Abstract:
This workshop will address Core Training and the Relational Actor (Hodge 2013) as a (re)nascent form. Hailed as a pioneering “critical acting pedagogy” (Peck 2020), core training is characterised by its emphasis on relationality, care, touch, sensuality, and listening, as opposed to individual virtuosity. It does not “hone a particular aesthetic body,” but instead “celebrate[s]… [the] uniqueness [of bodies] and the particularity of each encounter” (Hodge 2013, 27), which resonates with today’s turn towards feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist and activist training practices.
The Quick and the Dead, the group of actors who collaborated with Hodge on developing the training, gathered for a week of intensive practice research in September 2023 – ten years after our last time in a studio, after injuries, illnesses, marriages, divorces, cross-continental relocations, births and deaths, including Ali’s passing in 2019. The practice was instantly available and powerful; from our new situated realities, new/old bodies, loss and grief, we experienced the training, its ethics and its vocabulary, as a space of discovery, pleasure, hope and connection. I will share some practices that stood out for us in this gathering and propose ways of articulating and experiencing ‘attentiveness,’ ‘embodied listening,’ and ‘care-taking’ in terms of radical care (Hobart and Kneese 2020).
BIO:
Göze Saner is an actor, researcher, theatremaker, and clown. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her book Practicing Archetype: Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy is forthcoming on the Routledge Perspectives on Performer Training series. Her latest performance as research engages the ubiquitous flamboyant nudibranch.