Exploding Contexts

Michael draws on his experience of a decade of teaching at Central Saint Martins College in London where the student agenda has generated fundamental changes to a curriculum whose aim is to prepare the next generation of visual performance makers. Achieving this involves the task of negotiating benchmarks or common criteria to discuss and evaluate activity of such breadth that new terminology and new parameters are constantly being formulated and tested. Even the touchstones of what constitutes ‘the visual’ are being challenged as students apply their skills and ambitions to increasingly expanding contexts. Through the presentation of video documentation of selected performances from both students and his own work, Michael will attempt to pull together and articulate some common concerns – or perhaps common dispositions, evident in the work of young performance makers today. These ‘dispositions’ will touch on many different aspects of contemporary performance practice: performance in the ‘everyday’, performance as social documentation, the self as performance, spectatorship as performance and so forth. These patterns, tendencies…zeitgeists?…emerge from a plethora of interconnected historic, economic and social circumstances – digitality, post post modernism, global warming, the phenomena of the ‘cult’ of identity in Western Europe, social inclusion etc. Michael examines some of this complex web through examples of current practice, and an analysis of the forces which are driving and motivating the next generation of visual performance makers. The notion that Theatre Design, in the post-Craig traditional sense, is a discipline of rejection, is articulated in light of these emerging practices. Changes in pedagogic theory, which seem to parallel this shift, are also discussed as a means of attempting to understand the explosion of contexts for visual performance makers