INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Performance Anxiety Workshop Experiment!
My name is Claire Elizabeth Barratt, I’m an inter-disciplinary performing artist and MFA candidate with the Transart Institute. This project is the culmination of a series of Practice-As-Research workshops conducted throughout the year (2014 – 2015) in order to develop my first year MFA proposal:
“The Process & Praxis of Constructing the Self As Medium”
a practical pedagogy for the practice of performance art.
My objective being: “To employ my own methods of training, preparation and execution to develop a structure that can be integrated into a pedagogical curriculum for the practice of Performance Art.”
The particulars of arriving at the structure for Performance Anxiety were rather serendipitous …
I needed a vehicle to present my pedagogical practice in a comprehensive format that would demonstrate structural flexibility, clarity of objectives and scope for individual creative discovery.
In planning a six-week performance art workshop series at Warren Wilson College (an experimental, private liberal arts college in rural NC) this Spring, the intern coordinating the project was expressing difficulty in scheduling a weekly time slot when both space AND interested students could be available.
Long-story-short …
The solution was to create a REAL time/space, VIRTUAL time/space duality in which the syllabus could be presented on-line in the Virtual world, as well as during workshop sessions in the Real world at WWC. That way, all interested students could participate, even if unable to attend every workshop session.
- Once this had been established, the realization came that, in this format, participation was limitless!
So we extended the following invitation to art friends all over the globe …
… This was exactly what I needed – within the context of an “experiment”, ANYTHING could happen – and within the context of experiment “Facilitator & Researcher”, all I needed to do was set up the experiment, guide its flow and wait for the results!
Virtual participation took place on a private tumblr group site:
The following documents show the syllabus goals & objectives plus an explanation of the “PODS” system devised for the experiment: