To Learn, To Perform, To Teach

This program is designed to explore subjects that matter by using performance as a teaching medium. Our goals are to learn how to teach the things we read about and to work collaboratively. Students will pursue these learning goals by researching and writing critical essays, by writing and rehearsing scripts for performance, and by performing in front of an audience. Critical and creative processes will be inextricably linked in all our activities.

Each quarter will begin with students conducting academic research on topics that interest them. Next, students will work in groups (determined by their research topics) to create and critique a theatrical script (which may include music, dance or other performance) developed from student research papers. During the final weeks of the quarter, students will be ready to rehearse and perform the research material. Thus, during each quarter the initial academic research will have its fruition in a performance whose goal is to teach the research to an audience outside the classroom.

During the first quarter, we will study 19th- and 20th-century United States history with a focus on labor history, immigration, the development of the prison industrial complex, and the rise of the large office. Our hope is to take the results of this work to local juvenile detention facilities for performance and collaborative work with students in the Gateways program for incarcerated youth (http://youthinaction.evergreen.edu/). During the second quarter, we will narrow our research to social conditions in the Pacific Northwest, with a focus on environmental and economic issues, and on social justice. We will perform the results of this work in local high schools. Performances in the third quarter will focus on problems currently being addressed by government agencies at the municipal and state levels. We will perform the results of this work for government officials as well as for state and local workers. Ongoing campaigns led by local activists will help determine the format of these performances.

In addition to student work on critical writing and performative projects, program faculty will give regular presentations on historical examples of teaching through performance in the areas of literature, theater, music and film, situating these artworks in the specific historical moments in which they were created. Faculty will also present examples of the difficulties and problems encountered in presenting materials via the medium of performance: the resistance of audiences to learning, the perils of "talking down" to an audience, techniques of presentation of social problems, and the social function of language in the presentation of thought. These lectures and workshops, together with skills-based work on various modes of performance, will help frame and support students’ independent work.