In “What Decolonising the Curriculum Really Means,” author Sofia Akel defines decolonising education as “the process in which we rethink, reframe and reconstruct the curricula and research that preserve the Europe-centred, colonial lens.”
In the Acting and Performance Programme, we have spent a lot of time debating what this means for our course and our discipline. What does it mean to “decolonize” approaches to actor training?
One area we have discussed is the centrality of certain practitioners such as Stanislavski and Brecht (and Meyerhold, Grotowski, etc.) We have also discussed the status of text and whether embodied and/or devised methods advance this goal. We have also considered these issues in relation to the texts we choose to perform—our students use their own (racialized) bodies to represent characters, making this process far more fraught, than, say, a literature class which is only reading a text privately.
The imperative to decolonize and de-center many of these classic texts from the theatrical canon (most of whom are cishet, white males), however, quickly becomes quite complicated. Naturalistic acting derived from Stanislavski continues to dominate the world stages and even more so in film, and our students quite rightly demand this knowledge in the hopes of having a professional career. It would be impossible to understand much of contemporary Asian, African, or Latin American theatre without a deep knowledge of Brechtian theory whose legacy thrives most fully in these areas of the world. And last spring, in order for white students to work on a script by Winsome Pinnock, all cultural references were stripped from the Caribbean-British characters. These examples are point up the fact that the process of rethinking (decolonizing) higher education cannot be solely a matter tweaking syllabi to include more diverse voices (although they should do that do), but must re-think more complexly about the deeper purpose of education.
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