Evi, Stamatiou (2021) Ludic activism: an investigation of how Pierre Bourdieu's social theory of power can promote social equality in actor training. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Abstract

This thesis responds to the current interest of institutions, practitioners and scholars to tackle the misrepresentation and underrepresentation of marginalised groups in the texts, scripts and methods used for actor training, using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social power as both a critical lens and a basis for a creative intervention that invites trainees to acknowledge how their positionality is linked to their theatre-making and how their acting choices are biased. Drawing on practice-as-research and participatory action research, it proposes a methodology for theatricalising theories to construct, apply and evaluate interventions in actor training. To bring the Bourdieusian vocabulary in the actor training studio, Bourdieu's theory of social life as 'game' was combined with play theory which helped to identify the precursors of the creative intervention of Ludic Activism. Shared techniques of Bertolt Brecht, Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine that juxtaposed the social and the comedic were adopted and developed to theatricalise Bourdieusian concepts and construct a set of praxical methods - Mind Field, Points of View, Anti-hexis Body, Symbolic Object, Governed Language, Doxic Chorus and Misrecognised Song - that can be practically applied in an actor training context.¶To test the hypothesis that the Bourdieu-inspired vocabulary and pedagogical approach develops actors-as-authors to explore how their dispositions affect their theatre-making, participants from diverse backgrounds collaborated in a theatre-making process that trained them to use Ludic Activism. An evaluative framework was employed to critically reflect on the training process and the presentation of the participants' final performance to an audience. Audience feedback, and email interviews with participants were also used to evaluate how Ludic Activism can promote social equality in actor training. The Bourdieu-inspired pedagogy supported the participants to develop an understanding and use of their positionality in performance and how it biases their theatre-making choices, exercised through a set of tasks that invited them to make holistic, comparative and critical choices.