Assessment and Learning at the Department of Performance Studies

Students in the Department of Performance studies learn, and are assessed, in a variety of ways.

The teaching staff all have experience in various aspects of the performing arts, from working as actors and directors, to being dancers, choreographers, dramaturgs, multi-media producers, film-makers and animateurs. These experiences and their attendant knowledges and practices are brought to bear in the studio, lecture hall and seminar room, so although we do not assess students as performers—you are not learning how to act, for example—often there is a 'performative' aspect to the learning experience.

In PRFM 2602 An Audience Prepares, for example, much of the discussion of the signifying processes which are used to make meaning in theatrical production is accompanied by workshop classes, in which students are invited to learn about, for instance, spatial semiotics, by manipulating objects—including their own bodies—in space.

Assessment tasks range from conventional essays to multi-media presentations, in which students are encouraged to use a broad range of media to document and present performance practice.

The following essay, first published in 2000, sets out some of the philosophies behind the units of study offered by the Department of Performance Studies.

(from an article published in Synergy, October 2000, by Dr Ian Maxwell with Dr Laura Ginters)

Studying performance is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is determining just what performance is . . . does everything, from everyday social encounters to, for example, high opera, count, or do lines need to be drawn? And even once those kinds of questions are answered, how does one isolate the performance event itself, to make it available for analysis?

This is the fundamental methodological issue confronting students (and researchers) at the Department of Performance Studies. We set out from the premiss that performance is not limited to those forms traditionally marked as being 'artistic', and that any theory of performance must, accordingly, be generalisable to a wide range of performative practices, across and between cultures, history and conventional social categories. On this view, then, theatrical texts-those artifacts around which theatre studies has traditionally organised its teaching and research-are considered, at best, the traces of past, or (often highly significant, but nonetheless partial, contributory) ingredients of possible performances. This means that scholars and students in Performance Studies need to develop new tools with which to develop a sense of the object of their analysis: not a text, but the living, breathing (and often ephemeral) performance itself. The undergraduate teaching programme at the Department of Performance Studies is constructed around developing students' skills precisely in terms of this methodological concern.

Performance Studies has developed over the last twenty years from an interdisciplinary exchange between traditional theatre studies and anthropology, in particular at New York University. At the University of Sydney, the Department has grown out of a collaboration between, initially, scholars from French Studies, Italian Studies, English, Asian Studies, Architecture, and a range of professional practitioners. Over the years, that initial core group expanded to include scholars from Anthropology, Music, Electrical Engineering, Semiotics and, more recently, contributions from History, Archeology, Germanic Studies, Modern Greek, Classics, Medieval Studies and the Faculty of Law. At the same time, the discipline itself has evolved through a range of approaches, from semiotics to phenomenology, from functional linguistics to sociology, all of which have left their trace on current practice. Additionally, the department's staffing profile now includes permanent and casual teachers with backgrounds in a range of performance practices, in addition to their scholarly work. All of this adds up to a rich, varied, challenging and colourful learning experience in a discipline which is still very much in the early phase of its development.

Unlike theatre departments at other universities, students at Performance Studies do not learn by 'doing' plays; we are not in the business of teaching people how to be performers themselves. Instead, students learn how to watch and write about 'professional' practice. In early units of study students develop an historical and interculturally informed understanding of a broad spectrum of performance practices, within which they can contextualise those with which they might be more familiar. We introduce students to the idea of doing fieldwork by setting a series of observational tasks-some basic level ethnography-to develop their watching and note-taking skills, and to help them reflect upon what may be thought of as the essential features of any performance. These tasks are extensively discussed in tutorials, where students share their work, learning useful observational and descriptive skills from each other; in discussion it becomes very clear what 'works'-that is, what helps others to understand performances at which they were not present-and what doesn't.

This early coursework is developed into a semiotic model of analysis, the basic tools with which to be able to describe and write about performance. Through a guided process involving practical workshops, in which embodied, experiential learning is connected with propositional/theoretical knowledge, students are introduced to the material components of performance-making, and then asked to attend some live theatre work in order to produce their own analyses. By the end of their first year of Performance Studies, our students are equipped with the analytical tools to approach, in theory at least, any given performance genre.

In third year, having completed these core methodological units, students choose between a range of specialist units of study. Central to the learning experience is the acknowledgment that embodied, experiential learning is a powerful complement to propositional learning: students are asked to participate in exercises and explorations, not in order to accumulate performance skills, but to develop the capacity to critically reflect on those experiences, and to flesh out the ideas they are encountering in theoretical texts.

The key area developed in methodological terms, however, involves the documentation and analysis not only of performance, but of the preparation for performances: here the department is doing ground-breaking work in the field of Performance Analysis. Two courses-Rehearsal Studies and Rehearsal to Performance, pre-requisites for students intending to do 4th Year Honours, are structured around a project involving professional actors and a director, conducted in the Rex Cramphorn Studio, at the Department. The project is never a 'staged' rehearsal, put on for the benefit of the students; ideally, it is part of a rehearsal leading to a full professional production, and is conducted over a fortnight in the mid-year break, which students are required to attend full-time.

In the first semester of classes, theoretical and methodological groundwork is laid for the project: accounts of rehearsal by participants and observers, ethnographic theory, video recordings of rehearsal, prompt books and other materials are examined with a view to establishing an appropriate level of awareness of the task and a methodological approach. Students work with different recording and documenting technologies, developing hands-on skills and reviewing their results. Briefing sessions with the practitioners involved in the project are also included, helping the students to develop appropriately sensitive and productive ethnographic techniques: listening, questioning and observational skills in particular.

During the project, the students observe, and are responsible for documenting and recording, proceedings. They are also sensitised to the often very secretive, hallowed space that is the rehearsal room: this is absolutely vital preparation for their Fourth Year work, in which they will be placed, 'in the field' as it were, with a professional company. The sensitivities they learn through the (relatively) controlled environment of a rehearsal conducted at the Department itself are a core part of the learning experience.

In classes after the project, the experience is extensively debriefed and analysed, once again collectively, guided by the lecturer, with a view to the major assessment task: a 'casebook' of the project, the preparation of which involves a careful analysis of both the experience of having been in the rehearsal room and of the documentation (itself produced by the students). The students are thus involved, at every level, in what amounts to a research project; the learning they achieve is learning applicable not only in their fourth year (and often post-graduate) work, but more generally, as generic research and analytical skills, useful in any number of contexts.

Note: Dr Maxwell has been developing a body of published work in which learning paradigms taken from theatre practice and acting training are applied to different disciplinary contexts.

In collaboration with Les McCrimmon, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Ian teaches performance skills in an Advocacy and Interviewing special entry course for final year students. Les and Ian co-authored "Teaching Trial Advocacy: Inviting the Thespian into Blackstone's Tower", in Law Teacher 33 (1999): 31-49.

Ian has also written about experiential learning in contributions to two publications in the Health Sciences:

Maxwell, I "Acting and the Limits of Professional Craft Knowledge" in Higgs, J., & Titchen, A. (eds) (in press), Practice Knowledge and Expertise in the Health Professions Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford

Higgs, J, Maxwell, I., Fredericks, I. & Spence L. "Developing creative expertise", in Higgs, J., & Titchen, A. (eds) (in press) Professional Practice in Health, Education and the Creative Arts, Blackwell Science, Oxford.