Abstract:
“The only reason they are photographing our work is to recruit next year’s intake.”
Graduating student, CSM 2019
“Go somewhere, I don’t know where. Find something, I don’t know what.”
Opening statement – MA Acting exchange, Boris Shchukin Institute, Moscow 2019
This provocation explores loss of depth in performer (specifically actor) training, this student generation’s fear of their own psychic material and the loss of faith in practitioners and process.
It explores the horror story some students experience, despite extensive investment in decolonisation of training, and more wellbeing measures than ever before. Students choose instead to protect themselves psychically from performer training – and their own transformative experience.
Through a collective loss of history (the feeling, ‘no-one made any changes before our generation’), ground-breaking companies are disappearing from trainees’ consciousness. Inspiration is replaced by a destructive literalism inhibiting performers’ imagination.
I suggest exploration of psychical dark matter (potent material shaping the creative experience) is a fundamental missing element in training arcs, undermining our attempts to update. Once a collective understanding is reached that there can be no perfect outcome, and the progressive utopia promised is a repackaging of capitalist values, then work can begin.
This provocation questions whether training itself has become a feeder for institutional brand enhancement. We need urgently to make space inside our trainings – to strip them of the collective performance of perceived ‘goodness’, creating instead a deeper learning space where murkier material is allowed, and learner challenges are held and celebrated rather than weaponised.
BIO:
Georgina trained and worked as an actor. She co-founded www.dirtymarket.co.uk using bricolage to make new work with discarded materials of all kinds. Georgina was Course Leader of MA Acting DramaCentre@CSM UAL, Head of Acting at Oxford School of Drama, supervisor for Creative Performance Practice MA LSBU, and Head of Year Fourth Monkey Actor Training.