Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a range of pedagogical approaches I have been using with performance students, inviting them to engage with the daily life of public spaces in Johannesburg and to develop responses to their engagements through their artistic performance practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a range of pedagogical approaches I have been using with performance students, inviting them to engage with the daily life of public spaces in Johannesburg and to develop responses to their engagements through their artistic performance practice. The starting place for the research is a participatory engagement with the "now" of the city through a heightened awareness of students' own daily routes and activities and through interviews with other city-dwellers in public spaces. The second phase of performance development invites a dialoguing with the "everyday knowledges" of the urban engaged with in the first phase. The realisation of an artistic performances as response facilitates a broadcasting of these everyday knowledges, as well as initiating imaginaries, subtly or radically alternative, for urban pasts, presents and futures. This process serves a democratisation of knowledges of the ever-evolving urban, with specific attention to Johannesburg as a southern African city, through focusing on the everyday experiences of student artist-researchers and the fellow city dwellers they encounter, as well as through using a research communication medium outside of conventional academic media and arenas and more accessible to broader publics. The presentation offers a brief explication of this process in a conventional presentation style, followed by the facilitation of panel attendees in a truncated version of the process described, giving a sense of the specific methods within each phase, how the process unfolds on an embodied level and the kinds of research "outputs" and insights the process produces.