Whether leading students through a survey of dramatic literature, or staging a devised production, I consider my classroom to be a rehearsal hall. A rehearsal hall is a place to practice. It’s a safe place to be creative, to take risks, to play, and to fail. It’s a collaborative space in which everyone is present and working towards a common goal. I explain this to my students. In my experience, inviting students to consider the classroom as a rehearsal hall relieves them of a pressure to perform, opens them to experimenting with unfamiliar ideas, theories, or practices, and emphasizes that their learning is a process—always ‘in rehearsal’.

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The idea of this ‘rehearsal hall’ isn’t confined to the physical space of the classroom. As a site-specific theatre practitioner, I know that place has an incredible impact on an audience’s experience and understanding of a performance. I follow this logic through into my pedagogy, as I search for opportunities to step outside the classroom and use the university campus as a tool for my students’ learning. For instance, in leading a recent graduate seminar on ecological performance theory, I recorded a short audio walk of campus. A 20-minute exercise, the mp3 audio guide asked the students to observe the various ecologies of our university—from squirrels in trash cans, to students running late for class. The walk brought us to a greenhouse in the Environmental Sciences building where I led the group through a series of performative interventions with the greenhouse flora and fauna. I invited students to recite a short ‘dialogue’ with actual turtles; we sang to a roomful of cacti; and we discussed our weekly readings while surrounded by tropical plants and butterflies. Nearby professors and students from Environmental Science also joined in the conversation. The dialogue that arose from the event—from both being in a new place, and from being asked to see a familiar place anew—would not have occurred if we had stayed the classroom. Through exercises such as these, I strive to make the work playful and memorable, and, in doing so, make complex ideas approachable.

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Most importantly, I believe that it is my job as a theatre educator to support students in becoming curious, creative artist-researchers. I endeavor to equip my students with the building blocks of our discipline so that they may adapt these skills to serve them in response to any environment or circumstance they encounter.