Chapter 9: Nurturing Innovation in Performance Training: Embodying Values of Interconnection, Collectivity, and Interaction in Higher Education

Whether or not innovation can be taught to or learned by students in places of formalized training or education in the performing arts is a question that government and industry leaders are pondering. Certainly performance training institutions have a pragmatic obligation to both the students and their future employers to ensure that what the creative industries expect of graduates can be delivered. However, recent insights drawn from complexity theory, psychology, and education may suggest that any creative potential is inevitably an ongoing challenge and negotiation between enabling and constraining participants engaged in social activities such as performance making. Stacey, Griffin, and Shaw (2000) offer a perspective of complex responsive processes as a fresh way of seeing what human factors may be conducive to nurturing innovation. Alongside this perspective, Hans-Theis Lehmann’s (2006) postdramatic theatre values of perceptability, responseability, and mutual implication provide a useful model for embodied and experiential learning in the studio that can alert and empower performing arts students to the potentialities and hindrances that always come with any desire for innovation.