Stepping: With Theatre Practitioners

This research project formed the third chapter of my doctoral thesis, where I collaborate with Dr Göze Saner, to design new approaches to performer training that don’t require the physical presence of a tutor.

Göze is not only my collaborator but also my partner. Over the past decade, we have worked regularly on creative collaborations together, starting with the encounter described at the start of this chapter. Göze had just completed a community theatre project (Saner 2014; Saner and Dedeoğlu 2017), working with Turkish-speaking migrant women in London exploring the city, responding to the experience through performer training techniques, culminating in the performance of a co-devised theatre piece. The project was instigated in other cities, yet it proved to be a challenge to lead these in person. Göze initially approached me to co-design a way in which the participatory activities of the project, such as walking drifts, auto-ethnographic writing and performer training exercises could be self-led without the need for Göze, or any other trained facilitator, to be present while still providing a similar creative and pedagogic experience. This coincided with the emergence of my own walking practice, where I investigated embodied ways of engaging with stories including what it means to locate (place) and locate (find) a story within the bodily gestures and rhythm of a walk. One of Göze’s exercises called Stepping (Saner 2025) aligned with this current exploration.

Stepping is based on the simple action of taking a step with one foot and retreating, while keeping the other foot rooted to the ground. During the exercise this action is repeated while being asked to give attention to different stimuli that arise through the body. This may be how the foot makes contact with the ground, maintaining balance, distributing weight, or associated emotional and imaginative responses. The instructions sound simple, but “within its simplicity the exercise invites complex and nuanced processes” (Saner and Robinson 2019, 252). The role of the trainer during this process is to observe the participant closely and use verbal instructions or physical indications to encourage the participant towards these more complex and nuanced layers. The questions and instructions are not pre-defined and may change dynamically based on what is happening to the student and how the trainer adjusts prompts based on their observations.

The design brief was an embodied and relational problem which provided an ideal opportunity to continue the development of my own research on embodied design. How can the embodied knowledge created when a student steps under the guidance of a professional tutor be turned into something transferable and self-initiated? Could my interest in locating pre-recorded audio replace the tutor? And if so, what form would it take and how would one engage with it? What could I learn from working with theatre practitioners that might inform my own embodied practice?

The project’s major milestones were two events, a research-in-progress demonstration at Tapra Conference, Bristol in 2017, and Becoming Tortoise, a public installation held at Goldsmith Studio 3. The project was additionally disseminated as a workshop and presentation called “Locating Stories: Becoming, Empathy and Play in Embodied Experiences with Theatre Practitioners” (Robinson 2017) at the PhD by Design Conference in Sheffield in 2017. Findings from this project and its relevance to digital performer training are discussed in the article “Designing Performer Training: Digital Encounters with Things and People” (Saner and Robinson 2019, 250-269) in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal.

View my thesis page, for more context of this project. Or,  download my thesis, Bodies (in)Form: Reconceptualising Embodied Design as Intercorporeal Encounters, on the Goldsmiths GRO website to read about project outcomes.