Training Actors' Voices and Decolonising Curriculum: Shifting Epistemologies

This chapter aims to add to ongoing conversations about the future of training actors’ voices after #BlackLivesMatter protests [2020-2022] in the UK and US. In addressing the urgent call to ‘decolonize curriculum’ in UK actor training programmes, this chapter argues that voice training curriculum can/should begin at the grassroots, individual level. First, this chapter challenges voice trainers to critically reflect on their motivation for a ‘decolonized curriculum’ as the starting point for effective change. Next, co-authors advocate co-authoring a new curriculum, in part by centering lived experiences of the students and tutors that make up a given training space, instead of adapting pre-built training systems brought in from outside the classroom. Through a ‘cultural voice’ approach, each voice classroom can be understood as a uniquely developed composite of cultural knowledge. The shifting cultural knowledge of the individuals that make up the learning/teaching strategies is an ongoing, ever-changing, dynamic co-authorship of training curriculum between students and teachers. In this way, ‘culture’ becomes one of the fundamental ‘materials’ of training. Finally, co-authors call for a (re)valuation, an epistemological shift, in current mainstream popular voice training approaches and ask trainers and the institutions they work for to (re)consider the dynamic relationship of co-creating ‘decolonized curriculum’ together.