Creating a Communicable Pedagogy: The Bubonic Tourist as Cultural Secret Agent

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, I have been actively involved in composing a critical and creative character that I call the bubonic tourist. As an everyday relational and communicable figure, the bubonic tourist intimately transfers information, experience and intelligence by way of performance. The realm of the marginal, the aesthetic and the social are the bubonic tourist’s jurisdiction. When borders are crossed, identity becomes a trajectory, making the project of the bubonic tourist, in part, smuggling passports and granting self-citizenship. While the theoretical composition of the bubonic tourist considers notions of space, identity, affect and liberating pedagogy, it is the latter and its relationship to theatre and performance art that I will address. It is my intention to relate early feminist performance art and contemporary relational practices, as a pedagogical model, to my own personal narrative and subsequent development of the bubonic tourist. I realize that my course of reasoning runs the risk of polarizing what I understand to mean “theatre” and “performance art,” but this is not my intention. Instead, I share my story, in brief, knowing that it is hardly unique, but also knowing — to borrow from the lexicon of radical feminist and pedagogical discourses — the personal is political, and the political as performative is pedagogical. And so I begin.