Decolonizing Performance Training in 2025
Y'all... Let's talk about this Trauuuuma we're carrying into 2025. Like, seriously. We're watching the world literally and figuratively on fire – wars raging, floods rising, regimes falling and rising again – and what's happening in our theatre schools? They're still playing it safe. Still. Playing. It. Safe.
Listen, I've been around. My body carries wisdom from Bali's sacred spaces, from the electric energy of Celebration Barn, through the hallowed studios of the Actors Center, down to Melbourne Actor's Guild, and across pop-up workshops from New York to Mumbai to Jakarta. And everywhere – EVERYWHERE – I'm seeing this hunger, this desperate need for what the establishment calls "radical" training. But y'all, let me tell you what's actually radical: calling spiritual practice radical. Calling the integration of mind, body, and spirit into our craft "radical."
Let's get real about this "radicalism." What's actually radical is how these institutions – yeah, those ones with their deep pockets and glossy brochures promising Hollywood dreams and Broadway lights – are still clutching their pearls about training that honours the whole artist. These institutions, with their white male and female acting teachers, are still out here trying to convince a Black Haitian woman that she needs to embody some white woman's fever dream about lost privilege in the enslaved Black south.
#blanchedubois? More like #enough
Can we TALK about Tennessee Williams for a hot minute? The way his homo-erotic racist fantasies have been choking American theatre like kudzu on a magnolia tree? The way these institutions keep force-feeding us this narrative like it's the only story worth telling?
It's 2025, fam. Twenty-twenty-FIVE. And we're still dealing with this colonial mindset in our training spaces. While the world is literally transforming around us – through crisis, through revolution, through rebirth – these "prestigious" training grounds are still trying to preserve their precious status quo.
But here's what gives me hope: In every workshop, in every sacred training space I've inhabited across this globe, I'm seeing artists who are hungry for more. Artists who understand that our craft isn't just about mimicry or technique – it's about accessing something deeper, something truer, something that connects us to the very essence of what it means to be human in these wild, transformative times.
We're not just training actors anymore, loves. We're cultivating spiritual warriors, truth-tellers, healers. And if that's radical? Well, then call me a radical. Because that's the kind of theatre we need right now. That's the kind of artists we need to be nurturing. That's the future our stages are crying out for.
The revolution isn't just coming to the theatre – it's already here. And it's high time our training institutions caught up with the reality of what performance can and should be in this brave, terrifying, beautiful new world we're creating.
But that's just my truth, served hot and unfiltered. What's yours?
Dr. B