Doing Seminar Reading

Ways and Detours of Reading/Not-Reading Seminar Texts and Papers as Actors

Letting the scene end in disaster: that was the task set by a trainer in a forum theater experiment, as part of a performance seminar in Cultural Anthropology at the Universi-ty of Basel. Students in this seminar had to pick and perform a commonly known, problematic scene from their everyday academic lives. In the first round, they were to stage this scene very dramatically, with the intent of getting the audience’s emotions running high. They were then instructed to perform the same scene a second time, but this time the audience of other students and lecturers,…