Connecting Performance and Performing Connection: How the Performing Arts Can Usefully Engage an International and Interdisciplinary Cohort in Pedagogy and Research

Abstract

This article draws upon my experiences from the last several years (2014–2017) of leading collaborative performing arts projects with students and faculty from US liberal arts colleges and Asian partner institutions. Herein, I describe how the performing arts, like other forms of embodied learning, can usefully function to convene students and faculty who operate in different disciplines and languages.   The performing arts could be more central to and useful in education about and engagement with environmental issues by enlisting embodied learning, memory skills, transdisciplinarity, social networks, emotion, and liminal spaces of imaginative vision. The performing arts offer powerful tools for constructing international and interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges. Applied voice study in the liberal arts context also offers help in lowering language barriers in intercultural exchanges. Included are brief descriptions of performing arts projects which helped cement collaborative relationships in past projects. An epilogue follows, describing how development of a performance can also be a form of cultural research in and of itself, using Augusto Boal’s (1985) model of ‘participatory action research.’