Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately ''doing'' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing.
Frank Camilleri puts forward the ''post-psychophysical'' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The ''post-psychophysical'' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured - including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition - this volume provides readers with an enticing array of critical approaches to training and creative processes.
Industry Reviews
Camilleri boldly argues that we should move on from the psychophysical paradigm which has dominated acting theories for the last decade or more. With the term post-psychophysical, his innovative approach encompasses the much broader social and technological context in which today's performer operates, opening up new horizons for acting practices and theories. Performer Training Reconfigured is not only an important book for researchers of performance and philosophy but also one that will be useful for practitioners who will be inspired by Camilleri's perspectives and suggestions. * Paul Allain, University of Kent, UK *
An excellent study of performance training that goes beyond the limits of psychophysical approaches to performance, and that introduces current thoughts about science, art and the phenomenological experience. * John Lutterbie, Stony Brook University, USA *
Density, diversity and accuracy characterize this book. It recreates a panorama that makes visible the extraordinary adventure of training, highlighting a lateral apprenticeship to the traditional preparation for acting. The book made me reflect on the material conditions in which training takes place, including as it relates to my practice, on the links between ways of thinking and acting. * Eugenio Barba, Odin Teatret, Denmark *
It is an impressive and potentially paradigm shifting account, arising from the various turns to affect and cognition, encompassing and integrating perspectives from phenomenology, new materialism posthumanism, technoscience, suggest an alternative approaches to performance studies and practical processes. It documents how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training and performance making. In some respects it is a manifesto for the 21st century, challenging mind/body dualisms through a relational and ecological approach, conceptualized as "post psycho-physical". It invites controversy but the quality of scholarship is one of its strengths. * Professor Nicola Shaughnessy, University of Kent, UK *
Performer Training Reconfigured is the culminating product of three decades of applied studio research... It is a work that navigates between analysis and practice in a re-examination of performer training and body-centered dramaturgy viewed through the lens of the post-postmodern. This is a 'must read' work for scholars and practitioners alike who are interested in theatre training and embodied practice in an age of what Camilleri identifies as post-psychophysical, that is, an epistemic universe in which technology and the material world are as important to training and expression as the corporeal self. * Ian Watson, Rutgers University-Newark, USA *
Frank Camilleri has opened up the ways to think about performer training in scholarship and in practice. Looking beyond the mind-body binary to the post-psychophysical, he situates performing practices within a broader spectrum of socio-materialist, technological and cognitive paradigms and pulls the discourse of performer training into the new millennium. With detail and rigour Camilleri harnesses an impressive range of theoretical constructs to sharpen the tools of analysis and to re-conceptualise the agency of the performer. His concept of bodyworld is a game changer. * Lisa Peck, University of Sussex, UK *
This book provide diverse and well-informed perspectives on training theory and practice in an emergent discourse of this field. The scope and imagination of the book is compelling and its invitation to the reader is warm. Being as systematic and wide-reaching as it is in its hypotheses and proposals for theory after the predominant mind-body discourse, this book helps to move our critical thinking in the field substantially closer to new and more relevant questions about ourselves. * John Matthews, University of Plymouth, UK *
Performer Training Reconfigured examines training discourse and practice through a set of contemporary theories, including new materialism and postphenomenology, updating the field in exciting ways. Drawing on examples of contemporary practice as well as the author's long standing engagement with performance training and making, this is an account that makes an invaluable argument in a rigorous and accessible way. Camilleri asks us, as students and practitioners of performance, to re-consider our relationship with the practice in terms of the materiality that makes it and those involved possible in the first place. -- Maria Kapsali, University of Leeds, UK * Maria Kapsali, University of Leeds, UK *
This book is one of those rare animals that simultaneously engages with highly theoretical material - or 'Theory with a capital "T"' - while still retaining the in-the-trenches gravity that comes from an author steeped in lifelong practice. This is important to our fields of theatre and performance as many of us still fight to resist binaries of thinker and doer, scholar and maker, objective analyzer and subjective practitioner. [I]t also feels like Camilleri is positing his post-psychophysical as a clarion call 'Assemble!' In other words, it feels like he is suggesting that by overtly acknowledging training as an assemblage that moves from, through, and beyond the psychophysical, we can envision and make something new together in the realm of performer training. * Maiya Murphy, National University of Singapore, Singapore *
In this stimulating volume, Frank Camilleri draws on his experience as a theatre practitioner-scholar to carefully tease out those aspects of performer training that are often left in the background during discussions of psychophysical performance practices. This marginalisation is performed even by those whose practices might already be post-psychophysical in Camilleri's terms. Drawing on a combination of theoretical approaches including agential realism, assemblage theory and postphenomenology, Camilleri practises a critical posthumanist reconfiguration of performer training that respectfully builds on and supplements the insights of the dominant psychophysical performance paradigm. * Franc Chamberlain, University of Huddersfield, UK *
