Table Of ContentINTERCULTURAL
ACTING AND
PERFORMER TRAINING
Intercultural Acting and Performer Training is the first collection of essays from a diverse,
international group of authors and practitioners focusing on intercultural acting and voice
practices worldwide. This unique book invites performers and teachers of acting and
performance to explore, describe, and interrogate the complexities of intercultural acting
and actor/performer training taking place in our twenty-first century, globalized world.
As global contexts become multi-, inter- and intra-cultural, assumptions about what acting
“is” and what actor/performer training should be continue to be shaped by conventional
modes, models, techniques and structures. This book examines how our understanding of
interculturalism changes when we shift our focus from the obvious and highly visible aspects
of production to the micro-level of training grounds, studios, and rehearsal rooms, where
new forms of hybrid performance are emerging.
Ideal for students, scholars and practitioners, Intercultural Acting and Performer Training offers
a series of accessible and highly readable essays which reflect on acting and training processes
through the lens offered by “new” forms of intercultural thought and practice.
Phillip B. Zarrilli is Artistic Director of The Llanarth Group and Emeritus Professor of
Performance Practice at Exeter University, UK. Zarrilli is widely known for his publications
on acting, including: Psychophysical Acting: an intercultural approach after Stanislavski (2009, 2010
Outstanding Book of the Year, ATHE); Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practices; and Acting:
interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives (co-author).
T. Sasitharan is Co-Founder and Director of the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI).
He has worked as an actor, performer, director and producer and writes and lectures on
art, theatre training, performance practice and Singapore culture. He received the Cultural
Medallion, Singapore’s highest award for artists in 2012.
Anuradha Kapur is a theatre maker and presently Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University,
Delhi. She is the author of Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: the Ramlila at Ramnagar, and
her writings on performance have been widely anthologized. She completed her term as
Director National School of Drama, New Delhi in 2013.
INTERCULTURAL
ACTING AND
PERFORMER TRAINING
Edited by Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan
and Anuradha Kapur
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan and
Anuradha Kapur; individual chapters, the contributors.
The right of Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan and Anuradha Kapur to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-35213-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-35214-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43487-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of figures vii
Introduction in three parts 1
Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan and Anuradha Kapur
Part 1: Reframing intercultural acting and actor training
in the twenty-first century 1
Phillip Zarrilli
Part 2: Recalibrating intercultural acting/training today 6
Anuradha Kapur
Part 3: The “hot crucible” of intercultural actor training: the
Singaporean context 11
T. Sasitharan
1 Actor training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute
of Singapore 25
Giorgia Ciampi Tsolaki
2 From the flower to madness: the ontology of the actor in
the work of Suzuki Tadashi 48
Glenn Odom
3 Dancing Hamlet in a world of frogs: butoh and the actor’s
inner landscape 62
Tanya Calamoneri
vi Contents
4 Stepping out of the frame: contemporary jingju actor
training and cross-cultural performance in Taiwan 77
Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen
5 Re-considering intercultural actor training in South Africa
today; “borrowing on our own terms” 92
David Peimer
6 The actor’s process of negotiating difference and
particularity in intercultural theatre practice 106
Sunhee Kim and Jeungsook Yoo
7 The role of “Presence” in training actors’ voices 129
Tara McAllister-Viel
8 Training a performer’s voices 147
Electa Behrens
9 Grasping the Bird’s Tail: inspirations and starting points 167
Christel Weiler
10 Embodying imagination: butoh and performer training 179
Frances Barbe
11 Arifin and Putu: Teater Modern acting in New Order
Indonesia 202
Kathy Foley
12 Rendra 2.0: cross-cultural theatre, the actor’s work and
politics in dictatorial Indonesia 217
Marco Adda
13 Bali in Brazil: perceptions of “otherness” by the “other” 246
Carmencita Palermo
14 “Traditional” opera in a “modern” society: institutional
change in Taiwanese xiqu education 261
Josh Stenberg and Tsai Hsin-hsin
Index 279
FIGURES
1.1 Psychophysical training with Phillip Zarrilli at ITI,
October 2012 32
1.2 Taiji for actors with Pern Yiau at ITI, January 2012 33
1.3 Reflections: student performance directed by Noushad,
Hyderabad, 2012 36
1.4 Noh presentation, March 2013 37
1.5 Transformations: a piece by TTRP graduates, 2012 39
1.6 Noh presentation at ITI, March 2013 41
1.7 Kutiyattam presentation at ITI, March 2012 42
1.8 Beijing Opera presentation at ITI, October 2012 43
1.9 Wayang Wong presentation at ITI, November 2013 44
1.10 Final Year Individual Project at ITI, August 2014 44
3.1 Greg Hicks in Michael Boyd’s 2004 production of Hamlet for
the Royal Shakespeare Company 63
4.1 Wu Hsing-Kuo performing Aoshu Zheng (Macbeth)’s
desire on stage 83
4.2 The Mountain Spirit in Kingdom of Desire (performed by
Chang Chin-Ping) 86
4.3 The soldiers’ performance of fluster in the last act 88
6.1 Playing “the maids”: Jing Hong Okorn-Kuo surrounded by
her two sets of maids 108
6.2 “I Can Not” (Jeungsook Yoo with Regina Crowley) 112
6.3 “Release of Han Dance and Vocal Duet” (Jeungsook Yoo) 117
6.4 Creating the soundscape: Adrian Curtin (cello) and
Mick O’Shea (sound artist) 119
viii Figures
8.1 These graphs originally appeared in my article “Manifesto
in Praxis” in Responsive Listening, Theater Training for Contemporary
Spaces.. Eds Karmenlara Ely and Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk,
Brooklyn Arts Press, New York, 2015 153
8.2 Exercise: My voices 155
8.3 Action = flow + form 157
8.4 Flow graph. A diagram representing the relationship between
a person’s levels of skills in a specific activity, the level of
challenges the activity provides and the resultant experience
of the person. Specifically, flow is experienced whenever there
is a match between skills and challenges; when the challenges
are larger than the skills, anxiety is likely to be felt, when the
skills are greater than the challenges, boredom is likely 159
8.5 Exercise: exploding Chekhov 161
8.6 Action–Reaction cycle 163
12.1 Willy Rendra Student at AADA, NYC 1964 222
12.2 Visual Penghayatan 227
12.3 Hamlet poster, Jakarta 1971 231
12.4 Stanislavsky and other components in Rendra 239
14.1 Students of the Ta-peng Theatre School, the air force Jingju
school, late 1950s 264
14.2 Children training in the early years of the Fu-hsing
Drama School 266
14.3 Students of the NTCPA in 2012 271
INTRODUCTION IN THREE PARTS
Phillip B. Zarrilli,1 T. Sasitharan and Anuradha Kapur
Intercultural Acting and Actor-Performer Training originated as a specific edition of The-
atre Dance and Performance Training (7 March, 2016). This expanded book version is
intended to make this important and timely collection of essays more widely availa-
ble to actors, performers, teachers and students of acting and performance through-
out the world. For this collection, contributors were invited to explore, describe
and interrogate the complex issues, structures, practices, techniques, paradigms, his-
tories, and/or discourses of intercultural acting and actor/performer training taking
place in the spaces “between” in our twenty-first century, globalized world.
The three co-editors have each been deeply engaged in reshaping and refram-
ing contemporary actor training from an intercultural perspective throughout our
professional and pedagogical careers. Professionally, politically and personally we are
all invested in ongoing processes that reconsider how we think about, talk about, as
well as create performance and training in the interstices “between” in an increas-
ingly globalized world. As a prelude and introduction to the chapters that follow,
we each reflect in our own ways on intercultural acting and actor-training today.
Part 1: Reframing intercultural acting and actor
training in the twenty-first century
Phillip Zarrilli
In the twenty-first century, contemporary theatre practices and modes of actor/
performer training are being reshaped and reframed within the crucible of a global,
(largely) urban, cosmopolitan context, which is inherently multi-, inter- and or
intra-cultural. To take one example, Kay Li explains that “Hong Kong is a globalized
city” with a “long history of cosmopolitanism and capitalism”; therefore, “theatre in
