Towards a Radical Politics of Actor Training

In July 2019 I gave this talk, thanks to the kind invitation of Kiki Selioni, at the opening of the international conference, ‘The Makings of the Actor’ in Athens. This is what I said (it’s an academic keynote speech, so strap in)…

It is a great privilege to be invited to speak to you at the opening of your conference, and with privilege comes responsibility. So I want to begin by offering some thoughts about privilege and responsibility as a way of framing the first word of my title.

Part 1: Towards

The sociologist Peggy McIntosh famously described ‘white privilege’ as ‘an invisible, weightless, knapsack’, filled with the ‘special provisions’ by which a person identified as white is able successfully to negotiate challenges of which they commonly remain unaware. We might, therefore, be tempted to pair the weightlessness of privilege with the burden of responsibility: the visible and heavy counterpart to McIntosh’s ‘weightless knapsack’. That would, however, be a mistake, a mistake that I am going to call ‘the problem of accountability’. McIntosh writes that:

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, ‘having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?’

Although there is nothing on the surface to disagree with here, the problem with McIntosh’s account is that it does exactly what she says: it describes white privilege, and it does so in ways that individualise our conception of it and therefore limit her analysis to the level of personal accountability. At this level, the acknowledging of privilege is balanced by actions ‘to lessen or end it’. These actions are necessary, but they are not sufficient, because if we shoulder responsibility by exercising privilege, we do nothing to ‘lessen or end privilege’. In fact, we may indirectly justify and reinforce its power. Not only is taking responsibility easy when you have privilege, privilege is easy when you take responsibility. This is the basis of the accountability problem.

I don’t, of course, mean to suggest that power should not be held to account. ‘Accountability’, however — the condition of being accountable — is problematic, precisely because it is not the same as actually being held to account, and — in fact — because it commonly functions to pre-empt any such process. Students at my own institution have attempted, in recent years, to hold us to account on the subject of institutional racism. They have collected testimony about racial discrimination, held public events to discuss it, and staged a walk-out from classes in solidarity with those who suffer it most. Last year, in response to these events, the School commissioned a Race Equality Review from an external consultancy. Their report emphasised at the outset that — I quote — ‘[t]here was a strong wish from management, staff and students to support equality’ within the School. In the forgiving light of this ‘strong wish’, any evidence of inequality was miraculously converted from a failing to — and I am quoting a repeated phrase from the report — an ‘opportunity’. Perhaps, one day, this is how we will write feedback to students: ‘Congratulations! Your submission has provided you with an excellent opportunity to pass this assessment next time!’ Amused as I can just about persuade myself to be by its rhetorical contortions, however, I do not quote this Race Equality Review with any relish, still less out of any desire to air dirty linen or suggest that my institution is in any way unusual. Far from it. I quote it as an example of the way in which, under regimes of accountability, institutions and individuals set themselves — and therefore inevitably pass — the ethico-political equivalent of a pre-approval test for a credit card precisely in order to prevent anything so unpredictable as an actual public challenge. No sooner are we, in McIntosh’s description, ‘newly accountable’, than we invent a new form of accountability pre-emptively to shield ourselves from danger. Rather than being a method of lessening or ending privilege, accountability is simply the ability to account for it. Since McIntosh observes that privilege is, by definition, unearned, the conclusion of this train of thought is stark: accountability launders privilege.

The problem of responsibility, however, remains, and here I turn to Donna Haraway, whose punning conception of it partly prompted these thoughts about accountability. Accountability is the ability to account and, for Haraway, responsibility is the ability to respond:

Response-ability is not something you have toward some kind of demand made on you by the world or by an ethical system or by a political commitment. […] Rather, it’s the cultivation of the capacity of response in the context of living and dying in worlds for which one is for, with others. So I think of response-ability as irreducibly collective and to-be-made. In some really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making-with.

Responsibility is ‘the cultivation of the capacity of response with others’. It is ‘irreducibly collective and to-be-made’. It ‘is not yet, but may yet be’. Our responsibilities, in other words, are not individual burdens, counterbalanced by privileges, and nor should they be used to justify and extend the reach of what we already have. They might, rather, be conceived of as an invitation to focus on each other, to open ourselves to our fundamental collectivity, and direct our shared attention to the not-yet that it contains.

The word ‘training’ — with its roots in the Latin trahere, to pull or draw — refers to just such a process of gradual attunement to and preparation for the not-yet. The figurative use of ‘train’ to refer to people developed from its literal application to fruiting plants, which are trained into espaliers, fans and cordons by selective cutting-back and gradual tying-in to frameworks made of wood or wire in order to increase their productivity. This process is not, however, only a matter of imposing preconceived forms onto the unruliness of nature. A gardener setting out to train a plant must understand, in Haraway’s words, ‘that which is not yet, but may yet be’. The flexibility of a stem must be judged in deciding when to tie it in: too soon and the vigour of its vertical growth is lost, too late and it will not take on the desired shape. Pruning cuts must also be considered by assessing the future patterns of growth to which they will give rise: a cut is not only the removal of what has grown, but the shaping of what will grow. Gardeners assess plants in this way all of the time: patterns of bark reveal buds that will become side-shoots, swollen stems are spurs that will carry fruit. This verb ‘train’ had an archaic sense that captures this process, it meant ‘to entice’, and thus we return to Haraway: ‘it is a kind of luring, desiring, making with’.

Haraway’s account of responsibility underpins the first word of my title: towards. It is my responsibility and my privilege, today, at the start of this conference, to ask both of this event and the futures for which it has been created: what are we, collectively, making with each other? What are we drawn or enticed towards? And how might we cultivate the capacity to respond to these visions of the not-yet? It would be disingenuous of me, however, to pretend that I did not also have a framework to which I hope to train our training, and it is to that framework to which we must now turn.

Part 2: Radical

‘Radical’, as the activist and scholar Angela Davis famously instructed, ‘simply means grasping things at the root’. If I were to ask you ‘what are the roots of actor training?’, I am confident that every answer in this room would have included the word ‘Stanislavsky’. The image from Stanislavsky’s book My Life In Art of the great man sat on a rock in Finland contemplating the problem of how to stimulate the creative state in his performances is central to the mythology actor training. As Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina’s recent collection Stanislavsky in the World has shown, in the last century Stanislavsky’s system has entered into a huge range of intercultural dialogues with systems of acting and actor training all over the globe, and continues — in a range of applications and interpretations that continue to be contested — fundamentally to shape conceptions of what actor training should be.

To locate Stanislavsky at the roots of actor training is, however, to think of its roots in the sense of the lineages of its practices, rather than its roots in the sense of the roots of a plant. I am using the term lineage here to underscore what Foucault called the ‘genealogical function of historical narratives’ to ‘ensure that the greatness of the events or men of the past could guarantee the value of the present, and transform its pettiness and mundanity into something equally heroic and equally legitimate’. Actor training has indeed tended to ascribe its systems to great ‘men of the past’ — identified in the introduction to Alison Hodge’s collection Actor Training as ‘the fathers’ of the discipline — although their techniques developed from complex interactions among networks of practitioners. These would be more accurately represented by what Foucault called ‘disorderly and tattered genealogies’ which aim ‘to reactivate local knowledges […] against the scientific hierarchicalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects’. Cass Fleming has shown, for example, the ways in which the crucial work of Suzanne Bing has been erased from the tradition of practice now identified with the figure of Jacques Copeau.

I will return to something like Foucault’s ‘disorderly and tattered genealogies’ later. First, if we are going to grasp things at the root we need to reconsider what we mean by ‘roots’. Again, I turn to plants for guidance. Plants do not grow from up their roots, they grow roots; they actively form a fibrous network by which they are anchored to and able to draw sustenance from their growing medium, even as they also grow upwards, towards the light. The roots of actor training, then, are the network of connections that embed spaces and systems of training in the societies from which they grow, and by which they sustain themselves: the means by which they support their reaching toward a horizonal vision of the performances they will make possible. At the risk of placing this analogy under too much strain, Stanislavsky’s — or any other system — is better understood as a training’s genetic code: the information contained within it that dictates the possibilities and patterns of its growth.

Most of the examples upon which I will draw in this talk are taken from my now almost-finished book, Theatre Studios: A History of Ensemble Theatre-Making. The first theatre institution to be designated a ‘studio’ was the Moscow Art Theatre’s Studio on Povarsakya Street, established in 1905. Keen to introduce aesthetic ideas and creative methodologies from outside the Art Theatre, Stanislavsky appointed Vsevolod Meyerhold director of this initiative, for which he coined the term ‘studio’ to mean ‘not a proper theatre, certainly not a school, but . . . a laboratory for new ideas’. Meyerhold’s conception of a studio sat, therefore, in the space between theatre and school, borrowing elements of both, but he was prevented from exploring its possibilities extensively as Stanislavsky closed the 1905 Studio almost immediately (partly because of the October Revolution and partly because he was concerned that the actors were not sufficiently technically capable to achieve its potential). Only a few years later, however, in 1912, Stanislavsky opened his own First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, to which we owe a great deal of our knowledge of his System.

The spirit of the First Studio, Bryan Brown tells us, was sustained by two key concepts: the kruzhok (circle) and obshchina (commune). Kruzhki developed in the 1830s as spaces for discursive resistance to Tsarist rule and consisted of ‘informal domestic gatherings’ of strictly limited groups. These gave rise to obshchina, a form of rural social organisation based in shared work, which was the model for the First Studio, according to Stanislavsky’s collaborator Leopold Sulerzhitsky. But Sulerzhitsky’s idealism prompts material questions about its roots: was the Studio really owned and governed in common? It was not. It remained under its parent organisation’s purview and its actors effectively served two organisations and held down two jobs. The project of the Studio was rooted, in fact, in what Stanislavsky saw as a crisis in the theatre’s production processes, namely the incapacity of the actors to respond to the various aesthetic demands of their director’s vision. Thus, Sulerzhitsky’s vision of a commune was in some ways a useful fiction, masking the reality of a project dedicated to the extraction of greater value from the actors’ labour.

I should pause here to emphasise that I am not arguing that Stanislavsky literally enriched himself by exploiting the labour of his actors. The Moscow Art Theatre regularly sustained huge budget deficits, which were often financed out of Stanislavsky’s own pocket. However, Stanislavsky undoubtedly hugely increased his cultural capital as a result of his capacity to claim ownership of the Studio, to set its agenda, and to use the excess value produced by its labour, both as a director of the Art Theatre, and as the identified author of its system of actor training. These two patterns are commonly to be found at the roots of actor training, and I will offer a few brief examples.

Formalised actor training began in England with the founding of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Academy in 1906, which would become the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Tree announced that his academy would teach ‘voice production, elocution, blank verse, Shakespeare, dancing, fencing, acrobatics and mime, gesture appropriate to periods (minuets, the use of the fan) and the acting of plays’. Michael Sanderson notes that ‘Tree was a major employer of the products of his own academy’. A decade ago, Nicholas Hytner — then the Artistic Director of the National Theatre — conducted a government review of drama training. Reporting his preliminary findings, he stressed the importance of ‘vocational craft training: voice, movement and acting technique’, and its ‘slow and repetitious’ nature. He was ‘not convinced that time spent on education in theatre theory is time well spent in a drama school,’ though he added that he spoke ‘not as an educationalist but as a consumer of those who graduate from drama schools’.

It is striking that the prescriptions for actor training offered a century apart by these two ‘consumers’ of trained actors and managers of large theatres do not differ all that substantially from each other: ‘acting’ comes last on both men’s lists with voice appearing first, and this apparent ranking of disciplines notably reflects the priorities of the managers of large theatres. The theatres being built at the time of Tree’s Academy opening contained about twenty percent more seats than the theatres of twenty years earlier, and today’s National Theatre contains two large auditoria, one with notoriously challenging acoustics.

It is probably no surprise that Tree and Hytner saw training in this way, but the shaping influence of industrial management on training can be seen even in the studio tradition that commonly claims independence from such concerns.

This 1935 advert for Michel Saint-Denis’ London Theatre Studio, for example, asserts that the School part of this enterprise ‘will provide material for the Company’ and that the whole Studio is intended ‘to improve the material available for genuine theatre productions’. Saint-Denis may have owed his popularity in London to the collectively generated productions of the ensemble Compagnie des Quinze, but his studio unquestionably used the process of actor training in order to provide labour and resources for Saint-Denis to exploit in furthering his commercial career.

Like Stanislavsky, Saint-Denis also profited from his personal identification with an assemblage of techniques, a pattern in actor training that would become much more prominent in the post-War period. This was nowhere more true than in New York where the culture of acting was dominated, after 1947, by The Actors’ Studio, where Lee Strasberg taught from 1950, rising to become Artistic Director and the Studio’s sole teacher from 1951 until his death in 1982. New York-based actors could also learn versions of the American Method from Stella Adler at the Stella Adler Theatre Studio (founded in 1949), from Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen at the HB Studio (founded in 1945), and from Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (where he became head of the acting program in 1940). Though not all of these organizations had the title of ‘studio’, their similarity and common use of that term combined to redefine that term in the popular imagination to mean a private organisation focused on the ongoing training of professional actors. As Sharon Carnicke observes of The Actors’ Studio, it was ‘a special kind of club where members could perfect their acting without pressures of production, exercise their skills and test their limits’ in order to ‘help them succeed in a difficult and insecure profession’.

The actor Maureen Stapleton offered a frank account of this difficulty and insecurity: ‘actors are expendable, like cattle, because so few jobs are available. […] They’re constantly in a state of debasement, making the rounds of casting directors and having to look happy and great’. This was the context that gave rise to the New York studio-schools: they offered artistic sanctuary to actors who ‘lived’, as Elia Kazan recalled in more romantic terms, ‘like the longshoreman on the waterfront […] on the curb’, always seeking work. In Geraldine Page’s memory of her early career, that debasing experience was implicitly offset by the pride she took in training: ‘I took acting lessons with Uta Hagen and made the rounds asking for work’. Furthermore, although The Actors’ Studio managed to secure enough charitable support to remain free to join for those who passed the audition, most actors making the rounds were also paying for their classes. After all, their teachers were either making the rounds too or otherwise dependent upon an income from teaching that only a regular flow of students could guarantee. Therefore, just as actors’ insecure employment made every job also an audition for the next, their teachers’ insecure employment made every class also an advertisement for the next. It is therefore no surprise that, with the exception of Strasberg (who had made the Method his own), successful teachers began increasingly to develop exercises and techniques that were identifiably theirs, which they also recorded in books, to develop distinct brand-like identities. The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, for example, now sells itself as ‘the home of the Meisner Technique’.

This commercial exploitation of the need for and the consolations of training led to a marked shift in actor-training: increasingly teachers of acting did not so much teach acting as acting techniques, which focused predominantly on the individual performer. In the process, acting was fragmented into a set of technical challenges to be solved by the application of particular techniques, and play-texts were fragmented into parts and scenes. The actor Kim Stanley recalled working at the Actors’ Studio on ‘a part’, for example, and it is clear from records of courses taught by Meisner and Uta Hagen that the unit of study towards which student actors would work in this context was the scene. This process of fragmentation was, no doubt, significantly influenced by working practices in film, where rehearsal was rare and scenes were invariably shot out of order with actors present only when they were required. As a result, acting techniques needed to enable actors to create a performance without rehearsal and on demand, but not necessarily to work in collaboration with others, much less to reflect more widely on the artistry of acting and how it might relate to other aspects of the entire theatre-making process. Seen from today, this process appears to be an early example of what Wendy Brown terms ‘neoliberal rationality’, which ‘disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities […] and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors’, brands in which investments are made in the hope of ever-increasing future value.

These two processes, whereby actor training serves on the one hand to generate and appropriate skilled labour, and on the other as to configure both trainer and trainee as units of human capital are produced by and produce inequalities, which are particularly visible along the demarcation lines of, for example, gender and race. Researching Saint-Denis’ studios, it was impossible not to notice how often women disappeared from the records of the profession almost as soon as they graduated, whereupon they were frequently married, changed their surnames and worked infrequently, if at all. Rosemary Malague has demonstrated that patriarchy likewise governed the American Method, noting that ‘[t]he woman who offered herself as a victim or sexual object surely was […] the most marketable actress’.

Such inequalities are, of course, substantially hardened by racial difference. The African-American actor Harold Scott, noted that, in spite of the stated aim of actor training to produce versatile performers, versatility was not a requirement of the industry: ‘no one wants it. Everyone wants types’. He added, surely wryly, that ‘[n]ot many of the good parts are designed as Negro roles’. The same was true in England, as the British-Guyanese actor Robert Adams noted: parts were ‘few and far between’ and he was forced constantly to encounter ‘the Negro stereotype’. As a result, Adams developed a plan ‘of owning a theatre and having a Dramatic School’, but observed that ‘the task is such a big one and is meeting with such opposition that it is breaking my heart’. Adams was speaking here only a year after the newly-formed Arts Council offered substantial financial support and guarantees against loss to Saint-Denis’s Old Vic Theatre Centre, a Theatre and Dramatic School, attended and staffed — to my knowledge, at least — exclusively by white people. The director Yvonne Brewster had a similar experience of racism before she had even begun her training. She travelled from Jamaica to be told, at Rose Bruford College, that they would train her (her fees had been paid in full in advance), but that ‘you’ll never work’. As recently as May 1975, The Guardian newspaper’s London Letter column reported that it was the policy of the Central School for black students to study for only seven of the acting course’s nine terms because ‘there weren’t enough parts for blacks in the prestige productions mounted in the last two terms’, and we should not flatter ourselves that we have come very much further. As I have already intimated, the evidence clearly demonstrates that institutional racism is alive and well in actor training today. In short, it is clear that the roots of actor training in processes of capital accumulation had — and continue to have — consequences for actors that are not just unequal, but actively marginalising and oppressive (and I have said nothing here about homophobia, transphobia and ableism). A radical analysis of actor training demonstrates, then, that we must develop approaches to training that foreground power relations. In order to do that, we must turn to the last term of my title.

Part 3: Politics

In his book Theatre & Politics, Joe Kelleher takes his definition of politics from Stefan Collini: ‘the important, inescapable, and difficult attempt to determine relations of power in a given space’. The radical analysis of actor training that I have just developed exposes the extent to which the space of training is marked, inescapably, by power relations and how difficult and important it is to determine and — even more so — to re-configure them. It is evidently extremely difficult for spaces of training to resist incorporating the industrial conditions, social relations and thus ideological values that persist more widely in society. However, if we are to move towards a radical politics of actor training, we will have to develop strategies not only for identifying and critiquing but also for challenging and subverting the power relations to which these conditions give rise. I would like to offer two examples from my research of what this might mean in practice. The first is drawn from the work of Theatre Workshop and the second from the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

Joan Littlewood’s approach to directing has been described as a form of montage. This is nowhere clearer than in her most famous production, Oh, What a Lovely War! Created in the early part of 1963 with a group of actors and the designer John Bury, the performance was based substantially upon a 1961 radio documentary by Charles Chilton, called A Long Long Trail. Chilton’s work is described by Derek Paget as an ‘aural montage of fact and song’, to which were added improvised scenes in a wide range of styles, slide projections of documentary photographs and historical facts, and what Robert Leach calls an ‘electrical set’, denoting a scenographic environment created by lighting as much as it was by scenic construction. The result, according to Charles Marowitz, was ‘a context which accommodates — naturally and without strain — a number of different and often antithetical styles’. Paget argues, therefore, that the ‘creation’ of Lovely War was ‘primarily a work of editorship, not authorship’, which yielded a ‘montage-of-a-montage’.

The idea of ‘montage’ has its roots, of course, in Eisenstein’s conception of film directing, on the basis of which he suggests that ‘[i]t can be seen that the artist’s idea is not something that springs fully formed from his [sic] head; it is a socially refracted reflection of social reality. But from the moment a point of view and an idea take shape within it, this idea becomes the determining element of the whole factual and material structure of his work, the whole ‘world’ of his work’. From one perspective, this is an accurate account of Littlewood’s directorial work in the period after Theatre Workshop settled in London, but it contradicts somewhat her assertion to the company, during its earlier, itinerant phase, that ‘a broadening and intensification of each individual’s artistic contribution is necessary’ and her desire to ground her directing in ‘a co-operative effort between myself and the actor’.

It’s possible to see a remnant of this more collectively-oriented and unplanned conception of the theatre making process in Nadine Holdsworth’s description of Littlewood’s creation of a children’s playground near the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, as part of which ‘young people helped lay crazy paving, turf, and block-paving in a spirit of bricolage’. The concept of bricolage as a creative practice can be traced back to Claude Levi-Strauss’ use of the term in his 1962 book La Pensée Sauvage. He defines it in relation to two uses of the word in French. The first is the verb ‘bricoler’, which refers to ‘a ball rebounding’ in a game such as billiards or, in hunting, to ‘a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle’. The second is the word ‘bricoleur’, denoting ‘someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman’. Bricolage therefore describes a set of making practices that are unorthodox, spontaneous and unpredictable. Its activities are always contingent and limited by circumstance, as Levi-Strauss describes:

[the bricoleur’s] universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

Levi-Strauss’ emphasis on the bricoleur’s use of ‘whatever is at hand’ and thus on the heterogeneity of a finite and contingent assemblage of both materials and techniques with which she must ‘make do’ is echoed by Michel de Certeau’s account of bricolage as part of a set of practices whereby ‘[u]nrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers […] trace “indeterminate trajectories” […] that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems’. De Certeau’s ‘trajectories’ ‘use as their material the vocabularies of established languages’ and ‘remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes’ but also ‘remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires’. De Certeau encapsulates this idea in a simile that resonates with the history of actor training: ‘They circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an improvised terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order’. If the figure of Stanislavsky sits on ‘the rocks […] of an established order’, Theatre Workshop’s practice ‘drifts over an improvised terrain’.

This observation is figuratively true of Theatre Workshop, I want to argue, primarily because it was literally true. These maps shows the movements of Theatre Workshop in the years 1945 and 1946, and 1947 and 1948 respectively. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, they seem to me to instantiate quite clearly de Certeau’s ‘indeterminate trajectories’. Apart from repeated visits to northern towns and cities, patterns are difficult to distinguish because the group’s movements were guided primarily by the contingency of circumstances of which they only ever had partial knowledge and over which they exercised minimal control.

By contrast, successful theatrical careers at this time followed an established trajectory from amateur or repertory theatre in small towns, to periods of employment in the repertory companies of major cities and then to London. Even when visiting major cities, Theatre Workshop skirted around their wealthy centres, and its home in London was, as Shelagh Delaney remarked of Stratford East, ‘not really London’. Littlewood’s own account of the creative process seems to draw heavily on this experience: ‘The artist’s progress’, she asserted in an interview, ‘is no luxury tour. There is no smooth Autobahn along which one rides to one’s objective. The path, if you can call it that, is a rough one always mounting upwards, disappearing now and then in morasses and swamps, a perilous path, twisting through barren places, littered with the bones of dead enterprise’.

Littlewood’s emphasis on the exposure of the artist to the vicissitudes of the environment within which she must work anticipated de Certeau’s famous distinction between tactics and strategy in his theorising of practices. Littlewood’s ‘smooth Autobahn’ articulates a strategy of power, which, in de Certeau’s analysis, ‘postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats can be managed’. Such strategies inevitably produce a certain kind of knowledge, ‘one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place’. By contrast, a tactic is, for de Certeau, ‘a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus’. Thus, ‘a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power’.

Theatre Workshop was a constitutively tactical enterprise. As the company member Harry Greene put it, ‘we were tactically trained. We were expert at getting what was needed to survive’. These tactical practices, developed in the period of the company’s itinerancy, belong to the constellation of practices to which the anthropologist Tim Ingold has given the name ‘wayfaring’: living along the lines of a journey, continually ‘responsive to perceptual monitorings of the environment’. In fact, it was as result of this process that Greene came to join Theatre Workshop in the first place. He was picked up on the company’s travels in Wales when they were looking for an actor to play Welsh-accented parts who could also design and construct sets, drive a lorry, and stage-manage. Theatre Workshop’s members were commonly multi-skilled in this way, indeed they had to be, and one consequence was that any hierarchical division of personnel was undermined because the ‘set designer’ was often more than one person, one of whom was also the carpenter and stage manager and the other the lighting designer and technician. Likewise, both playwright and choreographer were also actors, the financier was an actor and a stage-hand, and so on. As a result, rather than running efficiently along separate tracks, these aspects of the production process became enmeshed in what Ingold calls a ‘comprehensive entangling’, meaning that the ensemble was best envisaged, in Ingold’s words, as ‘a knot of entangled life-lines’.

We can see the direct consequences of this analysis for Theatre Workshop’s creative and training practices in the notebooks kept by Joan Littlewood during the making of the company’s earliest productions, such as The Other Animals (1948, with a script by Ewan MacColl, direction and set design by Joan Littlewood, and choreography by Jean Newlove). When Newlove joined the company, Littlewood reportedly exclaimed ‘We have the trinity!’, an unusually theological metaphor for her, but we can see the evidence of its accuracy in her notations, which interweave blocks of text numbered in Stanislavskian units with figurative sketches of action and scenography and notated movements. These records of the company’s collaborative processes also warns against any tendency we might have to romanticise them: the word ‘CRAP’ is clearly visible in block capitals at the centre of one page. Far from the totalizing discourses of strategic systems of actor training, the creative tactics developed by Theatre Workshop were produced by and embraced contingency and imperfection.

So what are the lessons of this analysis for a politics of training? First, all of the activities captured here both emerged from and fuelled the company’s collective and ongoing tactical training. The study of text and of music, Laban-based movement, Stanislavskian active analysis and constructivist scenography were all explored and practiced by the actors in training and deployed in creative rehearsals. Rather than trying authoritatively to delineate problems in advance of encountering them in practice, Theatre Workshop’s tactical training was both self-consciously limited by circumstance and open-ended in its outlook. It was a process continually unfolding through chance encounters and thus produced relationally, between and among the company’s members, rather than dictated from a supposedly secure, single position of knowledge.

Tactical training represents, therefore, a political intervention into the space and conception of the training process by which single positions of knowledge become multifarious and contested, the urge to totalize is replaced by the desire for specificity, and hierarchies become tangles of relation. Before I succumb, however, to the temptation to make of this concept another abstract and totalizing position for the assertion of my own authority, I want to conclude with an example of what it might look like in practice, and of how tactical training might, to borrow from de Certeau, use as its material the vocabularies of established languages of training with the end of developing politically-engaged performers.

The cultural theorist Mark Fisher described capitalism as ‘an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker’, and speaking and hearing those words in Athens is, of course, a stark reminder to those of us who theorise politics from a position of privilege both of the material consequences we commonly escape, and of our responsibility to intervene in the cultural processes that ensure what Fisher calls ‘our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression’. If we are to intervene by creating performances that critically engage what Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’, the passive acceptance of capitalist doctrine, we encounter the problem that capitalism is, in Fisher’s words, ‘a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action’. As luck would have it, however, actor training has, within the vocabularies of its established languages, a concept well-fitted to this situation: Michael Chekhov’s notion of atmosphere.

Atmosphere was one of two techniques developed at the Chekhov Theatre Studio — the other being gesture — that served as a foundation for both its training and creative practices. Chekhov told his students and collaborators in rehearsal to ‘first find the atmosphere, and then try to find the dialogues and soliloquies in the music of the atmosphere’. Atmosphere was, for Chekhov, the primary condition of encounter, a dramaturgical substrate from which characters, action and narrative, were encouraged to live and grow. In Chekhov’s words:

The first step is to research the various atmospheres […]. The next step is to study the play — its historical values, background, costumes, etc. In this study we must discover the “world” in which the play has to be acted. Each play must have a special world around and about it. […] We must develop each play as a world; therefore, we need special study for each play.

We might appropriate this technique for the study of the world that produces Fisher’s capitalist realism, and, by researching its ‘various atmospheres’ and ‘historical values’, develop an affective exploration of contemporary capitalism. Because Chekhov conceived of atmosphere as the substrate of relation, such an exploration would ask what kinds of lives and relations are supported by the atmospheres of contemporary capitalism, and what kinds they punish or poison. In short, it would explore the nature of capitalism as a cultural substrate within which we all exist and which we usually take for granted. By exploring cultures as atmospheres in this way, we may explore the ways in which the forces of culture operate at an embodied level and begin critically to engage them in the process of training.

Furthermore, working with atmosphere challenges the assumptions of bourgeois individualism that are commonly to be found at the roots of actor training. Rather than analysing and developing a performance on the individualist basis of the actions of characters, atmospheric analysis proposes that events emerge from relations between them. Conceiving of action relationally in this way also undermines the bourgeois assumption that individuals can be studied outside of politics and culture. This echoes an important critique of some versions of affect theory that analyse relations between bodies that are assumed to float somehow free of social context. Feminist, queer and critical race theorists have pointed out that affecting and being affected are political relations and are therefore not equally distributed across either populations or the globe, and that feelings, in the words of Sianne Ngai, ‘far from being merely private or idiosyncratic phenomena’, are both ‘fundamentally “social”’ and material’ and are therefore subject to the same political processes that shape the social and material world. The same, of course, is true both of acting and of actor training.

I asked at the start of this talk what futures we desire for actor training and how we might cultivate our capacity to respond to them. I have argued that these questions will not find satisfactory political answers unless we grasp the places, practices and structures of training by the roots. I have suggested that we must expose and critique the structural basis of actor training in the extraction of value from labour and the investment in human capital in anticipation of a future yield. These processes not only enforce an ideology of individual competition and reinforce hierarchies, exclusions and oppressions, they lead to the reproduction of totalizing systems in which knowledge is an instrument of power. To move towards a radical politics of actor training, then, we must allow ourselves to become entangled in the fundamental sociality of the training process and acquire and share the tactical knowledge of the weak. On that note, it’s over to you.