It is a special kind of rush to set out in pursuit of an object-of-study that is as elusive, temporal, and contingent as performance. To be a performance studies reader is to work without a net, to walk on hot coals, to search in a dark alley at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there…We are the lovers on Keats’ Grecian urn, eternally in pursuit…For the most part, those of us who consider ourselves ‘performance studies people’ like it that way.
Henry Bial, University of New Mexico
Stage Rabbit, initiated by Aishwarya Kumar in collaboration with Nikhil Infant, SR is a research-based design collaborative investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces influencing experiments and speculations for the field of education design.
WHY
"There is no difference between living and learning, it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as separate"
- John Holt
"Veils of maya are replaced with other veils of maya, we know this, but at the very least, acknowledging that creates a restless engagement with the acts of knowing. More attention to acts of producing and less emphasis on product, the creation of an interface that is meant to expose and support the activity of interpretation, rather than to display finished forms, would be a good starting place."
- Joanna Drucker
To arrive at the topics mentioned above came through while we worked in the knowledge production sector of India.
One of us arrived from and works within a formal educational space. The other, arrived from and works in an informal space of learning. One works with undergraduate students from across the country, arriving from different tongues to English as the language of learning. The other with children and youth of indigenous communities for whom their regional language is what they think, dream and aspire in, communities brought together by various collective memories and art and science collaborations. One works through and around the established systems, the other experiments to form newer approaches to systems. One works with those who make up some of the urban landscape, the other works with those whose homes are being redeveloped into urban landscapes.
Both agreed in an alternate approach to the current education systems, knowledge production and dissemination systems, and policies that frame them. Both shared discontent with the cultural aspirations in association with education and subsequently careers/ jobs/ ideas of success. Both agree with the need to integrate disciplines. Both found the need to integrate technology in learning methods. Both believed in a non-linear and process based approach. Both believed that there is a disconnect in what we are taught and who we become. And both believed that learning and living needed to be integrated strongly.
Through this we began sharing our experiences and our vague yet common approach to learning and living. We gathered insights and discussed patterns of behaviour based on what we observed and what we had assumed. We debated the pros and cons of the various methods, formal and informal places, the spaces which support conducive learning, and what was elemental to learning itself.
We noticed how methods of facilitation influenced performance of learning, how performance of learning developed performance of living and how that subsequently became a culture. We noticed this in our work, we noticed this in our behaviour with each other, we noticed this with the interfaces we were using to support our speculations and we noticed this in the living culture we grew up in. Over time, with an increasing accountability to the students, community and participants we decided to translate our learnings, which we believe has hidden approaches within it(if extracted), that can be used to develop a non-binary, circular, free-flowing and fluid future.
A collaborative research
"Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned".
- John Jolt
Since the field of learning is an amalgamation of philosophies and practices across time, geography and culture, we are seeking to initiate the work by bringing together practitioners influenced by a diverse background which could hopefully aid to the formation and a prototype for learning in the future. By noticing patterns in the interests and engagement of the groups we worked with, we want to first understand if there is any value in the way knowledge is perceived today, then the content we engage, before begin to develop what the learning content of the future will be.
How can you engage with us?
To discuss this further mail us at: stagerabbit.lab@gmail.com
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Projects/ Thesis initiated under STAGE RABBIT
1. Sequence (Performance Of - Visual and Performance Arts as tools in ethnographic research and learning process) - A thesis project by Aishwarya Kumar
2. Ways of Being (if you could visualise fluidity, what would it look like?) - Research topic under Stage Rabbit
3. Deemed Vision (Stories through non-verbal communication) - Research topic under Stage Rabbit
Curated topics
Performance on motorcycles
Skin hieroglyphs
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Find us on Instagram at Stagerabbit_
And on medium
https://medium.com/@aishwaryakumar_57562
"Play exists for its own sake.
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Players do not seek out other purpose to play. In fact trying to twist play to end vitiates it, making it seem less and less play"
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Scott G Eberle
Performance of Living in Shared spaces
The walls - Ray Gonzalez
Julius Caesar’s head was cut off
and fed to the barbarians waiting
outside the walls of Rome.
Salvador Dali wore one orange
sock and a white one on days
he went to eat breakfast in cafes.
On days he stared at the wall,
he did not wear socks.
Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives
in wall of whale oil, claiming such
creatures were the only ones that
understood the art of sacrifice.
The last thing John Lennon saw
before he was gunned down was
the brick wall of his apartment house.
Sitting Bull had fourteen wives
he lined up against the cliff walls.
He would close his eyes and walk
blindly to them with an erection,
promising he would take the first
one his erection touched.
Crazy Horse watched silently
from the cliff walls above.
J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom
walls as a boy, promising his mother
to whitewash the figures the first
time he was caught.
Joan of Arc climbed over the walls
and fell on top of a castle guard,
the commotion bringing soldiers
who swore the wall opened and
she escaped by stepping through.
Nikita Khrushchev stared at the wall
of nuclear buttons and knew
it was a green one they told him to push,
but the triggers were every color except green.
Hernán Cortés’ men met a wall
of arrows, then turned and ran.
Montezuma’s men met a wall of armor,
wept, then stoned their chief off the wall
for helping the conquistadores.
Carl Jung opened his eyes to find himself
sleeping against a wall of flowers,
the beautiful smell giving him the answer
he had been looking for.
Charlie Chaplin ordered his crew to remove
the hidden mirror from the wall, footage
of his latest lover overflowing
onto the studio floor.
Sor Juana de la Cruz hid her new poem
in a hole in the wall, but when a fellow nun
went to retrieve it after Sor Juana’s death,
it was gone.
The Dalai Lama stopped in the snow
and bowed his head to pray before the wall
of dead monks killed by the Chinese.
Virginia Woolf’s last memory before drowning
was the wall of family portraits, the photographs
of her father and brothers so radiant in the river fog.
Billy the Kid simply dug a hole in the adobe wall
of the jail with his bare hands and walked away.
Janis Joplin was found dead of an overdose
in her Los Angeles hotel, her face facing the wall.
Federico García Lorca did not face any walls
when he was shot under the trees.
No one knows how Tu Fu encased himself
in a wall of bamboo, staying inside the tube
for ten years, never saying a word, his feet
becoming the roots of bamboo within
the first few months of his silence.
Al Capone stared at the walls of his cell
in Alcatraz and added the bank figures again,
trying to get them right.
Babe Ruth heard a thud against the wall
of his hotel suite, the baseball rolling down
the hallways as a signal his tryst with the team
owner’s wife about to be revealed.
William Shakespeare stared at the empty walls
of the theatre, stood there without saying
a word, and stared at the empty walls of the theatre.
Geronimo extended his arms over the walls
of rock, the approaching sound of the cavalry
troops echoing down the canyon, the pictograph
Geronimo carved high on the wall, years ago,
lifting him to safety.
Two days before Salvador Allende was assassinated,
Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra
to find the walls of the room where he lay
were covered in hundreds of clinging starfish.
"Play is special and set apart"
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Play reserves a particular setting for playing, and no matter how different from each other, the field, the stadium, the woods, the rink, the course, and the ring, all serve as a playground"
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Scott G Eberle
Losers discusses a crucial and extremely relatable psychology visible in the world of competitive sports.
.
For those of us brought up with sports, solo or team, this series talks about those emotions that ran through our souls every time we experienced a pep talk driven by masculinity, or during the part of the act where the shoulders hunch in and you walk out of the court, or every time the alarm went off and it was a day to work on the mistakes you had made the day before.
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It expresses the break you feel, over the break of your personal loss, when fathers turn away disappointed or opponents play with a misplaced sense of winning. Or the racquet misses the ball by a millimetre, or when the knee buckles in at the time it could have just stayed, stayed and supported your body for half a second more. It is the few second when you reach the finish line, and realise your breathing is not that of satisfaction but of the deep pit that is forming in your stomach.
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It resonates with those who faced as many emotional and mental blows as their body did and those who looked out of their car window at how kids live “regular” lives while they get driven to the club.
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It brings to light the subtle ways in which the idea of winning has seeped into our daily ways of being and created situations of toxic masculinity, suppressed anger issues, teens facing depression, and people with social anxiety.
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That said,it also breathes a certain freshness, of personal growth, revelation and why we play what we play.
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Audio: Losers. Now on Netflix
Video: @zorrba_ .
