Criticality Performed: Performative Learning Through Agonistic Interventions

Abstract

The Art School can often be an anathema to teaching and learning. Its constraining modules, timetables and architectures often control the learning experience producing narrow subject foci, devoid of risk and failure. In this paper, we argue that pedagogical performance is key to the challenges of space (the school as a physical constraint) and time (the ticking clock of the module). Through a close reading of what Chantal Mouffe (2013) describes as a multiplicity of social spaces, where the students engage in practices that reveal new and novel ways of creating social relationships and sites of learning, we will interrogate how cross disciplinary practise across art and design delivers participatory experiences designed to scale from local to national to international contexts, examining performative pedagogy not as mimicry but performance as activation. The contribution of actor/theatre training to ‘disruptive’ teaching (in the age of ecological emergency)