Languaging a widened embodied repertoire

This article develops a languaging lens for analysing actor training with Mary Overlie’s viewpoints to reveal an actor’s widened embodied repertoire when privileging peer actors over spectators. I draw from interactional sociolinguistics to introduce the notion of a repertoire as a collection of embodied and linguistic resources that are known and unknown by the actor. Overlie’s viewpoints are proposed as useful starting points for facilitating the actor to access such resources. A training example with third-year actors in an Australian acting conservatoire is the focus of the analysis. Within this context, languaging helps to conceptualise the moments that actors prioritise the intelligibility of their peer actors to draw more widely from their socio-cultural, linguistic and embodied resources. Facilitating these moments uncovers actors’ increased access to resources that are otherwise omitted in actor training and devising contexts due to the hegemonic restraints of the spectator’s gaze.