Decolonising Performance Training: Voice Messages from the South African Day to the Australian Night

This chapter is drawn from the first stage of performance training in French’s postdoctoral practice-as-research project Decolonising language ideologies in the body that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Given both the persistent issues with the rolling loss of electricity and bandwidth for video calls in South Africa, this project selected voice messages to navigate technological inequalities. The digital reading exchange between authors saw voice messages become meditative, reflective embodied and decolonising pedagogies. This chapter proposes the following factors as key contributors to this decolonisation: the mobilisation and transfer of embodiment within voice messages; the reciprocal and horizontal decisions made in the construction of this new ecology; the emphasis on orality and its relationship to key participants’ learning strengths; and corporeal displacement. Finally, the discussion puts forward processes of belief-building as core to the complex layering and unveiling of embodiment and knowledge within decolonising performance training and a South African higher educational context.