Embodied/Embodying Performer Training: Practices and Practicalities

Date: Wednesday 24 April 2019

24^th April 2019, University of South Wales, Cardiff Campus, The ATRiuM   Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Kaite O’Reilly Confirmed invited contributors: Prof Phillip Zarrilli and Sara Beer Wine Reception and response to the day from Working Group Conveners, Kate Craddock, Jane Turner, and James McLaughlin   In the preface of Atypcial Plays for Atypical Actors by Kaite O’Reilly, John E. McGrath highlights how O’Reilly ‘doesn’t imagine something that the actor fulfils – the writer opens a world of possibilities that the actor enters with their own complex, resistant, bodies and selves’. (2017)   Considering the above proposition, the TaPRA Performer Training Working Group invites 15 minute practice-based responses, provocations, lecture-demonstrations and papers, exploring and reflecting on Embodied/Embodying Performer Training: Practices and Practicalities.   Taking cue from Judith Butler’s (1993) proposition that ‘bodies never really comply with the norms by which their materialization in impelled’ we seek to provoke on several sub questions to the proposed:

• How is performer training embodied?
• Whose bodies are we training?
• What bodies have access to training?
• What bodies are marginalized, compromised and/or ignored entirely within traditional training practices?
• Do we embody roles of trainer/trainee within, and beyond, training environments?
• Do we embody ideologies/assumptions/aesthetics of traditional training practices?
• Do we embody our own training practices before using them with others?

  We also invite practices that explore notions of bodies that may typically be ‘othered’, e.g. disabled bodies, transgender bodies, intersex bodies, queer bodies.   We will consider proposals that go beyond the sub questions above, and we invite all participants to think about the practicalities of their contribution, that is to say, we hope the day will involve as much doing as it does thinking.   This is a one-day event, with tea/coffee and lunch included and all participants must be TaPRA members. If you are not currently a member, you will be asked to join the organization at the interim rate of £15 via http://tapra.org/join-tapra/ before the date of the event.   We also have 2 x £50 travel bursaries to facilitate postgraduate and non-affiliated artists/researchers attending this interim event.  The event organizers will award these bursaries based on:

1. The quality of the proposal,
2. The extent to which the applicant will benefit from attending, and
3. The financial need that might otherwise impede participation.

Our intention is that those who may not otherwise be able to participate in the event are supported to do so.   If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please include a short statement on your submission, briefly outlining how you will benefit from attending and testifying to your financial need that might otherwise impede your participation.   Please submit a 300-word abstract, outlining your proposed contribution to the day, alongside an indication of your technical requirements and set up needs, and a short biographical statement to denis.cryer-lennon@southwales.ac.uk. The deadline for the submission of proposals is 15^th March, 2019.