| dc.description.abstract | There is a diverse range of formal, institutional training opportunities for Indigenous
students who aspire to a career in acting. However, it is not only the technical aspects of
training that differ from Aboriginal-identified and mainstream programs— indeed, in this
respect, the similarities seem more striking than the differences. O f far greater
importance, as I argue in this thesis, are the differences in cultural context from one
institution to another. One question this thesis examines is whether there are critical
differences between the experiences of Indigenous students at mainstream and
Aboriginal-identified institutions. Whatever institution they attend, the way in which
Indigenous acting students experience, and make sense of, their training does not depend
so much on the specific content or structure of classroom and studio-based learning
activities; rather, it is essentially defined by the much larger cultural and pedagogical
frameworks within which these learning activities are embedded. In other words, the
experience of actor training, for Indigenous students, involves a constant, subtle
negotiation of differing expectations, or assumptions, around issues of identity, culture,
family, professionalism, and so on. Further questions this thesis investigates include
when, where and how do Indigenous students engage meaningfully or critically with
these particular issues, especially culture, during the course of their vocational training.
Also, how do institutions support students to navigate these issues?
My approach to answering these questions is to describe and analyse the manner
in which Indigenous students navigate these potentially fraught negotiations and to draw
out some of the lessons to be learned—by teachers and administrators in training
institutions, by theatre companies, funding bodies, and policy makers—from focusing
more closely on these students’ experiences. My research is informed by in-depth
interviews conducted with Indigenous graduates from a selection of different actor training
programs, some of which are very strongly, and historically, “Aboriginal identified”
programs and some of which are offered by “mainstream” institutions. In
many cases, the Indigenous theatre makers I interviewed had experienced training in both
Aboriginal-identified and mainstream settings, so they were able to offer very insightful
cross-institutional perspectives. Acknowledging, however, that the student experience in
any pedagogical encounter is never independent of the teacher experience, I also
conducted several in-depth interviews with teachers, directors and other staff from the
actor-training programs. At no point was the research seeking a single understanding of
the “right” way of training Indigenous actors. Rather, the thesis sets out to illuminate
multiple perspectives on the topic. It is an investigation of localised experiences, or local
narratives about those who inhabit, in some cases only briefly, the often tightly bound,
intense, “hidden worlds” of actor training.
This thesis suggests that no matter how idiosyncratic or special the “culture” that
has developed within any given institution, there are still multiple ways in which that
small-c institutional culture is being reframed, reinterpreted, possibly even restructured,
by the big-C “Cultural” frameworks within which students make sense of their lives. | en |
