Abstract

The Site-Specific Pedagogy Map is a paper and digital object that is an outcome of the UAL Educational Enhancement Sabbatical 2024. The map offers six pedagogical exercises based on Mike Pearson’s approaches to the ‘visitation’ of a site and how that site might be excavated for cultural, political and historical artefacts to be brought back to the studio. This paper will practically introduce the map and its pedagogical potential.

Session and activities

Fourteen years after the publication of Mike Pearson’s seminal theoretical and practical text Site-Specific Performance (2010), the pedagogy map reflects upon, and reanimates, aspects of Pearson’s writing and practice to think through what site-specifics make possible in the context of developing pedagogy for climate justice, sustainability and regeneration. Site specifics have a role to play in the ecological turn of theatre, performance and art making. Site-specific practices, when carefully and ethically situated, can provide sustainable and regenerative forms of art making. The pre-existence of a site and its materiality and action, enables performance making to bypass an emphasis on abundance and addition, instead generating practices that utilise pre-existing architectures, grounds, frames, sonics, objects and people to create the work, moving towards a more ecologically conscious mode of making. This mode of making can utilise forms of ephemeral design that frames, subtracts, reanimates and encounters the nonhuman world and makes it present in the work, for both awareness and preservation. In a pedagogical context, the development of student work can be reframed by an ethos of sustainability, landscape impact and engagement and a refocusing from the interiority of anthropocentric theatre and performance practices. As Alexandrowicz and Fancy state, “fundamental to the notion of animating “the ecological thought” in theatre pedagogy is the need for the performer to cast her/his gaze outward to the nonhuman” (2021:10). Site-specific practice offers a pedagogical apparatus that can enable this shifting of the gaze that can become fundamental to the politics and ethics of the future of performance and art making. These ideas and propositions will be explored in the paper through a practical engagement with the map itself so that participants might adapt and use it as a tool within their own pedagogical practice.