So Much to Do in Such Little Time . . (2015)

A group of students buzzes around the table at a local pizza establishment: introductions, family life, year in school, and origin stories. When did you start performing? Last year? This semester! You're still in high school? That excited? This going to be fun! I go last, definitely the oldest student at the table, deciding not to initially disclose my graduate student and facilitator status. Elyse Pineau reminds me that Performative pedagogy is more than a philosophical orientation or a set of classroom practices. It is a location, a way of situating one's self in relation to students, to colleagues, and to the institutional policies and traditions under which we all labor. As such, Classrooms are spatial and temporal sites where bodies rub up against one another literally and metaphorically. Despite our best efforts to inhabit that space democratically, our bodies always, already, are molded by our different social and institutional (Pineau 130-31).I introduce myself and my interests briefly, without fanfare, and the students simply reply that's cool and continue their conversation. I liked starting this process in that way. status as facilitator and my years spent studying performance are, at a table like this, just a minor note. I would take a director's role later, helping students to articulate and refine performance choices, but for that meal, for these students, I was just another guy with a shared interest, performance. As such, collectively, we had to make sense of this performance piece.You Can't Get It All DoneIn recent years, I've been enamored with the pedagogical act of restricting time for a given project. It's quite miraculous what can be accomplished in a generative activity, in a given time, with a set of limitations. Try it in your classroom: take an activity that should take an hour and cut it in half, then cut it again. Add in a laundry list of rules, putting any learning goals for the lesson at the top of the list, but alongside no less important rules that might be, say, attending to an everyday life conversation and the sights and sounds of a local neighborhood. Time limitations force students to work in distillation, overcoming the socially imposed aesthetic filters that keep these learners from tapping into a deeper relationship with the wider world.But if You Try Sometime,This process can be hectic though, and a lot of students don't respond well to the pressure. This is where pedagogues need to be clever about an activity's design. I would encourage performance teachers to always build hooks into these kinds of lessons, cornucopias of modality. Always use the logic of and, and... In the My Augusta project, the activity design tells students to build images and performances based in: sight and sound and photograph and conversation and place and space and speed and flora and fauna and people and group experience and chance and history and tourism. If a student can find just one way into the group project, authoring just one moment or element to the final performance as they embody the choices of other students, they have both engaged the assignment performatively and learned through the embodiment of the rest of the lesson. Seemingly impossible tasks like this assignment start big and scary, but eventually the dam breaks as ideas spill off of the page and into fingers. Legs move into position, and voices articulate texts, soundscapes, people's lives, and their histories. …