After reading the informative introduction to Göze Saner’s book Practicing Archetype – Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy. (2025) I was overcome by memories from my basic training in theatre and the debates and controversies at that time, which the book now illuminates in a new light. I was also surprised that I had never thought of my current performances for camera with trees as solo performances nor as ‘work on the self’, or as Saner suggests, ‘encounters with the self’. This is probably due to the fact that my primary education is in directing, not acting, and my identity is not that of a performer, so the idea of ‘training’ is not so prominent. And all the years of teaching performance art in an environment of dance and theatre, emphasising the need to make a distinction to those ‘crafts’, have of course left their mark, too. The real effort in traditional performance art is to do an action once, and to show the effort, as opposed to repeating an action in a way that it seems effortless or as if made for the first time, and so on. After reading the introduction I am fascinated by the idea of looking at my practice through the lens of solo performance, maybe even work on the self, actually, as suggested by the subtitle of the book, Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy.
 
The subtitles in the introduction give an idea of the breadth thoroughness of the contextualisations. She discusses first the notion of self in sections titled The Self in Performer Training, including Work on Self and Critical Reflective Practice; Configuring the Self; Self-Configuring; Encounters with Self; Therapeutic and Liberatory Practices of Self; Work on Self as an End in Itself; The Laboratory of Self /Selves. Then she treats the notion of solo performance in Solo Performance, including Solo (as) Pedagogy; What is Solo Performance?; Solo Political Actions, Solo Audiences, Solo Selves; Solo Imaginings, and further Solo Questions: Presence, Identity, Action; Training (for) Solo; Solo Problems; Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy. After that she turns to he notion of archetype in Practicing Archetype: A Methodology, A brief history of acting and psychology, Acting and the Collective Unconscious, Archetype and Coloniality, Repairing Multiplicity in Archetypal Psychology, Archetypal Image, Engaging Archetypally, Decolonising Archetypes, Encounters with Self as a Critical Liberatory Practice of Archetypes. The introduction ends with section on My Background, Audio Practice, and Instructionality. And this was just the beginning. The main chapters are devoted to three archetypal figures, Echo, Odysseus and Sisyfos. 1. Conversations with Echo: A Political Pedagogy of Presence (or, Teaching Presence is Political), 2.Interviews with Odysseus: (Dis)orienting Identities
in Training, 3. Pushing a Stone with Sisyphus: Action, Repetition,
and Difference, and finally the Conclusion: A Critical, Archetypal, and Liberatory Solo Performer Training.
 
She writes: “In Practicing Archetype, using presence, identity, and action as my points of focus, I disrupt the binary thinking that separates inner and outer realms in psychophysical training regimes, and use an ‘ideologically aware’ approach to reconfigure embodied forms of research into the self in all its fragmented and interrelated multiplicities, and as part of fragmented and multiple relationships with others.” (saner 2025, 10) She condenses a key part of her theoretical context as follows: “Drawing on a methodology that connects the fluid and precise poststructuralist understanding of archetype proposed in archetypal psychology (Berry 1982, Hillman 1977, 1983, 1992, 1995, 2005) with the interconnected understanding of self and community, as can be found in liberation psychology (Afuape 2011; Afuape and Hughes 2016; Martín-Baró 1994; Watkins and Shulman 2008), I examine solo performer pedagogy as a liberatory space for investigating the cross-sections of the personal and the political in one’s own body, mind, psyche, and relationships and, in doing so, modelling an accessible critical reflective embodied practice.” (Saner 2025, 3-4) None of these specific discussions within psychology are known to me, whereas the conversations related to laboratory theatre or actor training seem more familiar, although I have not followed recent developments.
 
In the very beginning Saner concretises her understanding of presence, identity and action for the performer, when she writes: “the archetypal figures Echo, Odysseus, and Sisyphus … help me organise my thinking ontologically in a way that interlinks solo performance and solo performer training around three questions, each addressed in a separate chapter: how, who, and what. /–/ The first question, how, is with regard to presence – how a solo performer holds the attention of an audience or how a performer in training learns to make an appearance. The second question asks who, or what identity, role, mask, character, or self a performer becomes, embodies, indicates, or plays in a solo performance and how her training prepares her to undergo such characterisation processes. And finally, the question what, addresses what a solo performer does, in performance and in training.” (Saner 2025, 3)
 
She later notes how the “three questions or problems I identified earlier, presence, identity, and action, propose a map for interrogating the individual-collective dynamic through embodied forms of solo training. They indicate the relational perspectives from which the self can be observed, studied, and articulated within actor training: the self as a kind of being there, the self as an identifying, and the self as a doing.” (Saner 2025, 39) Later she explains: “Echo, who perishes as a body and remains pure vocal resonance, speaks to me about the actor’s presence. Odysseus, who tells stories under many guises to many different audiences, offers wisdom on how the actor can navigate with and around questions of identity. Sisyphus teaches repetition and difference, lectures on habit, memory, behaviour and action, and hints towards lessons on freedom and liberatory acts. /–/ In the rhizomatic understanding of archetype … every engagement with repetition in training, theatre, or life, enacts Sisyphus; every (re)telling of a story with a specific audience performs Odysseus; every presence that reveals a new space recalls Echo.” (Saner 2025, 57)
 
The questions of presence, identity and action would be interesting to think of in the context of my practice Talking with Trees, potentially a solo performance: how is presence generated in recorded unedited speech, who is performing, only the speaker or both of us, as well as what kind of action is undertaken by talking to a tree…
 
 
 
Göze Saner, PRACTICING ARCHETYPE – Solo Performer Training as Critical
Pedagogy, in the series Perspectives on Performer Training, Routledge 2025