Performance Art as Progressive Education - Performing Pedagogy: Toword an Art of Politics - Review

As the final two chapters suggest, Performing Pedagogy is perhaps best approached as a deeply autobiographical project, one informed by Garoian's own multiple identities as a teacher, student, performance artist, Armenian American, and progressive educator. The book's various sections reveal, by turns, different sides of Garoian's rich experience--from the history of his own introduction to performance art in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to his twenty-plus years as a progressive teacher in the public schools, to postgraduate study of educational philosophy and performance theory, to his own creations as an Armenian American performance artist. Garoian's extensive history of spectatorship also helps to illustrate his argument: he cites over thirty specific performances in addition to those by Goat Island, Lacy, and McCauley. Through them, Garoian effectively advocates for autobiographically inspired, aesthetically innovative, and politically resistant performance art as a necessary practice for citizens of a not-yet-fully-democratic society. The book's final two chapters rake the reader through Garoian's own journey as a performance artist whose work first began facing thirty adolescents in a Los Altos (California) High School. As the accomplished trajectory of one man's life, Performing Pedagogy pays remarkable tribute to the visionary power and educational possibilities that contemporary performance art has to offer.

(1.) For an accurate description and analysis of the symposium, including work only slightly covered in Garoian's book, see Lisa Wolford, "Oppositional Performance / Critical Pedagogy: A Report from the Penn State Symposium." Theatre Topics, 7, no. 2 (September 1997): 187-203. Although the symposium was clearly connected to the writing of the book--Garoian acknowledges the funding that allowed him to organize it as a "research project--the precise relationship between the book and the symposium is never clarified.

(2.) Allan Kaprow, who spoke about his own early work, provided the opening keynote for the symposium and was referred to throughout the three days as the "father" of performance art. The improvisational work of John Cage and Kaprow places performance art firmly in the trajectory of modernist art innovation. Some might find a more specifically feminist and/or African American performance genealogy more appropriate to the work of Lacy and McCauley than is suggested here.

Jenny S. Spencer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches drama and performance. Past editor of Theatre Topics, she is author of a book on Edward Bond (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and co-editor of Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 1998).

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