This thesis provides insight into the experience of the performer trainer in the university conservatoire. Situated across actor training, music education, and dance instruction, it moves beyond technique or tradition to examine how teaching is shaped in action. It configures seven peer-reviewed publications into an ecology of practice structured around three interdependent themes, each developed through five sub-themes:

• Working from the Body and Its Sensations: Intra-Personal Perceptions

• Facilitating Connections and Collaborations: Inter-Personal Relationships

• Navigating Institutional and Professional Expectations: Extra-Personal Contexts

Within this ecology, aspects of training take on different meanings at each layer: teaching foregrounds the body’s temporal-spatial intelligence, converting sensation into embodied knowledge, and cultivating self-awareness; learning develops through listening with the whole self, dialogic exchange, and ensemble commitment; and pedagogy navigates conservatoire traditions, university structures, and industry expectations that produce the conditions for professional formation. Rather than operating as separate domains, these layers continuously shape one another, as embodied perception supports collaboration, collaboration gives form to institutional demands, and institutional conditions shape what can be sensed, shared, and sustained. Together, they reveal performer training as a dynamic negotiation rather than a linear progression.

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by prior publication, this thesis reads its constituent papers as a coherent body of work. In doing so, it reframes performer training as an ecology of practice, advancing a critical, reflexive, and ethically attuned account of teaching across theatre, music, and movement in the university conservatoire.