Performance Coaching

Successful teaching from a performance studies angle requires looking at life, even one’s own,    as a piece of theatre. Like theatrical production itself, the performance of everyday life is not an autonomous concept, but is effected by a number of outside forces, (funding, pressure to live up to the expectations of a given social frame/audience/community). A critical performance studies pedagogy, especially one invested in questions of race, gender, sexuality, and class has the difficult task of simultaneously making clear the  performative  elements of these concepts while also taking seriously  the ways in which the roles we play on a quotidian basis (boy/girl, son/daughter, black/white, gay/straight, rich/poor, religious/secular) are very real. As a teacher, I am  invested in pedagogy as a mode of knowledge production, but I am also interested in destabilizing knowledge as scientific fact. Rather good teaching should be about opening students’ eyes to the politics of knowing, however complicated,  exasperating  and exhilarating.

My teaching philosophy has been informed by my years  as  a  theatre  director,  performance artist, and acting instructor. Trained in both techniques of  psychological  realism  and  European corporeal methods (Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques LeCoq), I am particularly interested in a multivalent approach to actor training, stressing both “beat and objectives” and physical work on gesture  and emotion. In my more practical coursework as an acting instructor and director of department sponsored productions, I tend to choose exercises and material that directly concern issues of race,  sexuality, religion, and class while utilizing seemingly apolitical theatrical tools,  such  as  cabaret,  dance,  and clown to engage with them in new  ways. Present in all my teaching and directing is a commitment to   the ethical, moral and political stakes inherent in all performance and cultural representation and  a  central  question: How can we represent and empathize with the other while also being aware of the   ways in which by empathizing, we are often inadvertently simplifying, reifying, stereo-typing, and essentializing  the  other  into  being just like us?  It is during the process of trying to literally embody   the other that students can test the limits of their own tolerance.  Awareness  to  cultural  sensitivity  in  the art making process can often bring out hidden,  sometimes  stereotypical  assumptions  about  the other, for example when an improvised exercise turns casually homophobic or racist. I see these misunderstandings as teachable moments, as a chance to challenge and expand our collective notions      of  tolerance and understanding.

I believe that the classroom, like the acting studio, is a sacred space, one in which a community    is formed, one that does not judge or threaten, but questions and supports especially when dealing with ethically tricky situations. Following Irwin Goffman, what keeps the social sphere stable is a “belief in  the role one is playing.”   What my teaching strives to do is make students aware of these social roles   and try to investigate what gives them such power. For  instance,  in  reading  the  first  weeks’ assignment in my course on Performing Patriotism: Pride, Belonging  and  Dissent  in  American  Culture, students were asked to write about what  being  a  patriot  meant  to  them.  Almost  unanimously, the  class wrote  that being a  patriot meant steadfast, nearly blind devotion  to ones’ nation.

After weeks of studying the writing of Thoreau, examining the Vietnam War, watching Forrest Gump critically and questioning American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, students began to understand patriotism from a more nuanced perspective.  This understanding became palatable to me during one  class held outside in political alliance with the San  Francisco/Oakland  Occupy  movement  and  a  faculty and staff strike at UC Berkeley. While teaching Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai’s text “Monster/Terrorist/Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots,” in an outside grotto surround by protestors, three  students handed me a bumper sticker proclaiming “Dissent is Patriotic.”     In this moment, it became clear  that students  understood not just the  complex  nature of  nationalism  but how  it affects their everyday lives.

As a scholar with a theoretical focus on race, gender and sexuality, I  am  also  invested  in teaching students the ways in which these concepts are performed in both literary text and in their own lives. I accomplish this by creating a safe classroom environment in which pupils can relate theory to practical concerns, tapping into their personal interests and passions. For instance, during my research course on Performing Multiculturalism in the 1990’s, it was wonderful  to  see  student’s  spend  a semester examining the construction of race, gender and queerness across a variety of objects to which      I had little to no prior knowledge; excellent final papers were created on hip-hop,  female  driven  cartoons, post-rock, and even Johnny Depp. During the course of each of these projects students found ways of making new arguments and understanding how concepts of race and  gender  were  being  wielded in a  specific cultural context.

In all of my teaching I try to not discount the importance of things that are affectively known    as opposed to understood quantifiably.  My pedagogy stresses different forms of knowing that take  class, ethnic, sexual and religious difference into account; How can something be “true” if it cannot      be “known” but felt?  What are the political stakes of claiming that something felt but less tangible is  just as valid and real as something visibly true? What is the connection  between  these  abstract  concepts and their very real effects on people of different faiths, customs,  classes,  and  sexual  practices?   And  lastly, what can being acquainted with  these different types of knowledge do to help   us live a better  world? Guiding students through the often-messy process of negotiating these different types of truth  and knowledge is what I see as the most important role of a pedagogue