Arts in London: The Intersection of Performance Studies and Intercultural Learning
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If actors on a theatrical stage drop their lines or miss their cues or run into the furniture, they have no choice but to improvise if they want the performance to move forward and affect the audience in a positive way. It is no different on cultural stages. If students are to learn from intercultural experiences, to potentially contribute in positive ways to intercultural understanding and forge relationships in the places they are visiting, it is important that they, like actors, learn to improvise, critically analyze, and engage in self-reflection.
During summer 2000, we launched a project to explore the relationship between performance studies and intercultural studies. Kathleen Juhl is a member of the theatre faculty and Sue Mennicke is Director of Intercultural Learning at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college near Austin, Texas. Together we collaborated on the curriculum for a summer program called Arts in London. Kathleen traveled with the group of students to London and acted as on-site instructor. Sue participated in program planning but did not travel with the group. Our goal was to thwart the expectations of the students going to London for four to six weeks. Our assumption was that students interested in such a program probably would know about the cultural richness they would encounter in London: the theatre they would see and the art museums they would visit; the history, architecture, and music they would encounter; the rich social and cultural scene they would be stepping into. They probably also would know something of the lower drinking age, the pubs, the clubs, the nightlife. They also might know that London is a place to consume sights, sounds, smells, and cosmopolitan culture. With myriad places to shop, it is a consumer's heaven. However, we did not want the students to go to London simply to consume it, to hunt for commodities and not critically and reflectively examine their experience as participants in the London scene. Our premise was that if we asked students to become "performance ethnographers" in this international context we might provide an antidote to this consumerist tendency. Through using performance studies methodologies, we thought it possible to encourage students to see themselves as performers of cultural identity, as "participant-observers" 1 in a new cultural environment, and thus to approach their experiences in London with intellectual rigor and self-reflection.
Encouraging students to focus more intensely on the process of performing cultural identity is unusual for traditional study abroad programs. Our focus in this direction was intentionally broad because the intersection between performance studies and intercultural learning provides myriad avenues for exploration. The way that intercultural learning is put into practice by study abroad professionals is often centered on the practical: How can we help students learn a new culture? What are the tools one needs to successfully overcome culture shock? What is the best kind of preparation for entering a new cultural situation? The focus sometimes becomes one of accomplishment and mastery, rather than improvisation and play. Improvisatory learning and playful exploration are implied on one level, but there remains the sense that the job of the interculturalist is to provide a how-to list for [End Page 131] cultural adjustment. Using the concepts and methods of performance studies as part of the process of cultural adjustment lends a new perspective to the intercultural learning experience. The focus on the learner's agency as performer and observer within these performance studies frameworks dovetails beautifully with the interculturalist's goals of competence and adjustment to the new environment. We wanted the students to view their experience as ethnographic fieldwork in a sense, and to treat that "fieldwork" as "performance" which, Margaret Thompson Drewal writes,
means placing the emphasis on the participant side of the participant / observer paradigm; breaking down the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity; and engaging in a truly dialogical...
