Reviewed by: Anatomy of Performance Training by John Matthews Julie Rada Anatomy of Performance Training. By John Matthews. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; pp. 224. Training as an imperative in performance practice is embedded, ideologically and practically, in the discourse of theatre-making. Anatomy of Performance Training is John Matthews’s latest installment in his ongoing investigation of the place of training within performance disciplines. This book builds on his previous exploration of performance training in Training for Performance: A Meta-disciplinary Account (2011) in which Matthews critically questioned training as compulsory and ubiquitous, interrogated the presumed linkages between performer training and skills, and established a “meta-disciplinary” ground for training discourse informed by his participation in actor training, dance training, rehabilitative physical therapy, and monastic practices. In Anatomy of Performance Training he progresses his argument, positioning training within the scope of not just performance training, but human identity. Overtly eclectic and philosophical, Matthews is interested in how the ideology of training emerges and is reproduced in the individual, in the private, postmodern crises of psychological cohesion and in performances of self. He also is concerned with how training manifests publicly, in institutions and the globalized economy. Arguing that training surfaces ontologically in the problem of having a body and being in the world, Matthews uses the structures of the body to cleverly organize his musings, beginning with “Anatomy,” and advancing into chapters titled “Hand,” “Foot,” “Mouth,” “Heart,” and “Ear,” concluding and unifying in the final “Body of Work.” In this unique organization, he uncovers revelations through describing surprising intersections among such diverse topics as talent-show television franchises and John the Baptist (as in the “Mouth” chapter) or professional elite diving and the care economy (as he elucidates in “Heart”). In “Anatomy,” the introduction to this distinctive text, Matthews assembles a number of philosophical thinkers in order to explore the ideology of training as a “general class of human activity” (13). Deriving much of his argument from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition—namely, her concept of plurality as constitutive of the human experience—as well as Aristotle’s observation of human mimetic faculty and thus potentiality, Matthews accumulates a number of other voices to weigh in as well. He includes Roland Roberston, José López and Gary Potter, John Dewey, Immanuel Kant, Raymond Carver, Jon Mckenzie, Arthur Frank, Erving Goffman, and Simon Shepherd, among others. This list is hardly exhaustive and it evidences Matthews’s rhizomatic research, extending across literary and pedagogical theory, as well as scholarship in anthropology, sociology, globalization, or, in the case of Carver, poetry. Within the first few pages the reader is overwhelmed with the scope of this work, and, in fact, this may indeed be Matthews’s main point: that all roads lead back to the persistence and continuity of an ideology of training, traceable to Aristotle’s “The man who is to be good must be well trained and habituated,” and stalwart in the face of post-postmodernism’s tendencies to undermine and disintegrate (19). [End Page 178] In this introduction, Matthews establishes his voice, which affects an informed though unapologetically rambling tone. He is decidedly heterogeneous, vacillating between dense theoretical esotericism and then surprising the reader with charming anecdotes or quoting, for example, the song “Dem Bones” by James Weldon Johnson (“toe bone connected to the foot bone”) (26). In this, Matthews illustrates the postmodernity in which he situates his argument: his style is self-consciously intertextual and feels layered as though it is a series of hyperlinks, a pastiche of cultural references, both high- and low-brow, which accumulate to describe and inform the distinctly twenty-first-century conversation about which he writes. Matthews, notably, is interrogating training as an urgent question relevant to today’s practitioners, and asserts that “[p]lurality, potentiality, signification, and metabolism are the aspects of the human condition that … give rise to the socially determined experiences of being human today” (29). In the subsequent chapters, he goes on to explore various historical vignettes as examples of how training is innate and a component of everyday life, elucidating also how training has become pervasive and explicitly ideological in our contemporary social reality. In “Hand,” Matthews begins by describing...
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Dec 1, 2023
Philipp Wolf 
Open Access