Assemblage as a pedagogical approach - Students as partners in Liguan Flows

In my presentation I will discuss Liguan Flows, a site-specific, audio-immersive performance presented at Cody Dock on the River Lea in March 2023. The project was developed with level 5 BA (Hons) Performing Arts students and therefore serves as example of an interdisciplinary, creative project involving students as partners. Furthermore, I argue that it employs assemblage as pedagogical methodology; a methodology that expands students’ learning beyond their subject matter, indeed beyond their university environment, and embeds in them a consideration of past and current world matters.

 

My presentation will cover three key aspects pertinent to the creative process and the performance. These are 1) the creative approach in the rehearsal room, which offered agency, autonomy and authorship to students, 2) the performance materials, which combined movement theatre, immersive audio recordings, poetry, music and song, and 3) Cody Dock as site of historical, ecological but also socio-political and creative significance. I will demonstrate how each of the above aspects contributes to an understanding that Liguan Flows as performance was developed via a gathering and collecting of disparate things, and should therefore be understood as assemblage.

 

I want to argue that the unique aspect of assemblage as pedagogical approach is the awareness of the ontological diversity of agency (McFarlane & Anderson, 2011, p.162); using an assembling approach leads to redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a socio-material network of people, things, and narratives. In Liguan Flows, the historical, ecological and socio-political narratives of Cody Dock acted as another performer to consider and involve. Students therefore developed a holistic and lateral knowledge, one that acknowledges the interconnectivity of people, places and things and one that moves a personal understanding beyond oneself or one’s subject but into negotiation with the history and narratives of the wider world.