Liminal Casting: Self-Inquisitive Scene Study in Actor Training

Prior efforts to decolonise casting practices in actor training stressed the importance of empowering the students to make choices for themselves and liberating them from assumptions that the roles on offer, with the same ethnicity or gender as them, resonate with their social experience or their acting ambitions. This essay brings the concept of liminality to actor training to argue that text-based acting classes that linger in the preparation of multiple roles, instead of culminating in the performance of a single role, involve more equitable and inclusive casting practices. The analysis of an action research cycle of my text-based acting class prioritises student contributions during an end-of-module reflective discussion and subsequent anonymous feedback within standardised evaluations to identify good practices and areas for development to carry forward. Key insights include establishing a phenomenology-inspired vocabulary in class discussions to prioritise individual expressive means and acting strengths instead of what texts require. This essay invites the development of scene study as a liminal process of self-inquiry in search of the final casting state, or role, that hasn’t been written yet, as the student tests what moves them and what works for them during their transition between multiple roles.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Critical Acting Pedagogy: Intersectional Approaches on 01/08/2024, available online: https://www.routledge.com/9781032494142