6. Back to Classroom: Bottom-up embodied learning with apparatus transforming the materiality of the space – Part 1 (31 Jan 2024)

Following these explorations outside the classroom for two weeks, we returned to classroom learning. After reviewing the street scenes that we recorded as they were re-presented, mediatized and reproduced on screen and reflecting upon the process and effects, we also explored some apparatuses we can play with in an indoor theatre setting, to prepare a bottom-up vision of theatre-making, prior to combining it with a more usual top-down vision starting with ideas and intentions.

This was an embodied learning with a playful spirit, setting them up (arranging them in the space and making all connections required) and testing them out to let our sensation and perception inform us how these devices can transform the actors’ inputs into mediatized effects and how people in the space may feel differently. With the mediatizing effects and the material presence of the apparatus, the material space, or say, the materiality of the space, was transformed, too.

These data of perceptual possibilities became the grounds for later creative processes in solo and group projects, just like painters first know about the colors and brushes they have via their senses and playfulness before thinking about ideas and impulses to be expressed via painting. Action, sensation, and play are key in such learning process.