Learning to inhabit the chair: knowledge transfer in contemporary Australian director training

Abstract

How are theatre directors trained today? Although there is a body of work around what directors do, little sustained critical attention has been paid to the nature of teaching and learning within director training. Training a director has been called “teaching the unteachable” (Fliotsos, 2004) and leading practitioners assert “no amount of learning will make you a director” (Hall, 2000) — yet training courses do exist, and something, indeed many things, are taught in them. It is a kind of teaching and learning, though, which does not fit dominant models of pedagogy: “practical knowledge(s) […] have traditionally been hard to capture in meaningful ways and have, as a result, often been represented as a weaker alternative to theory” (Prior, 2012:xxiii). Using a theoretical framework drawn from the sociology of education, this thesis analyses how knowledge is transmitted and legitimated in creative arts training. This methodology seeks to understand the ‘on the ground’ realities of training, bringing into simultaneous view the official curriculum, institutional aspirations and the messy business of training. Using ethnographic fieldwork to apply this framework to the Directing program at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney, Australia, this thesis concentrates on the dual questions of what is taught and how it is taught. Research has been conducted from within the Institute, paying close, sustained attention to what goes on in the room during training. This work aims to contribute to debates around the accreditation of creative arts training, and the survival of conservatoire-style training. In a regulatory environment where institutions around the world now have to legitimate practical knowledges in systems designed to accredit primarily theoretical coursework, the framework proposed by this research allows trainers to account for the full spectrum of their work.