Intimacy [as] and pedagogy: a narrative inquiry of experiences of teaching theatre performance in higher education.

Abstract

This study positions teaching theatre performance in higher education as intimacy-producing pedagogy and examines its effect on four teacher-artists and their work. This is given the background of sexual harassment within the South African performing arts industry (Yende, 2021), outlined explicitly within the teaching and learning context of higher education through the autobiographical lens of the primary researcher. Consequently, the research questions focus on the understanding and experiences of intimacy’s relationship to theatre pedagogy of research participants in four higher education institutions. The research participants are referred to as teacher-artists to highlight the merging of the roles of teacher and artist in theatre pedagogy. This convergence of roles is further evidenced as significant in the intersecting of intimacy with pedagogy. Theatre pedagogy is theorised as simultaneously engaged, critical, and embodied. Additionally, intimacy is conceptualised as constructed through teaching [and learning] processes that consistently invoke vulnerability, interaction, self-disclosure, emotional connection, partner responsiveness, and physical contact. In its centring on the engaged, critical, and embodied knowledge of the teacher-artists, the study is necessarily interdisciplinary and qualitative. Narrative inquiry is the qualitative approach used to center story as data (Ollerenshaw & Creswell, 2002). Throughout the research design, vulnerability is utilised as the expressive mode of presenting the research to the reader. This vulnerability translates into highly subjective storytelling, the use of poetry, extractions from journal writing, and dramatic devices to share and intentionally organise data. These creative devices are also used as signposts for the reader. This strategy is explicit as both an ever-present illustration of the ‘intimacy-in-pedagogy’ that the study explores and a disavowal of the systemic tradition (in academia) of separating the academic researcher from the artist. Supported by a review of literature on higher education, black women in higher education, and performance studies, the study provides an in-depth discussion pointing to factors that emerge as relevant within a greater socio-political context. These factors include racial and economic politics of inequality, a deliberate state agenda towards the transformation of the higher education sector, the significant prevalence of gender-based violence (shown particularly at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic) as well as the agenda of HIV/Aids as a primary focus of national health interventions from the end of Apartheid well into the transitioning of South Africa into a democratic republic. The purpose of the study, in the first instance, was to understand how a specific sample of teacher-artists understand and manage intimacy as a part of their teaching practice. The criteria for identifying the initial participants of the study was that the participants themselves (before becoming teacher-artists) had been university theatre students who had experienced or witnessed a violation of intimacy within theatre practice. However, the focus shifted due to a lengthy delay and the Covid-19 pandemic interruptions to the research. Consequently, the research findings yield a thesis on intimacy and theatre performance pedagogy that reflects higher education as a context. Accordingly, this study argues that teacher-artists are partners with higher education in delivering intimacy-producing pedagogy to student-performers. Teacher-artists' experiences in higher education reveal a challenging and fragmented environment that hinders intimacy and growth and requires urgent reform. Intimacy is evidenced on three levels in the practice of theatre pedagogy: Namely, between teacher-artists and their practice of theatre pedagogy, between teacher-artists and student-performers, and between teacher-artists and their institutions. The study validates the ability inherent in theatre pedagogy to innovate social interactions in learning spaces where socio-economic inequalities and asymmetrical power relations are pervasive. The study evidences the continued need for inquiry on the consequences of gendered and raced experiences on knowledge within the field of theatre performance in higher education and argues that caregiving, transference, intimate partner violence, and institutional gaslighting are the intimacy-related issues produced for teacher-artists. The study argues that institutional attitudes towards theatre pedagogy are ambiguous, positioning the discipline and staff as persistently vulnerable in the overall politics of higher education. Finally, the study demonstrates that teacher-artists experience distrust and reluctance to participate in the transformation agenda of the higher education sector, particularly in response to the ongoing call to decolonize higher education curricula.