How exercises matter as a dramaturgical approach in performance art education.

Abstract

This article addresses a university course in performance art at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. The aim of this article is to discuss how the exercises and the dramaturgy of the exercises in the course matter. The author is the teacher of the course and thus the diffractive analysis is informed by her role as a teacher and artist-researcher. The study uses new material feminist theory and the theory of agential realism from physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad. The study investigates how the exercises become agents and get constitutive power. The exercises are material-discursive, in intra-action and entangled with the entire teaching environment, and they compose a dramaturgical structure that allows the unpredictable to happen. The analysis describes three examples of exercises from the course and highlights three aspects that matter in the mediation of the exercises – embodiment, materiality, and site. The results of the study point toward the importance of mediating exercises that activate the student-participants to experiment and redefine what the ever-changing field of performance art can be.