on performance labs. as pedagogical tools for knowing

FOREWORD: this is an -almost- unedited email- raw response to the question:

How do you see performance labs (or your performance lab in general) contributing to the development or practice of knowledge in ways different from more "conventional" scholarship?

Hi Maya,  

Thanks a lot for joining!! (and writing about it?)

I have been thinking about this question myself after the lab., concerned about the kinds of knowledge / experiences that can and cannot be aroused within  ‘methods workshop- as performance laboratory-as a health political lab’. [at the university- added edition] So, Thanks for this question, and the opportunity to work through this!! Long Text, Just get what you want.  

I understand performance labs as spaces of emergence, very much like an experimental laboratory. The lab functions as a kind of centrifuge that separates sets of fixed relations and enables the emergence of other possible sets of connections. My role as a facilitator is to ignite processes that will unsettle the relations that cohere certain objects of knowledge. In this case, for instance, the understanding of ‘health’, or ‘cancer relations’ (as an individual/medical only issue). Performance art tools play with relations through different kinds of techniques (transposition, juxtaposition, decentering, diffusion, repetition, augmentation)   creating differentials. 

In my work, the group is very important. Continuing with these biomedical metaphors; in the emergence, the group can make new possible connections, and a certain kind of knowledge-making contagion occurs. I see these labs as a kind of mechanism/technology for change, really. In these processes, my hope is that the group negotiate new meanings and understandings for ‘health’. In activism, experimental labs as spaces to arouse change or new emergences are a great tool for imagining new possibilities. As a kind of technology for situated knowledge making *despite I am aware that new possibilities do not necessarily equal better*, I see performance labs (what I call rehearsal) as useful technologies for weaving people through shared inquiry. Normally these labs emerge from the questions that are brought into the room by individuals who care about very specific health issues. The tricky part of our performance lab was to activate both, one kind of care, while working through methodology at the same time. 

This kind of experimental lab as a pedagogical tool requires a lot of work and engagement, as well as the willingness to ‘unknow’ , (to undo ‘certain’ knowledges). ‘Unknowing’ is a ‘common’ state -even a place/time to look forward)-in rehearsal practice in the arts; particularly in experimental approaches – (some other fields might call it: processing through. However, experimental methods are challenging for traditional forms of knowledge production. I have the sensation that current modes of understanding knowledge making in the humanities does not celebrate experimental, or his kind of situated knowledge making. 

Thinking on teaching on conventional humanities classes- for the most part, students coming from the humanities (and the social sciences) are not trained to be in spaces of emergence and experimentation, thus their level of anxiety can rise, which is counterproductive to process-based learning. Grading expectations are also counterintuitive to creating situations of emergence where one of the starting points is to ‘undo what we know’. Also, regarding knowledge production, this experimental lab is about making-thinking together. Sadly, this kind of experimental knowing-making labs are at odds with current privatized technoscientific fast-producing knowledge systems that aim for ready-to-consume knowledge products. These lab processes are messy, require tremendous amount of work, and making room for kinds of support and value systems that are not only centered on the individual, or on quantitative measures.

( . . . ) to be continued.