PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY TOOLKIT
This toolkit has been developed as part of an Educational Enhancement Award from UAL that emerges from the establishment of a School of Performance at Wimbledon College of Arts. Wimbledon has a long tradition of performance design disciplines and performance art making that has emerged alongside fine art practices since its origins as an art school in 1930. In 2018, the school of performance introduced acting, theatre and performance making into the art school context. What follows is informed by a rethinking of performance pedagogy through this lens, exploring the potential of performance as a concept and action for learning and teaching that can be applied across disciplines and contexts of educational theory and practice.
Art school pedagogy, with an emphasis on finding out through making, offers an ethos and approach that traverses and slips between conventional and well established pedagogical modes of teaching performance. The two most established models are that of the conservatoire, a colonial configuration that seeks to preserve hierarchies and practices (with gestures towards the experimental to keep it othered) and the drama degree, that seeks to study theatre and performance as an object rather than a thing done (with gestures towards practice as illustrations or etudes). In constructing - and thinking through- this tool kit, I intend to circumnavigate these conventional models by centreing the art school as the pedagogical ground.
The conceptual and theoretical foundation of the toolkit is two fold. Firstly, to centre (or introduce) a collaboration with the nonhuman in student practice to enable environmental and climate consciousness to be embedded in curriculum design. Secondly, to deconstruct the existing hierarchies of performance practices and rethink the canon of texts, techniques and practices used in pedagogical structures. It is hoped that these foundations become apparent through encountering and using the tools themselves. The critical frameworks of these positions are unpacked throughout and can be extended further through the bibliography at the end.