Embodiment, hybridity, and habit: the stick as an actor training tool

This article examines how the concepts of hybridity and habit can work interdependently to support embodied learning via an object which has long been associated with the training and development of the actor: the humble stick. Whether in actor training institutions, or within post-training rehearsal rooms, the stick has played an important role in ensemble building, and in the actor’s development of awareness and psycho-physicality. Insight into its lineage can be grasped via the theatre and actor-training practitioners that are pertinent to the stick-inspired work explored at Flinders University Drama Centre: ¹ Vsevolod Meyerhold, David Zinder, ² and Jacques Lecoq. This article offers insight into how balancing and throwing stick tasks, inspired by the aforementioned practitioners, are being explored at Drama Centre to assist students with their embodied learning. This article examines how the stick brings together training concepts from Bartenieff Fundamentals and the Alexander Technique, detailing how habitual stick tasks facilitate hybrid learning and assist to remove obstacles that have traditionally blurred the interdependent nature of the key actor training strands of Voice, Movement and Acting within western actor training institutions.