What will it take for scholars, teachers and makers of theatre and performance to survive twenty-first-century neo-liberal globalization? If the ‘global’, the ‘interdisciplinary’ and the ‘collaborative’ are now the terms on which our work is judged and our grants granted, what can and should these terms mean to us, beyond the monetary? If we internationalize our practices, what are the methods by which this internationalization can be most fruitful, its encounters most ethically productive? Or, to be as basic as possible about this braid of challenges: what exactly is ‘international’ performance research today, and how do you teach it ethically?
These are the provocative questions at the heart of International Performance Research Pedagogies. The book brings together reflections from students and teachers associated with the Erasmus Mundus MA programme in International Performance Research (MAIPR), which ran for eight years as a collaborative venture amongst the universities of Warwick, Amsterdam, Helsinki/Tampere, Arts in Belgrade and Trinity College Dublin. To mark the programme's end (itself a marker of the shifting European sands at this liminal moment in the continent's cultural history), the editors have gathered fifteen short reflections on key issues emergent from the programme's work.
The book's main strength lies in its focused reflection on a central, shared case study that has the power to open up a series of urgent, topical issues related to performance and its pedagogy in an ‘internationalized’ climate. This is especially true in those chapters that take up deep meta-disciplinary questions; for example, in ‘Scattered Speculations on the “Internationalization” of Performance Research’, Sruti Bala notes that ‘the call for the internationalization of the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies profoundly calls into question assumptions on the teaching and learning of the discipline’ (p. 58). These assumptions are foundational, though often invisible: what is our language of instruction? Who has access to it and who does not? How are our perspectives on our discipline's very ontologies shaped by that linguistic framework? What would it require to permit other performance ontologies (for example, indigenous or migrant ontologies) to become central to an internationalized performance teaching and learning network?
Other stand-out chapters do similar labour; Juan M. Aldape Muñoz and Lisa Skwirblies (both MAIPR graduates) pick up directly on the notion of decentring European performance ontologies and histories as they call for a rethinking of the ‘global graduate’ in terms of global South theory, and its capacity to transform ‘the conception of (global) culture from being framed as an epistemological object … to dramatizing it as an “epistemological subject or site for the production of knowledge”’ (p. 89). Mark Fleischman's ‘Towards a Pedagogy of Practice-as-Research’ reflects on the discombobulation that can attend a scholar from the ‘global South’ arriving in Europe to participate in the delivery of an EU-funded degree programme; he shares key pedagogical strategies that allowed him to shift a ‘teaching curriculum’ (mastered from above before delivery) to a ‘learning curriculum’ (co-created with students from multiple contexts, bearing multiple bodies of knowledge) that better served the MAIPR context (p. 132). Similarly, Joanne Tompkins's ‘Teaching Spatial Theory and Theatre “Site-Specifically”’ discusses a module in which she held lessons in literally a new space (including several theatre spaces) each week. This change of place provoked for students a welcome, embodied experience of a challenging theoretical curriculum that could cut across language barriers and different levels of student experience.
Several other chapters contain moments of profound insight and/or compelling teaching strategies to try out; I was preparing my modules for the coming school year as I read this book, and I found the intersection generative. Unfortunately, the book's organization into four sections – ‘Internationalizing the Discipline’, ‘The University as a Platform’, ‘Pedagogy in Action’ and ‘Curatorial Practices’ – feels arbitrary, and after a time each chapter begins to seem a lot like the last. Perhaps a firmer editorial hand might have alleviated this repetition, but truly this is a minor problem. Each chapter is short enough to allow readers to dip in and out, digging deeper as needed. In this sense, International Performance Research Pedagogies is a useful tool for all of us concerned about teaching well in our ‘global’ times.
