Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present and Future by Peter Zazzali (review)

Reviewed by: Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present and Future by Peter Zazzali Evi Stamatiou Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present and Future. Peter Zazzali. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2022; pp. xxi + 229. In Actor Training in Anglophone Countries, actor and educator Peter Zazzali discusses practice with its theoretical underpinnings confidently, engaging a range of readers spanning from performance scholars to actor trainers and students of acting. Zazzali argues that Western actor training needs to reconsider any of its practices that surreptitiously reproduce dominant ideologies, such as white supremacy and patriarchy, and work toward diversity, equity, and inclusivity for all students. Actor Training in Anglophone Countries builds on Zazzali's previous monograph, Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education. In both books, he uses ethnographic data to trace the history of the actor training field. But whereas Acting in the Academy centers on how to equip American graduates for employability, the latest book uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social power to assess the student as a social agent. At the core of Zazzali's study is the development of actor-entrepreneurs who create and manage their own work and brand in response to the needs of the arts and society in general. In acknowledging the historical moment associated with both the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, Zazzali investigates the endeavors of selected actor training institutions across the UK, US, Canada, and Australasia to decolonize their curricula, meaning to dismantle colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist structures of actor training. "Decolonization" is a much-debated term, the metaphorical use of which has been previously considered to disrespect Indigenous people. Recently, Amy Mihyang Ginther, in her introduction to Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training (Routledge, 2023), acknowledges the perplexity of using terminologies surrounding the pursuit of social justice in education and invites critical generosity among scholars and practitioners. Zazzali's understanding of "decolonization" draws from Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) and resonates with his use of Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital to theorize how social power is structured within actor training processes. Originating from his observation of the French colonies, Bourdieu's symbolic capital illuminates how the individual unknowingly embodies and practices colonialism, which implies the need for a conscious effort to decolonize themself. This notion reflects Tuhiwai Smith's call to "decolonize" by confronting "the Western academic canon in its entirety," including its "pedagogy" and "its self-generating arrogance, its origin mythologies and the stories that it tells to reinforce its hegemony."1 Zazzali might not be as explicit, but he successfully synthesizes the two theorists to underpin his examination of how "each program's pedagogical mission and administrative structure" interconnect (xvii). In Actor Training in Anglophone Countries, Zazzali contributes to the urgent need and desire of current actor training programs to develop practices and their theoretical [End Page 163] underpinnings that train good actors within "diverse, equitable and inclusive" models (179). Because of its impressive historical overview and successful links between anglophone institutions on three continents, Zazzali's book is a key reading on decolonizing actor training that will contextualize other recent works, such as Ginther's Stages of Reckoning, Lisa Peck's Act as a Feminist: Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy (Routledge, 2021), and my own Bourdieu in the Studio: Decolonising and Decentering Actor Training through Ludic Activism (Routledge, 2023). Zazzali's self-critical stance frames his ethnographic study. Six years of observing classes and seeing productions; interviewing students, staff, and alumni onsite and remotely; and researching institutional archives and relevant websites enable Zazzali to put institutions' current efforts to decolonize themselves in the context of their history. Zazzali finds British conservatoires "paternalistic" because they seem "overly reliant on hallowed practices at the expense of pedagogical innovation and cultural diversity" (9), resistant to actor-entrepreneur and non-Western practices. He describes US institutions that encourage transferrable skills as "commodified" because they produce superfluous numbers of actors for the already oversaturated industry (3). The "postcolonial model" he observes in anglophone Oceania combines traditional British training with non-Western...

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