PERFORMANCE PEDAGOGY
Ends collaborators are currently engaged with several projects around the idea of “performance pedagogy”. Performance pedagogy, as it is put forward in this body of work, is a reorientation of performance as always already pedagogy. Such a performance pedagogy is understood as an act of transfer, performative production of relation, and epistemic co-habitance and incompleteness. To that end, across our workshops and publications, “performance pedagogy” has come to hold more than teaching performance, performance studies, or performance-enhanced teaching. Instead, performance pedagogy emerged as an assembly of formations that question and articulate relations between performance, research, and pedagogy.
COLLABORATIVE ONLINE INTERNATIONAL LEARNING
Ends has developed a teaching practice based on collaborative teaching and learning, centring on the intersection between pedagogy and dramaturgy. We have developed our pedagogic approach using the model proposed by Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). Beginning in 2020, we have delivered modules as part of a partnership between LASALLE, the University of the Arts Singapore and The University of Antwerp. Thinking of pedagogy and dramaturgy in connection with one another, our teaching has followed a dramaturgical through-line that has sought to think through the pandemic experience. Our syllabi have developed into a trilogy: Dramaturgies of the Pandemic, Dramaturgies of the Unhappened, and Dramaturgies of Joy. You can learn more about these courses and their syllabi below.
Get in touch if you would like to explore possibilities for collaborating in this manner with us.
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Space and time constitute the basis of any given theatre performance: being ‘here-and-now’ together in the same place with others for a limited duration of time has long been considered the prerequisite of performances. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre-goers were introduced to novel performance forms in which spaces were dismantled, time was disintegrated, and various modes of consciousness were flattened to a single unit of quarantine space and time. Taking this first-hand experience as the base of reflection, students take part in a five-week COIL (Collaborate Online International Learning) exercise, which focuses on understanding the emerging dramaturgies of space in performances that are appearing in relation to digital arenas and outdoor spaces.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of lives worldwide were lost. Many of the victims' families could not even mourn and say goodbye to their loved ones properly due to the stringent health and safety protocols in place. Societies and communities have undergone unprecedented trauma. The inability to gather and share in the grief and pain has only amplified the feelings of loss, despair, anxiety, and hopelessness triggered by the pandemic. The public space and our bodies now need to be seen from the post-pandemic perspective, where a vast amount of “absence” of people and massive "forgetting" of unrealized events are integrated into the everyday sceneries. Could this be an entry point to think how theatre might help the world to overcome the pandemic through new-found aesthetics of care? How can theatre fill the gaps left by all those encounters, rituals, and processes that could not occur and perhaps are still in a state of suspension?
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of gathering in the collective here-and-now was halted. While digital environments maintained a semblance of community, the experience of sharing a live event was largely lost. The inability to share the pain was too restricted, as was the ability to share joy. When the message of memento mori resounds in the air, perhaps stronger than ever, people are willing to enjoy life while it lasts. After around two years, theatre slowly reawakened from the digital slumber. As if to quickly dispel the darkness of the pandemic, various theatre and performance practitioners shifted towards the dramaturgy of joy: a caring dramaturgy with positive vibes that attempts to bring people together to remind each other that life can be fun again. Our mission in this workshop is to carefully approach what comes after the era of suppression and paucity in theatres: should we naïvely embrace the stage of utopic joyfulness, or should we be more careful of the abundance and excessiveness that accompanies the festive energy? How can parties and ecstasies be critically assessed by keeping at bay the possibility of collective violence in the name of a gnarly cause, such as racism or fundamentalist nationalisms?