https://comedyintheclassroom.org
A cross-disciplinary approach that has produced a trans-disciplinary pedagogy.
I know Dr Gill Seyfang through playing music together around campfires at Dance Camp East - a 25 year old East Anglian event where cultural tribes of the East gather in the legendary Farmer Paul’s field in Suffolk in Summer. There is a history of Fairs and camps in the east. Following the footsteps of Richard Barnes book, The Sun in The East (1983) which chronicles the Albion Fairs from 1972-1982, Gill has collated and edited The Rising Sun: Celebrating Dance Camp East (2009), a similar book chronicling Dance Camp East from 1992 – 2005. This is my link via the element earth to this project; the eastern land on which we walk together, on which we meet and sit around campfires, on which we have a bodily proximity and history.
Gill’s discipline is sustainable development, mine is street theatre and early childhood arts-education. Beyond the academy, the place we meet is a field in Suffolk, an ephemeral community, that call to landscape and different ways of being.
Gill’s Doctorate is in Sustainable Development. She developed Theoretical Theatre with her colleagues (Gravey et al. 2017) as a response to the problems of teaching complex, abstract theoretical concepts to B.A students. Environmental Science at UEA is an interdisciplinary school with students from natural science backgrounds encountering the social sciences for the first time. Gill’s department were finding that students struggled with the finer distinctions between, and applications of, theory. Gill wanted to explore if and how theoretical problems could be embodied (and made funny) rather than talked about and if this would improve learning. She brought me in to run workshops for her team in improvisation, comedy and physical theatre to help develop a new pedagogical practice.
Gill deployed my expertise as a cross-disciplinary project to address an interdisciplinary problem in her school.
However I would suggest her project has produced a trans-disciplinary pedagogy which could potentially be applied to many other disciplines in order to embody and play with theoretical, ontological and epistemological ideas in FE.
Gill and I met up at UEA. Gill is currently developing further literature around TT. She spoke of the ways in which the work has been (and can be) disseminated in ‘a suite of resources’ to be used in a variety of ways such as video, copying the online programme, or even a hand out of quick games a lecturer can play. She is exploring TT as a method for exploring interdisciplinary conflicts, team building and community engagement with research projects.
We discussed the vital role of improvisation and playfulness being a fundamental factor in making the work stand out. I wondered how (and if) TT would actually work with people picking it up from an online resource rather than through an embodied (and improvised) experience (in an actual place on Earth) and we discussed whether the embodied acts of improvisation, exploring complicité and playing the fool might be prerequisites of successful training for TT.
Gill was attempting to work out how all the parts of TT fitted together. I drew a messy map. She cried out ‘but I like nice neat models!’
Massumi’s essay on Transversal Fields of Experience (2010) discusses people (be)coming together prepared to make an ‘event’. Everything which enters the event must do so actively not by proxy or representation or pre-constituted content. People approach the event aware of its uniqueness and particularity and therefore pre-constituted positionings must be left behind. The event becomes an event only when the constituent parts are actively and creatively assembled. While Massumi is talking about immanent critique in his essay, this idea of entering an event assembly activated and aware of the uniqueness of the particular situation also describes the act of improvisation - a commitment to the present-moment and what is going on in it.
Massumi is also talking about getting people together in an actual place on Earth. This actively entering into a unique space is the ethos which lies behind the culture of events such as the Camps and Fairs where Gill and I met. Massumi interrogates what makes something special, an event, transformative. He speaks about sets of ‘shared initial conditions’ and ‘creating a shared frame for the activation of differences as creative co-factors’ (pg. 339). Gill is a scientist concerned with the functions and uses of improvisation, comedy and theatre to develop disciplinary strategies whereas I am an Artist-Educator with improvisation at the heart of my pedagogical (and ontological) practices. It is the wider trans-disciplinary pedagogical aspect of TT on which we both find common ground and shared interest.
Isabelle Stengers speaks of the notion of an ecology of practices as being a tool and that ‘no tool is ever neutral’. I am hesitantly playing with the idea of improvisation as a trans disciplinary tool or force. Gill used improvisation as a tool for her colleagues to think differently about how they were teaching and to ultimately construct new, set pieces from this experience. This differs from my own use of this tool as a performer and educator but I suggest that it was our entangled experiences of transformational events that enabled this cross-disciplinary invitation that has become something more.
“Our experience reveals that performing as theories draws upon elements of performance in lecturing, but goes beyond it” (Gravey et al. pg.1333)
It struck me that Gill had taken a big risk in bringing an anarchic practice into a high status institution and submitting colleagues to a transformative and personally revealing process. It could have backfired on her professionally. Clown and improvisation is all about resisting pre-existing positionings (Massumi). It's risky, it goes wrong all the time and stays with that wrong. Now, six years later I can see what an inspired and brave move it was.
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