E(Lab)orating performance

E(Lab)orating Performance is a transnational collaborative teaching and learning project involving Massey University (New Zealand), University of Cape Town (South Africa), UWC Mahindra College (India), and University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). The project was devised to facilitate creative engagements between students and educators in theatre and performance classrooms at the participating institutions. By using online platforms to create transnational teaching and learning spaces, the project explored the affordances and the limitations of blended learning approaches to 'live' disciplines like Theatre and Performance Studies. In addition to exploring aspects of blended learning, the project was guided by an assumption that it might facilitate transnational cultural citizenship, through which participating students and educators might develop cosmopolitan engagements and openness to cultural differences. This paper critically examines the E(Lab)orating Performance project by providing an overview, a reflection on its various productive mistranslations, and a consideration of its effectiveness as a teaching and learning initiative.Keywords: transnational learningcosmopolitanismcultural citizenshipcollaborative teachingblended learningselfie performancedocumentary theatre Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. Wits University is home to an active, exciting, and internationally recognised History of Art department. With innovative approaches to multimodal teaching, learning, and research, Wits History of Art is committed to deepening and extending traditional understandings of the discipline.2. UWC Mahindra College has a student body of 200 young people, between 16 and 19 years of age, from over 60 countries. The Theatre Arts classes usually have between 10 and 15 students, and the pilot team-taught course (Applied Theatre) involved students who were in the second year of their IB Diploma Programme.3. Massey University is one of New Zealand's largest universities, with campuses in Palmerston North, Wellington, and Albany (Auckland), and a student body of approximately 35,000 students. The second team-taught course of E(lab)orating Performance involved the delivery of 139,220 Applied Theatre, which was offered to students enrolled at the Albany campus in Auckland (approximately 7000 students) in the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Communication (BC). Twelve students enrolled in the Applied Theatre course at Albany and participated in the E(lab)orating Performance collaboration.4. The UCT's Department of Drama has a student body of approximately 177 undergraduate and 27 postgraduate students. The pilot team-taught course (Applied Theatre) involved students from both undergraduate programmes who are in their second year of study.5. The Global South is a contested term and is defined differently based on the criteria being used: politics, economics, geography etc.6. Langeberg is a rural, farming region that lies outside of Cape Town and the core development challenges of the region are poverty and high levels of unemployment, particularly among youth (Langeberg Youth Arts for Change Project: Interim Report, Citation2013, 5). UCT, in collaboration with The Mothertongue Project, conducts annual service learning projects in the region with trainees from the Langeberg Youth Arts for Change Project.7. The Mothertongue Project is a collective of women artists, activists, and expressive arts therapists: www.mothertongue.co.za.8. The site was set up as a Google site and as a result required administrators to set up page-level permissions and other such access control. Therefore, students found the interface to be largely un-user friendly (see https://sites.google.com/a/biari.brown.edu/hemi-2-0/).9. Refer to http://imgur.com/a/deovZ.10. Refer to https://twitter.com/SelfyOlympics.11. It should be noted that Massey students were required to provide signed release forms for any interviews they conducted in New Zealand to supplement the interview materials from Langeberg.Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicola CloeteNicola Cloete is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis, which examines the memory politics in representations of slavery in post-Apartheid South Africa. Cloete's research areas include Slavery in South Africa, Gender Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Visual Studies, Post-Colonialism.Nandita DineshNandita Dinesh is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and was the Head of Performing Arts at UWC Mahindra College (India) and UWC Dilijan College (Armenia). Her work is centered on the potential/limitations of theatre in times and places of war and currently, her practice-based research projects are based in Kashmir.Rand T. HazouRand T. Hazou is Lecturer in Theatre at Massey University in Aotearoa/New Zealand. His research explores theatre that addresses exclusion and engages with issues of social justice. A recent example of his research, exploring the rehearsals of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Palestinian students of the Drama Academy Ramallah, is published in Research in Drama Education, 20 (2), 2015.Sara MatchettSara Matchett is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama at the University of Cape Town. She is also an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®. Her teaching profile centres around practical and academic courses which include voice, acting, theatre-making, applied theatre, and performance analysis. Her current research investigates the soma as a site for generating images for the purpose of performance making. As co-founder and Artistic Director of The Mothertongue Project women's arts collective, Sara has experience in the field of theatre in South Africa, Singapore, India, Kenya, and Indonesia as a theatre-maker, performer, director, and facilitator

Affordance · Art · Lecture hall · Pedagogy · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Online and Blended Learning · Psychology

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