Critical Pedagogy and Place

To address potential processes of reconciliation and examine colonial and settler colonial situations, this chapter draws upon the author's role as a professor at the University of Guam within the larger Western-dominant space of academe and as an apprentice to Austronesian seafaring directly connected to cultural networks in the Marianas, Micronesia, and Oceania. They suggest that decolonization and its closely associated processes of demilitarizing involves an ontological shift through which the knowledge, testimonies, and insights of Indigenous populations are actualized in transformation-based practices of critical pedagogy. This chapter highlights ways to approach contemporary learning situations as every form of institutional learning occurs within the classroom setting and the social historical geography of the region. Ultimately, they construct an example of what critical Indigenous performance pedagogy might look like.

ARTS-BASED ACTION RESEARCH ON ENHANCING CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY THROUGH AFFECT WITHIN PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE ART AND PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY

This article presents arts-based action research on enhancing children’s creativity through affect within participatory performance art and performance pedagogy. The study hypothesis was that children’s creativity can be enhanced by affect experienced at a performance site. The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of children’s involvement in artistic performance on their creativity at a performance site. The impact of interactions at the site, the co-participating children,and the involved artists were monitored on a daily basis to collect qualitative data, which were analyzed using a general inductive approach. Objective themes relating to the variables were retrieved from the collected data and assigned codes, concepts, and keywords extracted from photographs,video recordings, and observation notes. The case under investigation was the “Nomadic Radical Academy 2020: The Good, the Bad, and the Art”, which built on a pilot event held in 2019. This research concluded that performance art can have a social and creative impact during an art event through children’s participation and can be used by performance artists and educators.

Performance as Product, Process and Pedagogy: Laboring for Truth as Artist and Academic

As part of my practice-based doctoral thesis, I designed an experiment to develop a model of collaborative theatre-making based on collective ownership, in contrast to prevailing hierarchical collaborative practice, where artistic vision lies mainly with the director, and divisions of labour dominate. I conducted the experiment in the real world of rehearsals and performances with a theatre collective I established for this purpose. In this article I discuss my Marxist framework, justifying why I believe capital and cooperation to be the primary dialectic of cultural economy, at the root of the hegemony of hierarchical collaborative theatre. I identify the relationship between Marxist theory and Alain Badiou’s (2005) disruption of the status quo via ‘truth’, as well as and Baz Kershaw’s (2011) essential components for PAR, premised on dialectical paradoxes. I discuss Dialectical Collaborative Theatre (DCT), the original research, rehearsal and performance pedagogy I developed in response to prevailing collaborative practice. While ideology and ethics are integral to DCT, the focus of this article is the pedagogy born out of the dialectical interplay between praxis and truth. I am currently exploring the ideology of DCT in another forthcoming and parallel article, "Dialectical Collaborative Theatre: Ideology, Ethics and the Practice of Equality."

Harnessing the Wild Horses of Neurosis Contemplative Performance Pedagogy

Developing organizing principles for training actors in improvisational forms, Worley turns to Asian philosophies and Tibetan Buddhism for contemplative approaches and some hints at alternatives to the usual audience/actor relationship.

BRIDGING THE CITY: CONNECTING ART, PERFORMANCE DESIGN, ENVIRONMENT AND EDUCATION

This study explores knotworks and networks within art, participatory performance design, the environment and education specialists and institutions within the case-project “Nomadic Radical Academy”, realised in 2019 and 2020. The novelty of the research lies in its investigation of how international collaborations impact the performance pedagogy project at the local level. The project bridged a wide spectrum of actors in order to design an interactive space and participatory infrastructure involving a diverse variety of stakeholders. The projects were created by the author of this paper and involved the art venue Gallery Meno Parkas in Kaunas, local Kaunas schools and environment-friendly local art initiatives, families in Kaunas, Kaunas Municipality, The Lithuanian Council for Culture, a performance designer and international artists from the Baltic-Nordic region. The author created the performative milieu in the gallery space with the intention of educating children and young people about the environment and climate change through performance pedagogy methods. The research question is as follows: How are the knotworks and networks created during the planning and realisation of the international performance pedagogy project, and how do they target the local community and influence projects locally in real-time? The study materials were collected by arts-based methods and analysed by utilising reflexive research. The data collected during the planning and implementation phases are the author’s notes and reflections, notes from feedback and discussions with the involved artists and photos and videos. This research can be valuable to educators, performance designers and artists interested in knotwork- and network-building. This research focused on the planning and realisation of the project by involving international performance professionals in site-specific projects designed for local communities.

Performance Pedagogy: Performing Fluxus Pedagogy in a Contemporary Lithuanian Context

Educators practice performance pedagogy as the method where an educator/facilitator is seen as a performer or actor (Pineau 1994, p. 4). This paper presents an analysis of the historical roots of performance pedagogies in Fluxus pedagogies and performance pedagogy practices within participatory art events in Lithuania as exemplified by festivals AN88 (1988) and AN89 (1989). The case of my research rests on the contemporary implementation of performance pedagogy techniques during the course The Temporary Department of Time, Space, and Action for BA students at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. This research aims to define the concept theories within performance pedagogy in the art academy education, which developed behind the terms Human Semiotics (Andersen 2002), Hyper Performer,1 and InterMedia (Higgins 1984). This project was implemented using the strategy of critical utopian action research in the context of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The empirical material was gathered during my employment as a guest lecturer and the implementation of my pedagogical internship at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.2These concept theories are defined through. a reflexive analysis of archive material on the historical origin of performance pedagogies, originating in Fluxus pedagogies, local Lithuanian participatory art, and data from the contemporary case of my project The Temporary Department of Time, Space and Action (2018), in the form of archive material, photographs, interviews, observations, notes, and my diary. The results of this research are the application of performance pedagogy concepts and terminology to the art and education projects and the definition of the key concept theories within this field. These results can be useful for artists and those practicing university pedagogy.