Decolonizing Listening: Towards an Equitable Approach to Speech Training for the Actor.

This article confirms and deepens an understanding of the negative impact of teaching culturally embedded speech standards to actors who are “othered” by a dominant “somatic norm” within the performing arts. The author analyzes evidence from a three-year longitudinal study of actors within a UK conservatory in relation to the critical frame of the somatic norm and colonized listening practices in the performing arts. The author identifies conscious and unconscious bias within traditional training methods and proposes a decolonizing approach to listening within foundational speech training. The ideological shift outlined follows the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences and moves away from the culturally embedded listening at the core of “effective” speech methods, which focus solely on clarity and intelligibility. The outcome of this research is a radical performance pedagogy, which values the intersectional identities and linguistic capital of students from pluralistic backgrounds. The revised curriculum offers an approach to affective speaking and listening that assumes an equality of understanding from the outset, and requires actors, actor trainers, and, ultimately, audiences to de-colonize their listening ears

Toward an intercultural/interdisciplinary approach to training actors' voices

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Training Actors' Voices and Decolonising Curriculum: Shifting Epistemologies

This chapter aims to add to ongoing conversations about the future of training actors’ voices after #BlackLivesMatter protests [2020-2022] in the UK and US. In addressing the urgent call to ‘decolonize curriculum’ in UK actor training programmes, this chapter argues that voice training curriculum can/should begin at the grassroots, individual level. First, this chapter challenges voice trainers to critically reflect on their motivation for a ‘decolonized curriculum’ as the starting point for effective change. Next, co-authors advocate co-authoring a new curriculum, in part by centering lived experiences of the students and tutors that make up a given training space, instead of adapting pre-built training systems brought in from outside the classroom. Through a ‘cultural voice’ approach, each voice classroom can be understood as a uniquely developed composite of cultural knowledge. The shifting cultural knowledge of the individuals that make up the learning/teaching strategies is an ongoing, ever-changing, dynamic co-authorship of training curriculum between students and teachers. In this way, ‘culture’ becomes one of the fundamental ‘materials’ of training. Finally, co-authors call for a (re)valuation, an epistemological shift, in current mainstream popular voice training approaches and ask trainers and the institutions they work for to (re)consider the dynamic relationship of co-creating ‘decolonized curriculum’ together