Twenty-first-century actor training : personal development within industrial and digital landscapes

Abstract

This dissertation rethinks the phenomenon of actor training from a twenty-first-century perspective. It investigates three critical strands of contemporary actor training, mainly ‘personal development’, ‘industry-relevance’, and ‘digital pedagogies’. The Introduction sets the scene through a brief exposition of twentieth-century actor training and the conservatoire model, which is the primary training model discussed in this dissertation. The first three chapters contextualise and problematise the three stands respectively (typically in the first two sections of each chapter) and each chapter will refer to a case study or case studies (in the last section) in order to shed light on the matters at hand from a practical point of view. To gain relevance, this dissertation interweaves the impact of COVID-19 in its discussion while also recognising the socioeconomic and poltical nature of contemporary actor training. In the light of increasing mental health awareness, the Conclusion then brings these three strands in dialogue together to suggest that personal development is detectable in industrial and digital actor training landscapes although it is more of a secondary effect.