(Re)considering the role of touch in "re-educating" actors' body/voice

The use of touch as a pedagogic approach to training actors’ voices is a popular, mainstream practice found in many Anglo-American actor-training programmes. Recently, voice trainers have been (re)considering the use of touch within the voice studio, specifically within multicultural classrooms. Master trainers like Micha Espinosa ask, “What are the power structures at play? What do I represent?” Touch is political. David Carey and Rebecca Clark Carey suggest, “If it is appropriate to ask students to touch each other, feel free to be creative with those exercises that require it—or simply don’t do them” (2008, xvi). If there are benefits from the use of touch , what are they and what are tutors missing if they ban touch from their classrooms as a means of avoiding the complex issues that touch brings into the voice studio? One aim of this chapter is to examine the concerns I have surrounding the use of touch in my teaching, particularly focusing on the multicultural and diverse training environments in which I work. I offer an alternative approach to traditional practices that use touch as a corrective model through object-body observation. Using Jeungsook Yoo’s approach to meditative practices in her Korean actor-training as a departure point, I interweave Asian modes of training with adaptations of Anglo-American voice practices. The conceptual model for what touch and feeling can do and how it can do “it” is augmented. Touch and feeling are no longer located to individual investigations of physiological function, but open up to include ways of ‘forming one body’ (Leder 1990, 156) with others, leading to more connected communication and empathetic listening.