We're happy to announce that Performance Philosophy will have a presence at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) this summer in Scottsdale Arizona. Below, please find a brief description of the events and participants. We hope you can come support the event if you are in the area and planning to attend the conference.

Session Title

“The Dream of Educating a Revitalized Sociality: Performance Philosophy Pedagogy””

Session Organizers

Wade Hollingshaus (Brigham Young University) – session chair

Will Daddario (Illinois State University)

Session Abstract

Among the many situations in which we find ourselves struggling to “dream” forth the possible from the impossible, higher education stands out as one of the most troublesome. With growing class sizes and shrinking faculty sizes, the wholesale institutionalization of quantitative assessment, the push toward distance learning, and other evidence of the neoliberalist financialization of education, the liberal tenets that have long underwritten higher education are facing unique challenges, but also unique opportunities. This session features research from three scholars who have invoked the contexts of Performance Philosophy to respond to this neoliberal crisis in education.

Papers

“‘There is a Sphinx in the Corridor of E Building!’: Critical Practice at Victoria University”

In recent years, the restricting of the creative arts degrees at Victoria University have evacuated those degrees of, as Margaret Trail writes, their “theoretical and philosophical components.” In her paper, Trail outlines the intervention—“Critical Practice units”—that she and her colleagues have used to respond to this crisis.

“Academy, Conservatory, University: Transdisciplining Performance in The Hague”

Attempting to “resuscitat[e]” liberal education and “to articulate an engaged and engaging global citizenship for the 21^st century,” Cissue Fu has developed what she refers to as “Political Arts,” a set of practices which offering an “inspection of the communicative, reflexive, and transformative aspects of individual and collective political agency.” In her paper, Fu “crystallizes the educational opportunities and pedagogical insights” she has garnered as she has implemented these practices at Leiden University College.

“Mindfulness Meditation as Technology for ‘Becoming Imperceptible’ in Performance Philosophy and Performance Practice”

David Fancy (Brock University) explores moments in acting training and thinking about performance that engage Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “mindfulness meditation,” an attempt to “interrupt,” as Fancy explains, “retrenched and unconsciously reproduced patterns of affective, social, ideological, psychic, cognitive, embodied and emotional conditioning.”