IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

This paper examines the role and relevance of performance practice in rehabilitating the studio setting as a collective social form. It aims to chart the complex motivations, logistics, and desires of doing collaborative, performance-centered experimentation in the context of design education. I employ as case studies three courses (‘Campus in Pieces’ (Buffalo, 2017), ‘Stagelessness’ (Utah, 2020), and an upcoming fall class) where students and I embark on the quasi-public production of an all-class “play” as our full-scale design project, with the schools’ central atriums as rehearsal stage, amplifying backdrop, and institutional heart. Building on my extended research on the social and performative gestures of the contemporary university campus, these pedagogical techniques both galvanize “amateur” participants’ embodied expertise with their immediate surroundings, and call into question the “proper” and often bureaucratic deployment of existing academic architectures for temporary transgression. With the suspension of typical deliverables and with the will to camaraderie over competition, I advocate here for the urgency—even delight—of building muscles of improvisation in the heart of a design student, where hesitation and rumination are waived temporarily in favor of inhabiting spaces and raising voices in real-time. One may picture a fleet of designer-student-actors falling in or out of formation, reciting speeches while navigating furniture, or engaging guests—blithe, bemused, and confident—altogether owning and operating the shared vehicle of their stage. How might the activities of bodies like this, in their loose allegiances, jostle the disciplinary bodies of the performing professional designer? How might different spatial assemblies of study in the academy move us even a muscle away from the status quo?