Empowering the somatically othered actor through multi-lingual improvisation in training

In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the decolonization of training by enumerating a key step of the intracultural methodology developed by Kristine Landon-Smith, building on the training of Philippe Gaulier and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. We describe here what we call “ ‘multi-lingual improvisation”: a rehearsal room activity that bridges speech work and scene work by inviting somatically othered student actors to bring their full cultural and linguistic contexts to the fore through improvisation exercises that draw on the full range of first and heritage languages, as well as vernacular englishes, present in the room. We position the democratization of language through multi-lingual improvisation as an integral first step towards intracultural praxis, presenting non-standard accents, historically marginalized vernaculars, and linguistic diversity as audible manifestations of somatic otherness in training rooms and on stage.