Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Stephen Johnson
Claire Fogal, “Relational Performance Pedagogy as Creative Inheritance”
This paper shares the key findings of my 2024 UBC dissertation “Relational Performance Pedagogy: Decroux and Grotowski based innovations in Western Canada.” The project was personal, investigating the entwined training inheritance I’ve received from my father Dean Fogal, a first-generation creative descendant of Etienne Decroux, as well as three primary physical theatre mentors from the lineage of Jerzy Grotowski: first-generation teacher Linda Putnam, and second-generation artists Kathleen Weiss and David MacMurray Smith. MacMurray Smith is also a second-generation “Decrouvian” as a student of Decroux’s assistants Jean Asselin and Denise Boulanger. I see the pedagogical developments of my four teachers as laterally hierarchal “diagonal transmissions” within their respective lineages – honouring their sources with integrity while extending in new directions. Within their collective innovations I identify what I term “relational performance pedagogy.” Techniques developed by these teachers promote the relationality, autonomy and wellbeing of the actor by cultivating a capacity for what I call portable “grounded belonging.” The productive intersection between the Grotowski lineage and Indigenous theatre development in Canada is traced through Saskatchewan Cree theatre artist and theorist Floyd Favel’s appreciation for Grotowski’s non-racist teachings and encouragement, as well as MacMurray Smith’s twelve-year service as Core Trainer for Margo Kane and Full Circle First Nations Performance’s Ensemble Training Program which nurtured some of the most prominent Indigenous theatre makers working today. Through their comprehensive relationality, the practices of Fogal, Putnam, Weiss and MacMurray Smith are valuable contributors to a forward-facing embodied performance pedagogy integrating both personal agency and ensemble wellbeing.
Jill Carter and Kathleen Gallagher, “‘And what remains for the two-leggeds to do’?: AI, teaching, and the change we never asked for”
Theatre scholars and teachers Jill Carter and Kathleen Gallagher recently attended a keynote talk by a Nobel prize-winning scholar who argued that AI teachers are already better than human ones. These AI teachers have ‘inherited’ language and teaching skills from their human trainers, already surpassing our teaching value; they do what we do more efficiently and effectively, so said the expert.
As we transition into the greater presence of AI in classrooms, rehearsal spaces, and artistic practices, our paper will seriously consider what this move means for the social relations of teaching and learning and for the long traditions– Indigenous, western, eastern—and human inheritances of teaching. Carter and Gallagher will present on reflexive fieldwork they have undertaken on the matter of teaching that is not AI-driven, taking account of what is happening in these relations and contexts of questioning and collaboration that technological innovation might never learn. If storytelling is a ceremonial act, how will the ceremonial encounter (in spaces of teaching and learning, within the research endeavor, or on the public stage) shift and transform with the introduction of an other-than-human conductor? Proceeding from an honest, undefensive exploration of what teaching is/does/means, we consider in this paper what is left for the two-leggeds of now to do, and to ‘pass down’, to future generations.
We take seriously bell hooks’ assertion that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” and have asked ourselves what role teachers must play in this complicated moment of passage.
Andy Houston and Reina C. Nuefeldt, “Dialogic + Relational Aesthetics: Engaging Difference on Campus through Performance and Pedagogy”
How do we reconceive pedagogies to support new directions in theatre and performance that at the same time address problems of difference and division within a university setting? This paper presents insights from a co-taught course called “Relational Aesthetics Towards Dialogue” in which we brought together pedagogies from Theatre and Performance with Peace and Conflict Studies to address issues of difference and polarization on campus.
Relational aesthetics, drawing on Bourriaud, Kester, Bishop, and O’Donnell immerses students in collaborative artistic creation with the broader campus community, in pursuit of a platform of engagement which challenges traditional representations of identity, language, the body, and place in contemporary discourse and media. Critical dialogue, drawing on Gurin, Nagda and Zuñiga, emphasizes building relationships and understanding through storytelling, empathic listening, perspective-taking while attending to constitutive effects of power and privilege.
The combination of these two approaches was our attempt to engage difference with care and creativity, building ‘architectures’ of co-reliance, trust, and respect amongst students.
In the paper we discuss how these pedagogies worked in practise, and how this process was reflected in the students’ projects.
Biographies:
SSHRC supported UBC Public Scholar Claire Fogal’s 2024 dissertation examines the pedagogy of her father Dean Fogal and other senior Grotowski and Decroux-based mentors. A Vancouver director, teacher and theatre creator, Claire contributed to The Mime Handbook and Research and Reconciliation, and published in TDPT, Percées, and upcoming Embodied Action.
Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi), theatre-maker and faculty member at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS) at the University of Toronto, applies Indigenous aesthetic principles and traditional knowledge systems to contemporary performance.
Kathleen Gallagher is Director of the CDTPS and studies theatre pedagogy and global social issues and relations.
Andy Houston (he/him/they) is an associate professor in the Theatre and Performance program at the University of Waterloo.
Reina C. Nuefeldt (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies.