Frances Barbe shares her intercultural approach to preparing performers in her work as director, movement-director and actor-trainer. First training in classical ballet she later encountered Japanese butoh dance and has spent more than two decades training in butoh all over the world and applying insights gained from butoh not only to movement-based dance work but to training and directing actors. Her work also draws on her experience of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training (SMAT) and Nobbs Suzuki Praxis (NSP) – a unique Australian variant of Suzuki’s approach. Frances retraces the steppingstones of her journey from ballet to butoh, from dance to theatre, from Australia to Japan, London and Germany. Her keynote is organised around some key moments of insight from her journey that now inform her unique intercultural approach to training performers that she applies to preparing performers at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). 

Her keynote will foreground the evolving nature of the student-teacher relationship, and how she cultivates the agency of each individual in training both craft and creativity. She examines how and why she weaves together codified and uncodified movement training for the actor, to release creativity and develop a nuanced command of craft so that they can meet the demands of a wide range of performance approaches. She will articulate how her psychophysical approach, informed by butoh and Suzuki, works alongside established psychological approaches to acting as a complement and not a challenge those paradigms. She will explore how intercultural training broadens a performer’s awareness, encouraging them to look beyond a singular notion of what acting is to learn the value of remaining open to multiple paradigms as they navigate complexity in their art-making. 

View ALL CONFERENCE TOPICS

Asian Intercultural Conference 2023

UEN Charity/CPE No: 200818680E | CPE Registration Period: 13 Jul 2020 to 12 Jul 2024

Intercultural Theatre Institute Ltd is supported by the National Arts Council for the period from 1 Apr 2021 to 31 Mar 2024