COLLABORATORS AND HECKLERS: Interruption as a teaching and learning tool

Abstract

Performance Art (and Art per se) is predicated on rule breaking, even on discomforting audiences, especially the elitist audiences of Live Art and Performance. As Dr Jane Munro recently pointed out at Tactics of Interruption, a public discussion event curated by Lee Campbell at Toynbee Studios, London in June 2016, interruption is about ‘creating new forms – allowing interruption to shape the work – not hiding them’. Each of the three presentations comprising this roundtable theorises, articulates and demonstrates the power of interruption as a pedagogic strategy to not only provoke students’ participation but also to demonstrate how performative pedagogy can be effectively deployed as a means to break implicit rules surrounding the exchange of power relation between student and teacher.

Beginning the discussion, Fred Meller will argue for the power of performative pedagogy underpinned by disruption for challenging institutional orthodoxies. Lee Campbell will then respond by speaking about his focused usage of interruption in the art seminar for provoking participation, revealing some of the complex operations of interruption at stake when used in a learning environment. Peter Bond will then add a further layer to the argument by referring to his practice of answering phone calls during teaching sessions as a critical incident that has the power to be transformative. Concluding proceedings, Alex Schady will discuss his practice of inviting students to deliberately sabotage aspects of his teaching delivery in order to, in his words, make power relations visible, apparent and potentially abused.