Intercultural Acting and Performer Training

Zarrilli Phillip, T Sasitharan, Anuradha Kapur, Zarrilli Phillip, T Sasitharan, Anuradha Kapur, Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138352131
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429786297
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Intercultural Acting and Performer Training is the first collection of essays from a diverse, international group of authors and practitioners focusing on intercultural acting and voice practices worldwide. This unique book invites performers and teachers of acting and performance to explore, describe, and interrogate the complexities of intercultural acting and actor/performer training taking place in our twenty-first century, globalized world.

As global contexts become multi-, inter- and intra-cultural, assumptions about what acting "is" and what actor/performer training should be continue to be shaped by conventional modes, models, techniques and structures. This book examines how our understanding of interculturalism changes when we shift our focus from the obvious and highly visible aspects of production to the micro-level of training grounds, studios, and rehearsal rooms, where new forms of hybrid performance are emerging.

Ideal for students, scholars and practitioners, Intercultural Acting and Performer Training offers a series of accessible and highly readable essays which reflect on acting and training processes through the lens offered by "new" forms of intercultural thought and practice.

1
Actor training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute of Singapore

Giorgia Ciampi Tsolaki

Introduction

The Theatre Training and Research Program (TTRP) (now Intercultural Theatre Institute, ITI)¹ was founded in Singapore in 2000 by playwright Kuo Pao Kun and theatre practitioner Thirunalan Sasitharan. The school is based on Kuo Pao Kun’s:

vision of intercultural actor training using a matrix of traditional theatre systems and conceptions of theatre making from different cultures with a view to producing original contemporary theatre and socially engaged artists

(ITI website http://iti.edu.sg/ 2011)

This kind of training enables the actor to become aware, through regular and in-depth forms of practice, of the broader cultural context in which different theatre traditions were born and developed. The objective of practising the traditional forms is hardly to perfectly reproduce them, but rather to open the actor’s sensibility to different modes of perception and possibilities of practice. It is the actor’s work that goes into embodying these forms – into making them present through the body-mind – that allows the actor to be traversed by different kinds of energy, rhythms, images, feelings from different places and times. A deep practical understanding of these theatre traditions allows the actor to make mindful choices in relation to their practice and develop new contemporary work.

The traditional teachers at the school are deeply aware of this: the Noh theatre practitioner Hideo Kanze (descendant of the Zeami lineage) once told a student who asked if he could change a Noh gesture: “Change it! But know why you’re doing it!”

In this chapter, I will concentrate on how the different theatre training systems meet, intersect or contradict each other within the body-mind of the student-actor at ITI. I will reflect on ITI’s intercultural programme, through a series of interviews with the ITI/TTRP alumni themselves.

The context

ITI/TTRP: a brief history

I will start by contextualizing ITI/TTRP within the Singapore cultural landscape.

Why does the need for this intercultural school arise at the heart of multicultural Singapore?

There are many aspects about ITI’s project that are contextually specific to the socio-historical and economic context of Singapore. I will try to capture some of them. The 2015 ethnic composition of Singapore is: 74.3% Chinese, 13.3% Malays, 9.1% Indians, 3.3% Others. This terminology and subdivision is the specific result of the CMIO - for consistency’s sake with later examples model (Chinese Malay Indian Other), which represents the “racial governmentality of late twentieth-century Singapore, which endows each of its citizens with a racialised identity and speaks to them through race” (Holden 2006)². It is the British, whose colonization of Singapore lasted from 1819 to 1965, who were responsible for bringing to Malaya immigrant workers from their other Chinese and Indian colonies (PuruShotam 1998, p. 56). After Singapore achieved independence in 1965, its “nationalist discourse, to an even greater extent than in most postcolonial nationalisms, borrowed many of the elements of self-fashioning from the colonial state”. With the initial aim “to contain ethnic conflict”, the CMIO model ended up reproducing, as “a glove inside out” (Holden 2006, n.p.), the separation of different racial communities and cultures, which had previously been endorsed by the British colonialists.

It is within this context of separated cultural coexistence, that Kuo Pao Kun’s vision of an “open culture” can be understood. He believes that seeds of this open culture are to be cultivated in the field of education. In fact he comments:

There are no in-depth education programmes in school or society to make the communities understand each other’s customs and practices, culture and religion, their deeper emotions and higher aspirations.

(Kuo 1998, p. 52)

Kuo Pao Kun here highlights the urgent need for a space where the different cultures can begin to communicate with each other. ITI’s function within this context is thus coming into focus.

After Singapore’s independence, the government’s emphasis on economic growth, together with policies of multiracialism, has caused the cultural and social development to be dictated by global economic laws. As a consequence:

Singapore’s cultural and social landscape are saturated with signs of other modernities held up as objects of desire: Japanese popular music and fashion, Korean soap operas dubbed into Mandarin, Dutch banks, American seminars on entrepreneurship and self-help books.

(Holden 2006, n. p.)

It is against this fast-growing and barren saturation, that Kuo Pao Kun’s project proposes to recognize “what is currently ours, within us and around us” (Kuo 1998, p. 56) within the richness and fertility of the existing cultures of Singapore. Within a historically forced multicultural coexistence, there can be born a willingness to understand and be part of each other’s existences. For this willingness to understand each other’s cultures and traditions to flourish, the mere presence of different cultures is not sufficient. Culture and tradition are not automatically inherited; they must be gradually discovered and acquired through study and effort.

The structure of the ITI/TTRP programme and the issue of the “intercultural”

I will now give a brief overview of the organization of the ITI/TTRP three-year programme and of its subjects. During the first two years, the students undergo an intense training regime from 8am to 6pm every day. In the third year they work with Singaporean or international directors to create three contemporary theatre productions.

During the two-year training period, the mornings (from 8am to 1pm) are dedicated to the core modules: Movement, Voice, Tai Chi and Humanities. The afternoons (from 2.15pm to 6pm) are dedicated to the particular theatre training (traditional or contemporary) that the students are practising in that period. Each year they experience two “training immersions” in traditional Asian forms (each immersion lasting from two to three months) and two contemporary theatre techniques. The uniqueness of the school consists in offering practitioners from all cultures and backgrounds a “training immersion” in four traditional Asian theatre techniques (Kutiyattam Theatre from India,³ Beijing Opera from China,⁴ Noh Theatre from Japan⁵ and Wayang Wong Opera from Indonesia),⁶ alongside various contemporary techniques from all over the world.

I attended ITI from 2012 to 2014 and I reflect here on the modules that I experienced during this time: the “Movement” module was based on techniques of corporeal mime and theatre anthropology, taught by Leela Alaniz. Within the “Voice” module, teacher Robin Payne, (trained in Cicely Berry and Linklater techniques), challenged us to turn back to the popular voices of our ancestors, to rediscover our voice. “Tai Chi for actors” was conceived by Taijigong Shifu from Wu Tu Nan lineage, Sim Pern Yiau. During the weekly “Humanities” class, the director T. Sasitharan had the students discuss several theoretical readings, often contextualizing the particular form they were practising in that period. Some examples of the contemporary theatre approaches I was exposed to are: Phillip Zarrilli’s “psychophysical training”, Iben Nagel Rasmussen’s “wind dance technique” employed in the research of “organic” action and clown, taught by actor/director Guillermo Angelelli, Stanislavskian technique and Shakespearean text with director Aarne Neeme, Butoh training with teacher/practitioner Frances Barbe.

This created a unique combination of training systems and vocabularies, which pulled our body-minds in all directions, stirred all sorts of conflicts and contradictions within us, and lit up our sensibilities to an incredibly different range of theatres/performances/cultures. Every time we would think we were beginning to grasp the inner workings of a particular form, the rug was pulled out from under our feet, the rules changed and all was to be discovered anew. Andy from the very first batch of TTRP, explains:

I don’t see any other programme or school that addresses so emphatically the conflicts of culture. The programme itself is a conflict; teachers taught contrasting things. For example, one teacher asked me to learn how to relax, and another teacher may require me to hold tension in some body parts. I needed to find my own way and this is the true training of it.

(Q&A with Andy Ng, ITI blog, https://itiblog.org/2015/01/08qa-with-andy-ng/)

However, the “interculturality” of the school’s teaching space doesn’t come from the variety of techniques but from developing the capacity for accepting, negotiating and containing all the contradictory aspects, from not trying to smooth them out or make them agree with each other. This attitude towards the contradictions inherent in the training emerges both from the daily practice and from the space for reflection on the practice, initiated in the “Humanities” class. Through this space, the issue of the “intercultural” is brought to the centre of the students’ enquiry from the very beginning of the programme. I believe this inspires the way the students welcome the different teachers and receive their teachings: as a gift. Sasitharan finds this idea of the “gift” to be at the heart of the intercultural exchange.

Intercultural exchange happens at its purest when the two parties decide to make a gift of their art. The person who offers doesn’t expect anything else but the receiver to receive the gift. This is the only kind that preserves the artistic integrity. That’s the way we work with all the teachers. They don’t come to teach a formula but just to give you a gift.

(Sasitharan 2012)

In fact, all the teachers carefully selected a limited part of the taught repertory in order to be able to concentrate on the quality and the depth of the work: even if it was just a walk in Noh theatre that we were learning or a way of stretching our eyes open, or learning how to perform only one sentence through the mudras⁷ in Kutiyattam Theatre. This created a breathing space between the different cultural forms. It seems to me that it resisted the sense of Singapore’s cultural saturation and instead opened up a space in between cultures, a space where cultures could breathe, interact, enter into dialogue, debate, exchange, “imagine and re-imagine themselves”, (Sasitharan 2009, p. 5).

But what was the students’ experience of this training? What was the process of encountering the different theatre systems like? How did the different types of energy, rhythms, images, which underpin each theatrical culture, affect the student-actors at ITI? How did they cope with the different philosophical and practical approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction in three parts
• 1 Actor training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute of Singapore
• 2 From the flower to madness: the ontology of the actor in the work of Suzuki Tadashi
• 3 Dancing Hamlet in a world of frogs: butoh and the actor’s inner landscape
• 4 Stepping out of the frame: contemporary jingju actor training and cross-cultural performance in Taiwan
• 5 Re-considering intercultural actor training in South Africa today; “borrowing on our own terms”
• 6 The actor’s process of negotiating difference and particularity in intercultural theatre practice
• 7 The role of “Presence” in training actors’ voices
• 8 Training a performer’s voices
• 9 Grasping the Bird’s Tail: inspirations and starting points
• 10 Embodying imagination: butoh and performer training
• 11 Arifin and Putu: Teater Modern acting in New Order Indonesia
• 12 Rendra 2.0: cross-cultural theatre, the actor’s work and politics in dictatorial Indonesia
• 13 Bali in Brazil: perceptions of “otherness” by the “other”
• 14 “Traditional” opera in a “modern” society: institutional change in Taiwanese xiqu education
• Index