Description
In 2020, the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Drama) at the Flinders University Drama Centre was placed under Review, and for the first time since formal actor training began in 1973, the student intake was paused.In the context of theatre and performance programs around Australia grappling with Covid restrictions, budget cuts, and a profound reassessment of the way student actors should be trained, this action was received by students and the arts community as signalling an existential crisis for Drama at Flinders. Many feared that South Australia’s only university-based actor and director training program would be disbanded.
On release of the report, the University convened a committee of students, staff, alumni and industry stakeholders to stakeholders to review the full-time Acting degree and the pedagogy underpinning it. This facilitated a collaborative response to a host of issues, including the accelerating demands for decolonisation of curricula, and the reverberating lessons from #MeToo. Likewise, the intense pressures of traditional actor-training on student financial and mental well-being have ceased to be an acceptable price to pay for professional-level performance skills. As a result of this process, the university reaffirmed its commitment to professional actor training in a research environment, and reinvested in Drama.
This moment of crisis thus became generative: an opportunity emerged not only to consider how crisis might shape training for students entering an arts industry constantly itself ‘in crisis’, but also the alternate routes that crisis makes visible. In these dual papers, we use the Flinders crisis to extend Sara Jane Bailes’s contention that “although ostensibly it signals the breakdown of an aspiration or an agreed demand, breakdown indexes an alternative route or way of doing or making” (1). We examine how Flinders has responded to shifting generational perspectives to actor training by centring students’ experiences and values at the heart of their creative practice. From consent-based training, wellbeing protocols and intermedial performance practice, to a radical revision of the ‘showcase’ model, Flinders Drama Centre has used a moment of crisis to redraw its commitment to nurturing the next generation of autonomous performers.
| Period | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | AusAct 2023 Actor Training Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Ballarat, AustraliaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |