Of Pounds of Flesh and Trojan Horses: Performer Training in the Twenty-first Century

Performer training in the West has been increasingly commodified in the course of the last two decades by having its most tangible and transmittable aspect (i.e., training techniques) severed from the wider contexts that had initially given it impetus. This situation indicates the strong possibility of a paradigm shift that is currently still underway: performer training in the twenty-first century seems to have outgrown the twentieth-century need of a formative ethical dimension as it becomes increasingly implicated in the processes and procedures of institutionalization. I consider this a ‘fundamental’ shift precisely because it concerns the very foundations of performer training, i.e., it concerns not technique per se but the manner in which technique is approached and treated. Furthermore, the widespread extent of this movement, which is fuelled by heavy institutional intervention in the educational and cultural industries, assures its paradigmatic status rather than being merely a ‘tendency’ or a ‘trend’. Though the full effects of this shift still need to filter upwards to become more clearly manifest in performance and pedagogical practices, there is ample evidence of its activity in the inter-century decades (1990s and 2000s). The current article deals with this activity.