But the pace continued to accelerate, and those who had learned from those who had learned now
faced challenges to create their own concepts of theatre pedagogy. The world was getting smaller,
and we Europeans also became aware of the scale of experimentation in the United States: then both
Europe and America discovered, or rediscovered, the rest of the world and the richness of other
theatres, and we began to absorb these influences into our work. The extension of university drama
departments encouraged, even demanded, the existence of all-round academics able to teach across
different areas of the syllabus and, coincidentally, able to make connections between the different
areas of theatre study.

We may have thought we had hard lives, that we had to struggle for what we achieved in the post-war
world, but in fact we were lucky. We were the privileged generations, enjoying such opportunities to
know where we stood on the world map. Young people entering the theatre today are faced with a
bewildering profusion of possible choices: they stand seemingly at the place where entrances to many
labyrinths meet. Which path to follow towards fame, fortune, or artistic maturity and satisfaction is
practically impossible to decide.

A Confusion of Choices

There are several factors which contributed to creating this confusion of choice. The teacher-to-pupil
chain had begun to produce a range of methodologies within the same area of theatre pedagogy - the
movement work of Laban being a significant example of this. The appetite and impetus of the auto-
didact began to produce teachers who combined aspects of the work of a number of masters, creating
a new methodology and practice. Experts appeared who developed methods for training actors which
concentrated on specific aspects of theatrical skills much more precisely than Meyerhold, Copeau,
and others ever could - such specialization often being achieved at the expense of a total, integrated
view of the theatre.

Some techniques derive from the theatre and are applicable to theatre training - if you possess the
contextual knowledge to make the links. One can become a Feldenkrais teacher or an Alexander
teacher without any connection or reference to theatre whatsoever. One can even become an expert
in eurythmics without ever having heard of the theatrical work of Appia and Jacques-Dalcroze. There
is also the importation into a western theatre training of Tai-Chi, Shiatsu, Yoga, Aikido, and other
physical training disciplines. And then there are the forms of drama therapy, relaxation, radiance
technique, bio-art, games theory, contact improvisation, theatre anthropology.

The list goes on. Never has there been so much enquiry, investigation, formulation, a and theorizing
about theatre art. Each of these areas is producing its own literature, together with a literature
providing commentary, interpretation, and methodologies extending the range of existing materials. At
the start of the 'sixties there were very few prescriptive manuals. It may not have been easy working
your way through Laban's Mastery of Movement for the Stage, but at least you knew what philosophy
and range of ideas you were dealing with. Aside from Stanislavsky, Laban, Viola Spolin, and some
voice manuals, there were few others to come to terms with, or turn to for guidance.
Then short pieces began to pour out of the Tulane Drama Review, giving briefer insights into other
methods - and now the range of available books is enormous. The current Gazelle Book Services
catalogue thus contains 25 books on teaching acting, and I have heard of none of them. One of them,
called Megapproaches, costs £26.50. Should I buy it, or not? What are megapproaches? Should I tell
my students, 'You should try megapproaches'? A few years ago I set about bringing that section of my
library up-to-date, which netted for me, at great expense, several very important books - and a lot that
weren't. (Gone are the happy days of lavish library funding when you could try them out in the library
first.) When I wrote Theatre Games, it was in an attempt to set down a possible theoretical and
scientific explanation of what was, then, a largely pragmatic use of games and improvisation in theatre
training. Keith Johnstone and Albert Hunt made their own important contributions to this search for
some stability in the hit-and-miss area of actor training.

The shelves now are loaded with theoretical works, practical manuals, differing approaches to an
almost infinite range of aspects of theatre training. Some are works of great insight and brilliant
innovation. Some are untutored junk. All are expensive. How to separate the grain from the chaff?
Heaven help the would-be auto-didact in the theatre world of today. Someone clearly has to make the
choice for you, and the last forty years have seen a proliferation of institutional and other means of
training which do just this. All you have to do is guess which door to go through: but this is far from
easy - and it is clear that many people make their choice in pure ignorance and trust to luck. Any
incomplete listing of institutions or pathways through which training may be pursued would include the
acting school or conservatoire; the university; training in a company; some form of apprenticeship;
workshops; and self-direction or autodidacticism. But these choices are reduced because we cannot
realistically divorce theatre training from questions of finance, whether in the area of how the
institutions are financed or how the student finds the money to pay the fees.

The Training Pathways Cross

Not so very long ago there was a clear understanding as to the structure and function of the various
institutions. Drama schools trained actors for the professional theatre. The universities and former
polytechnics provided an academic education in drama and theatre of a non-vocational kind. In the
case of the drama schools the mark of achievement was a self-validated diploma.

In the academies the mark of achievement was the award of a degree. Already, some drama schools
did include or encourage the study of world drama or other academic aspects of theatre training, while
universities included and fostered the practical examination of the processes of creating theatre
through classes or full production work. Certain hazy areas began to appear even as early as the
sixties. The former polytechnics and colleges of higher education established heavily practical
courses, supposedly justified by the assumption that they were taking less intellectually gifted
students. Expected to follow the university line of using practical work to investigate how theatre was
created, they began to attract people more interested in gaining experience of creating theatre and
learning the skills. In any case, the concept of what theatre could and should be began to change
radically through the mid- to late-'sixties, and a less technical and less demanding concept of the
actor's work followed. It should be remembered that the alternative theatre movement in Britain from
1966 to 1980 owed a great deal to the enthusiasm, energy, and ideas of the graduates of
polytechnics, colleges of higher education, and colleges of art. It was a field marked by a high level of
vitality and bold experimentation - and by a marked failure to sustain itself.

The development of the actor/teacher from the mid 'sixties onwards further blurred the lines as to
what form of training actors should be given when they worked in educational theatre in schools. The
function of colleges of education, which should notionally have been to train teachers of drama to
work in schools, began to expand to include more and more performance aspects. The best of these
colleges maintained high standards of integrity, but in the weakest it was often difficult to discern what
the educational justification of the work was against a seemingly self-indulgent process of turning out
inadequately (and often self-deluded) actors and dancers bound for the professional stage.

From the other side, some drama schools began to expand their activities beyond the field of training
actors for the professional theatre to establish courses, ironically, in educational drama and theatre,
and also in various forms of the therapeutic application of these skills. Everywhere proliferation,
nowhere integration.

Among the causes of this rapid and profuse growth of institutions of all kinds were powerful
arguments that theatre should be placed firmly within the field of education, which served the cause of
the lobby for increased subsidy for professional theatre and the lobby for the reform of education in its
concern for a more interactive and creative process designed to educate through self-realization and
development rather than the direct transmission of information.

Secondly, the proliferation of institutions and courses was caused by more and more people wanting
some form of education or training in theatre. The theatre in Britain somehow presents itself as an
alternative way of life, separate from the pressures of the rat race and free from the interference of
hierarchical structures of direction and authority but it is still an alarming phenomenon that so many
present themselves for education and training who cannot be accommodated within the limited
opportunities for employment, and so are fated never to use the specific subject of their education -
while it could also be questioned whether many do not get lost in the educational process, looking in
the wrong places for the satisfying of inarticulate needs. It is now over twenty years since I first
advocated a pre-formative year for all students in drama and theatre, acting and academic, and the
need is as strong as ever.

Vocational or Academic?

Recent events - principally the effects of the economic recession - have done nothing at all to
elucidate the situation. The restriction, if not near eradication, of discretionary grants, which are all
that drama school students are entitled to apply for, is driving more and more to seek the safety of
mandatorily financed places at universities, old and new, and colleges of higher education, to the point
where these latter are now swamped by masses of students almost all expecting a very high level of
practical classes and a heavy production programme.

Drama schools, alarmed by the drop in fees coming in, have tended to proliferate courses in all areas
of theatre training, directing, designing, and technical theatre, then in desperation seeking validation
by a university (on the demise of the CNAA) in order to qualify their students for a degree programme
and so to access to the mandatory grant system.

And the existing processes by which drama schools were controlled is breaking down. Her Majesty's
Inspectorate is being disbanded, and if E15, a non-accredited school, can receive validation from the
University of East London, the accreditation process (devised and carried out by the National Council
for Drama Training, largely set up to advise local authorities as to where they might reasonably give
the fast-disappearing discretionary grants) has clearly become redundant.

The granting of degree status to drama school courses will have consequences which cannot be
foreseen at this stage. For example, the fees for drama schools are much higher than those for
universities or colleges, so that even the acting student in receipt of a mandatory grant is going to
have to raise a considerable amount of money. One logical if reductive way of looking at where to go
might be to view the degree as the result of two widely differing equations: you pay so much and what
you get is a BA; you pay so much more and what you get is - a BA.

Those of us working in universities know the all-too-common confusion of the gaining of a degree with
educational richness. The result of such thinking will send many would-be actors in search of the
cheapest, most practically-oriented course, usually in a college of higher education - the staff of
which, already under heavy pressure to take in more and more students, will then be under no less
pressure to make their courses more professionally vocational. The granting of degree status to an
acting course which includes no academic elements raises the whole question of what a degree
course is, and might make it more and more possible for universities and colleges, under pressure to
raise intake numbers, to resort to structuring courses geared towards students who are seeking
professional vocational training, without having adequate resources to teach them.

The irony is that several of us advocated the merging of university drama departments and acting
schools many years ago, in the interests of training actors who were not vocationally blinkered and
drama students who could see how and where their academic studies achieved creative realization.
My feeling is that we have now embarked on a rapid and comprehensive process of change where
educational decisions are being taken for economic reasons.

Below the already established institutions and courses there is a great morass, some of which
surfaces each week in the advertisement pages of The Stage. Those drama schools which have not
tried or managed to gain validation from a university are in dire financial trouble. Training in theatre,
particularly in the acting field, is labour-intensive and expensive. You can lecture to, say, 200 students
of mathematics, but you cannot responsibly run a teaching class for actors with many over twenty.

The twin solutions to these problems are (a) to increase the fees, which excludes the talented to
privilege the wealthy, or (b) to increase the number of students, which dilutes the power of the
education. Neither course seems feasible when government figures give out that 75 per cent of all
drama students and 100 per cent of all dance students failed to get discretionary grants, making
increased numbers a non-option. The prospect of an acting school for the children of those above a
certain income does not seem to be a serious proposition either. So the unvalidated schools are likely
to find themselves in real trouble - short of students and finance, while competing in the same market
with degree courses.

Problems of 'Pre-Training'

What is offered through The Stage is a whole set of new ways of training for the profession in a
variety of institutions or schools. You can train in the evening or at weekends. You can train for a lot
less than the fees demanded for established courses. Now which of these schools is responsible and
which fly-by-night is anybody's guess, since there is no register (or registration), and seemingly no
supervision or licence from
any educational authority.

I obviously cannot name names, but one attempt at some sort of survey ran across a school which did
not answer any letter sent to it, and for which no-one answered the telephone. I wrote to two
institutions advertising, asking two questions. Both courses purported to offer training which would 'fit'
the student for entry to a university or drama school. So I first asked whether the diploma awarded at
the end was self-validated or whether it had the authority of some outside educational institution. My
second question concerned the standing of the diploma in relation to university entrance
requirements.

The first institution did not answer any communication. The second rang me up almost
instantaneously and promised that as one of their 'people' was to be in my part of the world, he would
bring full documentation with him. A second phone call, many weeks later, informed me he was 'on his
way'. Since the material never arrived I presume he got lost somewhere in Cheshire or Stafford.

B-Tech courses are causing all kinds of problems. Formulated as a pre-training course to replace A-
levels for those students considering university or drama school entry, their status for university
entrance requirements has never been established with any consistency. There is a clear gap
between what the B-Tech council put out, what the student might be led to belief and whatever value
university admissions officers place on the qualification. In these hard economic times, it is clearly
seen by some students not as pre-entry training for drama school but as an alternative to drama
school. In some advertisements, institutions seem to walk a tightrope between implying this and
stating it.

All this may soon be largely irrelevant since B-Tech will shortly be replaced by a entirely new and
different qualification, GNVQ/DVE. Having spent three years getting the B-Tech working effectively,
staff are now becoming demoralized by the instruction to devise an entirely different format.

This confused melee is obscuring important educational questions about the function of schools and
the function of universities. Is the training of actors, as given in acting schools, appropriate to the
theatre which is likely to emerge in the future, or does it simply perpetuate the traditional style of the
theatre of the past, still with us in its desiccated state?
The level of tuition in drama schools is, my estimation, of a very high standard, and there has been a
steady raising of levels, spite of economic stringencies, over the last twenty years. The range of skills
taught to high standard in a wide range of performance activities is impressive, and the act of today is
infinitely better equipped to create a theatre of dance, song, and drama than his and her
predecessors. So it is not that the schools are turning out actors solely equipped to work in an
outdated theatre: they are training actors for a totally different theatre, whilst leaving them somehow
fixated on the outdated kind.

Making the Conceptual Leap

Those I have talked to recently seem never to have made the conceptual leap, which many university
and college students make with ease (if lacking the expertise to follow it through), that there is life
outside the National Theatre and the Birmingham Rep. that the most vital and innovative areas of
theatrical work are outside the established theatres. Untrained in how to create their own structures
for survival whilst still working to their full creative capacity, they make a few small attempts at fringe
production in pubs, often in the style of cut-down versions of established companies, then disappear -
new skills chasing old ends, fine talent and valuable investment in training thrown on the scrap-heap.

In the week in which I write this, I have sat in on an animal class in which there was fine, imaginative
work performed using animals as a basis for extended characterization. I enjoyed the work - but when
and where will I see it in a theatre, except as a subdued (and repressed) eccentric touch in a
performance in the style of 'polite naturalism' which dominates our main stages? One aspect of a
theatre which is dominated by directors has been that even when the production moves into some
form of stylization, the stage is peopled by actors who seemingly carry out the director's instructions to
the letter, and whose faces you cannot remember fifteen minutes after the performance ends. High
skill, no personality.

Can universities include in their teaching any level of training and performance skills, taking into
account the conditions and restrictions under which we work? Yet, given the complexity and variety of
theatre forms in existence today, can we teach about areas of theatre which are advancing - or at
least represent the most advanced level of the avant-garde - without recourse to practical work?

If it is important (and I think it is) that we disabuse our students of the old cliche that London, New
York, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow are still the great centres of theatre, and that we should acquaint
them with the innovatory work that is being carried out, cross-genre and cross-culture, in small
companies in often out-of-the-way places, with theatre which is trying to find new solutions to the
social problems which the now-discredited 'political theatre' was meant to solve - how can we make
this real? If it is important that we introduce our students to the work of Gardzienice, Odin Teatret, and
the new experimental work of Grotowski, can we do this without acquainting them with the training
and practice on which these theatres base their performance?

Old considerations of the interaction between scholarship and professional practice should be raised
again in the context of the new forms of relationship between universities and drama schools, to see if
some form of melding is not possible which goes beyond the overseeing of examination procedures. It
will not be easy and it will take a long time, but it will in the end be to the benefit of both institutions
and their students, and help to remedy the demoralization which seems to be creeping into the
practical teaching areas of university departments.

Probably the best way for anyone interested in theatre training is to join with one of those companies
committed to working in a particular style, with its own clear aesthetic. In that way a rigorous attitude
to work is taught and the actor learns directly from people who can achieve at the highest level what
they teach. But the strongest of these companies were formed in the great period of experimental
theatre, by people who worked in the earlier experimental companies. On this basis they have
constructed their own training programmes, which have evolved over a long period by trial and error.
It is not easy to join companies such as Gardzienice, Odin, or Teatro Nucleo, and whoever does has
still not gone through the process of evolution. They do not possess the history. And those who train
this way will find their training hard to apply if they join another company or attempt to enter the
established theatre. How are those who start new companies going to find the theoretical and
methodological basis for their work?
New Kinds of Participation

Leaving aside some restrictive but extremely important ways, such as participation in Grotowski's
work in Pontedera, what is left outside the methods I have looked at is a self-directed programme of
education in theatre which takes advantage of some of the workshop opportunities given by
international masters along the way. This process of networking would allow for access to training
workshops at a variety of centres. More and more performers and theatre artists give on their CVs not
what schools they trained in but with whom they have participated in workshops: you are more likely
to find this on the Continent and other parts of the world than in Britain, but it is becoming an ever
more important feature of theatre training here.

The International Festival of Workshop Theatre now mounts, every two years, a festival of master-
classes open to anyone who wishes to participate. In between the festivals, the organization holds
individual events. These festivals can make masterclasses available at very low fees, but cannot yet
make them free. Maybe, then, it is more economic to invest what money you have in a series of
workshops rather than take pot-luck with a school or university?

To do that, or to make it worthwhile, the aspirant theatre artist would need to have done homework
into the European theatre as well as the British to know with whom to work, and would still need a
regular supply of money to acquire an introduction to the comprehensive range of skills this method
would facilitate. The financial constraints serve to select. Fees would have to be made relatively high
to balance the budget. To some extent the ideal equation, which would see masters working with
young actors well-placed to take in the training opportunities that they have to offer, does not
materialize, and, once again, the master is then left working with people who can afford the fees, and
not those would could take most advantage of the training.

How can we (a) help the aspiring theatre artist find the institution or way in which he or she would be
happiest, and (b) give people, in and out of the institutions, the basis on which to construct their own
programme of self-development? I ask this with a disturbing feeling that in general people are not
finding their own way to fulfilment and that standards in performance are not as high as they should
be. And I am certain from my association with drama schools that there is an enormous wastage of
talent, time, and money.

Of course I am generalizing. There is some excellent theatre around with very high standards, and
there is clearly much more that I have not seen. But you have to look very carefully for this theatre or
to know where it is. I am appalled by the low standards of skill and professionalism in the two national
theatres and the regional reps, where the standard of work does not reflect the talent and ability I see
in third-year acting students. I see many groups where technique does not match intention. I see
many experimental groups who appear to feel that no technique is necessary. This may be well
enough, if what they are constructing is a programme of political theatre where intention takes over
from aesthetics: but I doubt it, for bad theatre makes bad politics. It cannot, in any case, be of any use
at all in a company which has aesthetic ambitions. I have a feeling that the avant-garde is simply
repeating the past or, in the words of Albert Hunt, reinventing the same mistakes.

I think these are important issues which face, or ought to face, anyone in theatre education today. At
this level they are clearly beyond our powers to solve: we can only get to grips with them, and we
must be careful not to give priority to tackling such problems at the expense of our own self-
development - it will not help if we feel guilt or shame because we have had the privilege (and hard
work) of participating in a period of exciting developments in theatre. But neither can we sit back and
pretend that we are in the right, and that present developments do not concern us.

Nothing is more debilitating than continually returning to the beginnings and not proceeding far along
the road with new groups of students. We have a responsibility to continue our own development. It is
not for us to teach, it is for us to make accessible that others may learn. And that responsibility is
theirs. In this sense pure research has a function, and we should not worry unduly about aspects of its
immediate applicability. The work of the International School of Theatre Anthropology is important for
those of us who participate in its programmes. For most of the time we are expected to supply
answers to questions and to be sources of specialist information - to create circumstances in which
theatre can happen and learning take place. In ISTA, for a brief period, we are allowed the privilege of
being a student, a non-knower, of questioning our understanding, and we enjoy the release of enquiry
for its own sake.

But research has in some ways to be related to the needs of the talented, eager aspirant, and the
1992 ISTA session in Brecon and Cardiff showed quite clearly that, without all the contextual
knowledge, which we have accumulated over the years, the aspirant participant is in a poor position to
under- stand or fully to take part in this enquiry.

Mapping the Past, Planning the Future

We have lived through a historical period rich in theatrical experimentation, and the prime requirement
for opening up this world to others is to be able to construct for them maps of previous explorations
which have created the background and patterns of today's advanced research. In this I am not
asking for simplification but purification. I will outline some secondary questions which might profitably
provide the basis for future discussion and action:

1. How can we best acquaint the student with the context within which to start work? It was Craig's
opinion that many of the new impulses in theatre died away quickly because the people taking part did
not understand the history or the context in which they were working. Italian colleagues in the Teatro e
Storia group are undertaking a revaluation of many aspects of twentieth-century theatre history, and a
collaboration could supplement our own revaluation. We, in our way, had to learn from Craig,
Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Copeau, and others.

How can we make this alive and useful? How can we extract the historically essential from the purely
temporal features of their work, given the passage of time and the experience and knowledge we
have gained? For example, if today we were to reconstruct Copeau's programme for training the
theatre artist, what would we include in it and how would we go about it?

And, since we have grown up with many of the theatre journals that exist today, it is easy for us to
forget what an important part they played in our own education. I can recall specific issues of what
was then the Tulane Drama Review (TDR) - on naturalism, on Brecht, on Stanislavsky - which were
key influences in advancing my understanding of theatre. Journals now are edited and in the hands of
people of the older generation, and it is easy for us, in our editing, in our writing and publishing, to
pursue our interests in esoteric aspects of theatre theory and practice and to forget that the early,
basic stages which support this enquiry have been missed by younger colleagues. We need to look at
the content of our publications, but we need also to enquire into ways in which younger generations
can create their own periodicals and journals which will not only set out essential historical material
but also face the questions of today in terms which are relevant to the people who will create the
theatre of tomorrow.

2. Given the multiplicity of methods of training and concepts of theatre, can we work to discover a
basic common core? Can we start from certain basic choices? The voice useful against the voice
beautiful? Free-flow dance movement against rigid systems? The principle that action must be
released before it can be controlled? Anarchy preceding order and discipline? Are there basic spatial
skills, the orientation of the body in space, which must be learned regardless of what direction the
actor will follow at a higher level?

At the heart of such questions lie the basic skills of kinesthetic co-ordination, which the performer
must have developed before going on to advanced work. How do we use our experience and
understanding to clarify and teach these skills? Can we reduce the length of traditional training
programmes though a more precise focus?

Learning How to Learn

When I see students who have left the university and become professional actors, their work seems
thin compared with those actors who have gone through a good drama school training. Watching
actors in third theatre, experimental, and independent companies, I find a similar lack of depth - not
only physically and vocally, but in the connections between the various functions of the mind and
body, and in their inability to break through the habitual personality structures they have built up.

They are unable to transform themselves into other characters or perform effectively other functions,
such as symbolic or metaphoric actions. They have not been 'broken down' - have not learned the
systematic stripping away, which Laban considered essential, of all inauthentic action to find the core
of the person from which all authentic action springs. How can we define this and communicate it?
Can we take over from the acting schools the principles and practice of 'breaking down' the
personality-constructs without taking over other training methods as well? Can we reach some
agreement on a basic, irreducible training programme?

Central to all this discussion, which establishes its primacy for us in theatre education, lies the
question of how we enable students to learn how to learn. How can we put them in a position where
they are to acquire and assimilate new skills, in interests of their own self-development have all seen
the results of poor and over-ambitious teaching, where students appear to acquire a vocabulary within
which to describe what they are not doing. They have the right words, but their actions do not conform
to what they are thinking. There many things one can teach if the student is in a position to learn.

Out of experience, how can we impart the philosophies of theatre we have learned - that it is a way of
life but, as Eugenio Barba has written, cannot be a substitute for life? The group which does not have
a total commitment to exploring theatre will not last long. Perhaps in our present atomized society, it is
time to revive Barrault's concept of the actor-priest. How can we communicate that training is not a
short period of intensive tuition but a life-long exercise which must be maintained as the biological
processes alter balance, metabolism, and rhythm?

As a contribution to further concrete discussion can I suggest, firstly, the publication of a series of
carefully constructed studies theatre experiment in the twentieth century, and in the last thirty years in
particular, written with a primary consideration for the theatre artist embarking on his or her
career.Secondly, can there not be collaborative research to try to establish a core programme in
training in practical skills, which would form in itself the facility through which other skills could be
learned? In the messy, confused, and confusing hotch-potch of manoeuvres which are now playing
havoc with the established methods of training for the theatre in this country, and which a willy-nilly
bringing the acting schools into the margins of the university domain, are we not in danger of losing
sight of the manifold, rich blessings which could come from an integration of the institutions based
upon scholarship and practical expertise? Can we not try to do something to help effect this greatly
desired cross-fertilization?