Grid Pedagogies: Teaching dramaturgy through student agency and choice

A paper presented at the symposium: Between Presence and Meaning: Strategies of Teaching Practical Dramaturgy of Contemporary Performance at DAMU Prague.

The symposium asked the following question:

What are the available tools for teaching practical dramaturgy in the contemporary performance field, where each event has its own performative logic, lives in a different context, and triggers different kinds of relationships? As teachers of practical dramaturgy, we cannot provide recipes: in devising things “work” or “don't work” depending on the context they are in; each performance provides different unfolding, timing, landscape. If dramaturgy is “unfolding of the performance for the audience” as Behrndt and Turner write in their book ´Dramaturgy and Performance´ (2007) - what are the strategies to teach this unfolding in the classroom? What are the tools, approaches and exercises that students need to encounter in order to be able to develop coherent performances with their own inner system, that are unique almost every time.

For my contribution, I explored how Grid Pedagogies might be used as a strategy for energising and enabling student agency and choice within the development of their theatre and performance making practices. They are used as a pedagogical method in BA Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Wimbledon College of Arts UAL (UK), a course that centres on the teaching of dramaturgy at the core of the curriculum. The grid pedagogies were developed to address the complexity of a pedagogical context that enables students to develop practices across theatre and performance modes and forms, from staging play texts and theatre making, to installations and performance art. Grid Pedagogies have enabled the creation of diverse, student centred projects, whilst still maintaining parity and learning outcomes. This paper presented two examples of how grid pedagogies function in the course: Aspect Lectures and The Scene Bank. Aspects Lectures enable students to select from a grid of options to build their lecture programme, devised from and challenging staff research interests, while The Scene Bank has been developed to create a structure that groups text and non-text based materials used on the course by a theatrical or dramatic thematic rather than by place of origin, author, chronology or location.