Sleeping with Cake and Other Touchable Encounters: Performing a Bodied Curriculum

In her book Places of Learning Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) explores the potential for thinking about education as something “in the making,” as an embodied, experiential, and relational process. Her research examines multimedia projections, public events, and performance art to present emergent pedagogical qualities, or rather, places in the making. Ellsworth positions these places as anomalies-as irregular, peculiar, or difficult to classify when viewed from the “center” of dominant educational discourses. We believe that the intimate performances and interventions enacted by contemporary Canadian artist Diane Borsato, need to be considered from this perspective-not as “things” already made into concrete facts, projects to be taught, nor metaphors for teaching and learning, but in the making-“harboring and expressing forces and processes of pedagogies as yet unmade, that provoke us to think or imagine new pedagogies in new ways” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 6). Barbara Kennedy (2004), in writing about film from a feminist Deleuzian perspective, contends that film (or in our case performance art) needs to be understood not as a text with a meaning, but “as a body which performs, as a machine, as an assemblage, as an abstract machine” (p. 5), where “perception” is explored as experience and sensation.