Training for Performance

A meta-disciplinary account

John Matthews

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408139240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

'Training for Performance is the first work of its kind; not in the sense that it addresses training for performance, but in that it invites a critical questioning of the imperatives and the rhetoric which govern academic and practical concerns for training alike.' Dr Martin Welton - Queen Mary University of London Training for Performance: a Meta-disciplinary Account is an innovative contribution to the field of work on contemporary actor and performer training. John Matthews introduces the concept of 'askeology' - a field of study that dissolves divisions between disciplines and their exercises - and identifies four meta-disciplinary categories in the process of training that are common to all institutional contexts: Vocation; Obedience; Formation and Automatisation. Through the exploration of contrasting accounts of training and the differing cultural politics within which they operate, Matthews provides a highly original and comprehensive approach to defining one of the most frequently used terms in theatre and performance studies. Training for Performance encourages performers to think afresh about how they understand and engage in their training and is an invaluable resource for any actor, student or professional interested in the process of performance.

1
Askeological investigations

As I have argued above, asking ‘What is training?’ is, in reality, a matter of asking ‘What is called training?’ And that involves asking about a range of practices – not only theatrical – wherein the term is used. In this respect this book is indebted to Heidegger’s well-known work, What is Called Thinking? for the realisation that the articulation of a useful answer entails the formulation of an appropriate question.

This chapter, motivated by the possibility that the generic usages of training may evince a genus of training, takes a lead from another celebrated philosophical text, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and its insistence that, as Robert Fogelin puts it in his commentary, ‘the meaning of a term has not been fixed until its use in a broader setting has been established’.¹ Fogelin points out that the association of meaning and use in Wittgenstein comes via Frege who wrote, ‘Never… ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.’² Wittgenstein’s extension of Frege’s concern for ‘propositional context’ in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus – ‘only propositions have sense; only in a nexus of a proposition does a name have a meaning’³ – is sometimes seen as a refutation of Frege’s claims that expressions have both a sense and a reference (a sense being the meaning or significance of an expression, and reference being the thing that uniquely satisfies the sense of an expression), given that Wittgenstein argues that names have only a reference but no sense, while propositions have a sense but no reference.

I don’t intend to pursue any connection between this book and Wittgenstein’s too far; the focus of my analysis of training is less concerned with the philosophy of language or the disaggregating of sense and reference than with the tracking of ‘meaning’ through different contexts of usage. However, the assertion that there is an intimate connection between meaning and use motivates this meta-disciplinary study precisely because it suggests an irreducible connection between all usage contexts and the ‘meaning’ of a term. Wittgenstein showed in his later work, Philosophical Investigations, that accepting that a word, such as ‘training’, might be impossible to define in anything other than a generic sense does not entail accepting that training cannot be explained in quite definitive ways.

Wittgenstein invites his reader to find a definition for the word ‘game’ and then, through systematic analysis of the various approaches he anticipates, he shows that conceptions based on amusement, competition or rule-based action will fail to capture the totality of what is meant in all the contexts in which ‘game’ is used.⁴ The point of the exercise however is not to show that no definition can be found for ‘game’ but that one is not necessary, because, even without definition the word is used effectively to explain specific phenomena. Furthermore, our understanding of ‘game’ allows us to use the term selectively, even to the extent of explaining new activities as yet undefined as games. Indeed, Barker and Hacker write in their commentary on Philosophical Investigations, with reference to Wittgenstein’s example of ‘game’, that this means, ‘my understanding of what a game is is completely expressed in the explanations I can give of “game”’.⁵

Following this train of thought, what seems interesting and significant to me about training is that the generic usage of the word ‘training’, rather than simply meaning different things to different people, might actually mean the same things, as it is used to describe differently augmented, configured, situated and conceived activities. To do as Ian Watson does in Performer Training: Developments Across Cultures and to describe training as a ‘generic term’⁶ is to overlook the fact that a diverse range of people all use this term to explain and interpret their practices, and this would seem to suggest that, even if there is no essential meaning to the term, there may be shared characteristics of any activity or experience that is called training.

My intention in this book is not to define what is called training because this would involve a process of identification between meaning and use, which as Donald Gustafson, following Wittgenstein, has shown is quite literally ‘nonsense’ but to explain and understand it by investigating some of the characteristics that occur in instances where it is used.⁷ Explaining and understanding the term training will of course produce a certain kind of knowledge about it, which will not be in the form of definition but of isolation.

Deleuze has written about isolation as a ‘sub-medical process’ common to artistic (critical) and medical (clinical) activity whereby concepts are not defined but diagnosed. Writing on this process in Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze later explained in interview his desire to describe the ‘articulable relationship between literature and clinical psychiatry’.⁸ The idea was not to apply psychiatric concepts to literature but, as Smith and Greco have explained, ‘to extract non-preexistent clinical concepts from the works themselves’.⁹ As in Wittgenstein’s method of arriving at an understanding of terms by showing that the meanings of words are not defined but delimited by their particular use, Deleuze argued that the method of arriving at a coherent concept (for example, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, nihilism) is a diagnostic one, whereby symptoms (ressentiment, the bad conscience) are isolated in the conditions and forms in which they arise.¹⁰ The ‘clinical view’ achieved by isolation is coherent in so far as its symptoms or characteristics are irreducibly present in all instances of the application of the concept, and in this respect the sub-medical isolating method resembles Wittgenstein’s version of ‘meaning is use’ insofar as each and every correct use of a term corresponds to a certain explanation of it.¹¹

The clinical view of training that will be developed throughout this book will be the product of the isolation of key concerns or processes encountered in the different sites where the term is applied. This kind of knowledge, which is generated through the symptomological practice of observation and analysis, resists (as Allsopp and Williams put it on behalf of Performance Studies) producing ‘a summative or in any way definitive’¹² term, but rather assembles a provisional constellation of characteristics to be added to and tested. The framework for this observation and analysis is askeology.

What is askeology?

‘Askeology’ draws on the ancient Greek verb askeo and combines it with a familiar suffix applied to those things that we feel driven to know more about, describe, analyse and explain. Askeo means ‘to train’, its literal translation being ‘to work with raw materials’.¹³ The familiar adjective ‘ascetic’ derives from the term askesis, meaning the practice of training or exercise. Warriors and athletes in Greek society applied the discipline of askesis to attain optimal bodily fitness and grace.¹⁴ The manner of life, the doctrine or principles of someone who engages in askesis, were referred to as ‘ascetic’ – a word which, over time, has come to describe persons who practise a renunciation of worldly pleasures or comforts to achieve higher intellectual or spiritual goals. Asceticism now refers in particular to the undergoing of extreme physical and psychological trials of deprivation, often self-inflicted, and is intimately associated with religious training.¹⁵

Consequently few actors – even the ‘holy’ ones – would be likely to describe their training as ascetic, and the same could probably be said of trainees in other non-religious contexts.¹⁶ Even a contemporary monk may speak of his ‘ascetical life’ and yet dissociate himself from practising extreme physical privation, and this is in part because ‘asceticism’ now describes a particular discipline of training and no longer speaks of the embodying of a meta-disciplinary process of training. It is useful to preserve the association of asceticism with spiritual training, but it would also be useful if one could push backwards through the etymological construction of ‘asceticism’ and resuscitate the term askeo to denote the field of this study of training. If askeo could once again refer to the practising of training, the working with, then askeology might describe a field of study which looks to comprehend ‘training’ at a meta-disciplinary level as well as in its multiple disciplinary manifestations. The word askeology might allow one to state that there are ‘trainings’ and there is ‘training’, and that both these things are askeological concerns. Then, perhaps, our actor, monk and all other trainees might be willing to say that their practices are askeological.

The very word askesis, by virtue of ending with ‘-sis’, expresses an activity and thus describes a mode, or rather modes of training; it speaks of the ways in and by which a meta-disciplinary category underlies or overcodes a range of activities. This thinking about and naming of a meta-disciplinary category manifest in various embodied acts suggests that we might think about training as a process extending before or beyond its actualisation as praxis. This concern for training’s disciplinary activities as manifestations of meta-disciplinary processes appears to have been subsumed into different concerns over time. For example, when Alison Hodge argues in her influential collection Twentieth Century Actor Training that ‘the centrality of actor training is evidenced by the fact that many of the innovators in this field have been responsible for both unique training techniques and for some landmark theatre productions’,¹⁷ she is asserting that, in the theatre at least, the significance of ‘training’ is that it denotes certain technical activities which give rise to performative expressions. The enslaving of the term ‘training’ to describe specific regimes of activity has produced a silence where a term should speak of the practice of practising them. Just as ‘performance’ is used to denote that which exists in and during specific performances, and that which survives them, so too a word is needed to describe that which exists in, on, over and beyond the existences of training.

In reviving askeo in something akin to its original meaning I do not intend to engage in a rewriting of history. I do not know what ancient Greek trainees thought about askesis, and this book is not about ancient asceticism. The reason I want to extract askeo from asceticism, and to reformulate it as ‘askeology’, is to delimit a field of study which investigates training. I do not want to displace ‘training’ from this field by dislodging it from its title position in certain fields of study – ‘actor training’ or ‘performer training’, for example – for, on the contrary, askeology is about training. However, as Hodge has shown, ‘training’ doesn’t describe a field of knowledge, practices, experiences, encounters, but speaks of disciplinary technical activities and we have no way of accounting for the fact that its usage is so widespread other than to simply state that it is.

The proliferation of the term ‘training’ as a suffix in formulations such as Alison Hodge’s ‘actor training’, or Ian Watson’s ‘performer training’ indicates that it has existences and operations beyond and apart from these things. Conversely, the compounding of ‘training’ with terms such as ‘actor’, or ‘performer’ suggests a coincidence with them. Askeology is a study of this thing called ‘training’ which seems bound to acting and performance and yet somehow not subsumed or completely contained within them. Askeology asks about diverse disciplinary trainings, and about the meta-disciplinary character of training.¹⁸

I am not interested in adapting askeo into ‘askeology’ simply to restore currency to obsolete terminology, but rather to be clear and precise about training, in the most basic way described by Gregory Ulmer in his consideration of word use: ‘The most basic way to be clear or precise is to define a word.’¹⁹ I contend that askeology should be (and to some extent already is) a research field, but that its various sites and activities, and their connections to one another, need to be highlighted and conceptualised clearly and with precision. This field is already operational, though unnamed, in the sense that its bibliography already encompasses studies of managerial and organisational efficiency, acting and dancing manuals, practical and theoretical guides to performance, sports science textbooks, medical textbooks, physiotherapy case-studies, educational guidebooks and progress reports, anthropological investigations of cultural rites, narrative accounts of personal experiences, video diaries and photographs from studios, rehearsal rooms, clinics and sports fields, webpages and internet archives and, of course, the very lives of those who train or are trained. The study of askeology is existent and operational by giving it a name – albeit a somewhat idiotic one. I mean to point to that fact.

Is askeology an idiotic name?

Many theatrical characters from the hobbling King Oedipus, to the no less royal Ubu, from the archivist Krapp to the STEWARDESS FORGETTING HER DIVORCE²⁰ have placed centre stage Alan Read’s assertion that ‘a certain idiotic quality in a name does not mean that the subject has to be stupid’.²¹ If, to a twenty-first-century reader, the name ‘Oedipus’ is idiotic in the contemporary sense of being ‘dumb-sounding’, then this subject is the archetypal idiot in the etymological sense of the word, deriving from the Latin idiota meaning ‘ignorant person’. Ignorant as Oedipus may be of his parentage, the idiot who solved the riddle of the sphinx is not ‘stupid’, from the Latin stupidus meaning ‘slow-witted’ as used to describe those in a lethargic ‘state of stupor’. In his book Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue, Read coins the ‘idiotic’ name of showciology for a discipline composed of the prefabricated materials of practices at the borders of theatre: philosophy, sociology and phenomenology. According to Read, showciology is, unlike its progenitors, ‘homeless’ and ‘like all “prefabs”… as temporary as one requires and provisional enough not to worry anybody when the time comes for its removal’.²²

‘Askeology’ shares several characteristics with ‘showciology’, not the least of which is the hybridity of its name, but while askeology holds a particular relationship to showciology this book remains a singular work with an agenda all of its own. However, a selection of the contemporary arguments and ideas that prompted Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement also inform this book, as one produced at the same historical moment as Read’s. Read’s rethinking of first questions that undermine the supposed efficacy of political theatre, as they do the proposed benignity of the relational conditions of performance, provides a suitable context for the contemporary concerns that motivate Training for Performance. His recognition of the reality that ‘appeals to resist defining the shape of a field always serve those in power’,²³ limited as that power may be, stimulates this book to trace a field of training and a method for its study. Doing so might provoke a reconsideration of what such a field...