Abstract
Rehearsing Realities: embodied learning, performance and incoherence as queer world-building
With this PhD research, I want to investigate the ways in which queerness, incoherence, and embodied learning can be employed to develop an educational approach that stems from the field of performance. The aim is to develop performative embodied learning practices that can foster community, enlarge shared social responsibility, and offer space for collective imagination and the creation of new worlds and ways of relating.
Contemporary education is very much situated around knowledge production that is coherent, quantifiable, measurable, and self-explanatory. With embodied learning, I refer to a knowledge that stands in opposition to this, and is obtained through physical encounters and experiences. The aim is to center the body as a site for learning and make way for forms of knowledge production that derive from intuition, emotion, belly-feeling, playfulness, joy, intimacy, affect, friendship, experience, and encounter. The root of the practice is to find a mode of communication and encounter that is non-verbal, a language of the body.
I approach queerness as a way of thinking and doing that can invade dominant narratives and grant space to non-normative ways of living, working, and being together. Lauren Berlant describes incoherence as a method to be harnessed in order to foster political non-sovereignty, and suggests “training one’s own incoherence.” I want to research what a practice of ‘training one’s own incoherence’ could look like, and what a political currency of incoherence and illegibility could be.
Part of what I wish to investigate is the ways in which movement of the body is related to the movement of ideas, and ultimately to the emergence of social movements. Performance provides an excellent vehicle for this, as it enables possibility to meet in physical space and connect ideas to movements, individually and collectively. It also invites us to ‘play’; playing at being someone, something, or somewhere else, approaching imagination and the malleability of the world in a playful manner. To guide this research, I have dreamed up a speculative, itinerate ‘school’ which I refer to as The School for Collective Embodied Inquiry. Gathering under the moniker of ‘School’ allows to question what a school is or can be, what learning is, who the teacher is, and how knowledge is produced.
The School for Collective Embodied Inquiry stems from a desire to provide space for a learning environment that is body-based, intuitive, and collaborative, yet holds at its core the wish to engage with (and provide answers to) wide-ranging social issues. The School aims to offer space for the collective imagining, rehearsal, and embodiment of realities, narratives, and worlds that are different from our own. The goal is to develop workable scenarios, scripts, scores, models, methods, tools and practices that can be implemented within a range of communities and learning environments. It acts as a place for gathering, encounter, collaboration, and collective research, and will emerge in different locations and environments.