TY - JOUR
T1 - Without Walls: Performance Art and Pedagogy at the ‘Bauhaus of the North’
AU - Butt, Gavin
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - This essay explores a period of education in the early 1970s when performance art briefly flourished under the auspices of a libertarian approach to art pedagogy. Charting developments at Leeds College of Art and Leeds Polytechnic from the 1950s to the 1970s, I analyse how the teaching of Basic Research mingled influences from the Bauhaus and elements of sixties counterculture to create an exceptional educational environment which, in the early 1970s, made possible student exploration of inter-media performance work. Drawing upon newly-obtained oral histories from former students the essay explores the work of large-scale student collective Soft Soap in order to delineate how performance practice was shaped by a pedagogy focused on the possibilities of open-ended cross-disciplinary creativity. Recollections and analysis of sometimes literal, oftentimes metaphorical, ‘walls’ show how performance-making developed as a practice of ignoring or traversing disciplinary barriers and exploiting the relative accessibility of an art college education for students from multiple economic backgrounds made possible by post-war UK state-funding of higher education.
AB - This essay explores a period of education in the early 1970s when performance art briefly flourished under the auspices of a libertarian approach to art pedagogy. Charting developments at Leeds College of Art and Leeds Polytechnic from the 1950s to the 1970s, I analyse how the teaching of Basic Research mingled influences from the Bauhaus and elements of sixties counterculture to create an exceptional educational environment which, in the early 1970s, made possible student exploration of inter-media performance work. Drawing upon newly-obtained oral histories from former students the essay explores the work of large-scale student collective Soft Soap in order to delineate how performance practice was shaped by a pedagogy focused on the possibilities of open-ended cross-disciplinary creativity. Recollections and analysis of sometimes literal, oftentimes metaphorical, ‘walls’ show how performance-making developed as a practice of ignoring or traversing disciplinary barriers and exploiting the relative accessibility of an art college education for students from multiple economic backgrounds made possible by post-war UK state-funding of higher education.
KW - Leeds Polytechnic
KW - Performance art
KW - Soft Soap
KW - art education
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087698068&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/19443927.2020.1746926
DO - 10.1080/19443927.2020.1746926
M3 - Article
VL - 11
SP - 126
EP - 144
JO - Theatre, Dance and Performance Training
JF - Theatre, Dance and Performance Training
SN - 1944-3927
IS - 2
ER -