Organised by the Working Group Performance and Pedagogy, Adelheid Mers and Rumen Rachev

This workshop is part of Performance Studies international.* 

The Performance and Pedagogy Group is forming anew. While we (Adelheid and Rumen) had already looked forward to inviting you to develop directions with us in person, in 2020, and then this summer, in Rijeka, we were instead immersed in online lives and education. This sharpened our thinking about our core interest, relating embodied knowing, institutional being, and imaginative doing, as and through pedagogy and performance. We assume that performing/performance engenders specific ways of knowing. At the same time, organizations/institutions, including their architectural, textual and digital platforms are formal and informal rule systems that codify forms of being. Therefore, we want to explore how doing in performance, as participants understand it, currently does and in the future could inform institutions of pedagogy. Here, we think of academia as much as of education and emancipation narratives within performance and the performing arts. 

In order to address the above, we will host a series of online sessions, proposing multiple platforms and modes of interaction, by which to investigate permutations of the question how knowing in performing shapes performance pedagogies and the institutions that house and deploy them. To facilitate these sessions, we will first seed a Research Catalogue site with questions and materials. We will then host two sets of global workshops, each made up of three, biweekly sessions. Each session will be documented and shared before the next meeting, so participants can choose to work through all three sessions, or join anytime during the sequence. During workshops, we will be moving between Zoom, SpatialChat/Wonder, and Google docs, hoping you will be moved to draw, perform, collect and share ideas that emerge in this way. 

We are hoping that you will be interested in helping to shape the Working Group Performance and Pedagogy going forward. For this year, we aim to create a foundation for ongoing inquiry, documented in our Research Catalogue pages.

Platforms: Zoom, SpatialChat, Wonder, Discord, Google docs, ResearchCatalogue 

Times: To accommodate global time zones, we will offer two, three-session workshop series, on alternating weekends. Times listed here are UTC/GMT-5, or CDT. Here is a time zone converter.