ABSTRACT

Stages of Reckoning is a crucial conversation about how racialized bodies and power intersect within actor training spaces.

This book provokes embodied and intellectual discomfort for the reader to take risks with their ideologies, identities, and practices and to make new pedagogical choices for students with racialized identities. Centering the voices of actor trainers of color to acknowledge their personal experience and professional pedagogy as theory, this volume illuminates actionable ideas for text work, casting, voice, consent practices, and movement while offering decolonial approaches to current Eurocentric methods. These offerings invite the reader to create spaces where students can bring more of themselves, their communities, and their stories into their training and as fodder for performance making that will lead to a more just world.

This book is for people in high/secondary schools, higher education, and private training studios who wish to teach and direct actors of color in ways that more fully honor their multiple identities.

chapter |19 pages

Introduction

Why this book now? 1

part I|55 pages

Distilling/grounding/performing identities

chapter 1|19 pages

Black queer autoethnographies

Tools for equitable teaching and learning in predominantly white institutions

chapter 3|16 pages

Embodying racial consciousness

White allyship as given circumstance and objective for the casting and coaching of scenework

part II|49 pages

Embodying disruption/abstention/resistance

chapter 4|16 pages

I'mma do me

Code-switch resistance as collective liberation in voice and speech classes

chapter 5|17 pages

The erotic of abstinence

Refusing the white-possessive and embracing settler abstinence in performance pedagogy

chapter 6|14 pages

Nepantla

Lingering in-between to embody our voice

part III|69 pages

Traveling across time/space/language

chapter 7|20 pages

Representation matters

The why and how of decolonizing Stanislavski actor training

chapter 9|32 pages

The possibilities of paradox

Decolonial Shakespeare process in practice

part IV|51 pages

Transforming across/through/around disciplinarity

chapter 10|19 pages

A time of protest

Exploring activism and acting through Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed

chapter 11|17 pages

Whose body is dis

Taksu, ase, Black queer intersections, and the awakening of the actor's spiritual practice

chapter 12|13 pages

Stigmata

biography of an Arab female body in pain