performable crit

I made some interesting discoveries by trying something new to me in a third year poetry class last week. I had a tricky situation where I needed to both continue our usual workshopping cycle and also to get the students thinking about and working with performance, but with very limited time.

Students had, as usual, already read and written notes on all the poems to be workshopped. So I got them into groups of two or three, assigned each group another student's poem, and gave them fifteen minutes to devise a performance around this work that would bring forward some aspect of their critical observations. They were allowed to make new versions of their assigned poem - to excerpt from it, to rearrange it, to make cuts or repetitions or extensions. They could perform together or have one group member perform. They had performance objects available to them that their lecturer had asked them to bring along.

The results were wonderful. I was unsure whether they would have enough performance vocabulary be able to communicate their critiques in this way, but almost every piece was incisive, two or three of the six startlingly so. The performance mode turned their feedback into a genuinely constructive - as in productive, creative - act - an act of the imagination & one of many possible - rather than a reduction or a correction.

Working with a classmate's poem seemed to allow them to try performance with more gusto and generosity than they might at first be able to give to their own work. And it became clear as we talked through each performance that it was of great use to the poets to see and hear their own work as it was encountered and reinvented through the attentive readings of others.

It's certainly something I'll do again, but it's also got me wondering how it would fare as a flat-out replacement of the standard workshop-feedback model over an entire course. And what other response methods could be invented alongside it.