2025 AusAct Conference

Transforming Safety & Identity in Training

Flinders University, Adelaide
Thursday 6 — Saturday 8 March 2025

If Truthfulness and Transformation were perhaps the twin (conflicting?) totems of the skilled actor for generations, then the highest values of today’s student may be authenticity and safety. In response, around our region, institutions are re-committing to training that “ensures the safety and agency of all actors” (Moor 90).

Meanwhile, in significant international collections, including Stages of Reckoning (ed. Amy Mihyang Ginter), Critical Acting Pedagogy (ed. Lisa Peck and Evi Stamatiou), and Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training (ed. Petronilla Whitfield), colleagues around the world have grappled with the intersections of identity and training.

How is the value of transformation itself transforming in the present cultural shift towards prioritising the performance of authentic identity? As trainers, how do we consider a meaning of safety which allows for the fruitful intersection of identity with discourses of transformation? To interrogate these and other questions, we are particularly interested in proposals that address the following in both embodied and theoretical forms:

• Uncomfortable vs unsafe: navigating intergenerational perspectives on language used in performance training.
• Navigating the assessment of embodied work in a university environment: balancing absenteeism, non-participation and access.
• Adapting training methodologies for neurodivergent students.
• Navigating issues of identity, authenticity, and transformation in performance.
• Managing conflict and miscommunication in the studio.
• Actor training terminology and gender identity and expression.
• Touch without touch: human contact when contact isn’t possible.

We invite proposals across two specific categories:

• Paper presentations, for 20-minute academic papers that interrogate some aspect of historical and/or contemporary actor training, identity and safety; and
• Practical workshops, for 60- or 90-minute training sessions that offer an embodied exploration of an advance in training practices. We are particularly interested in sessions in which undergraduate students can participate.

The conference dates are aligned with the 2025 Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week, and we warmly encourage colleagues to extend their stay and experience some of Adealide’s ‘mad March’. Thursday 6 March will be a pre-conference day for postgraduate students and industry colleagues, followed by two days of conference papers and workshops. 

Abstract and Submission Information
Participants who are interested in presenting a paper and/or conducting a workshop must submit an abstract up to 250 words each via this form. Applicants who are interested in submitting an abstract for a workshop must clearly state the level of participation (including whether it can accommodate student participation), the aims and objectives of the workshop, influences/inspiration behind the work, and any other requirements needed. In addition to the abstract submission, participants should also include a short, 100-word bio for all presenters.

Submission deadline: Wednesday 29 January 2025. In order to allow delegates to arrange travel in advance, we are providing rolling acceptances at the end of each month; final acceptances will be delivered by Friday 31 January 2025.
 
For any further information, including registration, please visit our website at www.ausact.com.au or contact Conference Co-Convenors Tiffany Knight (tiffany.knight@flinders.edu.au) and Renato Musolino (renato.musolino@flinders.edu.au).