We at @UoBrisTheatre have been doing some AMAZING teaching using Zoom. I was nervous about teaching practical performance workshops online, but it turns out the key to teaching a live medium is that it has to be *live*. Right now, in these circumstances, it doesn’t need to be f2f

Make no mistake - this is the fault of our useless government and the media talking heads, with all their lazy-thinking “Zoom university! value for money = f2f!” blather.

They have backed us into a corner.

Just imagine if the government genuinely recognised the value of our “”world-leading”” HE sector, & had given us that (comparatively tiny! £2.5bn compared to the £12bn they wasted on Serco!) bailout.

Just imagine if the govt & media had spent months talking us up: “hey kids, it won’t be the same, but you’ll have brilliant lecturers designing innovative teaching sessions & you can save ££ by living at home...”

instead of bitching on and on about quality & “lol Zoom uni lol”

Just imagine if they’d done all this back in March, giving us months to properly redesign our entire curriculum.

We could now be focusing on teaching our students to wring every creative possibility out of the digital-performance experience. There’s a global audience out there!

Instead of trekking in to teach a percentage of the class in masks & visors who can’t use props or touch the furniture or hear each other speak, while trying to run a parallel Zoom class off my laptop... Blended learning, baby!

(disclaimer: the uni haven’t asked me to do this)

And the real kicker - the unbelievably frustrating part of this whole thing - is that, each week, it’s the ones at home who are CONSISTENTLY making the most interesting work!

(the students in class are doing their absolute best, but they’re buried beneath visors & masks & they can’t see or breathe properly or hear each other & they can’t get closer to each other than 2m or put the audience in close proximity & it’s hot & weird & awkward)

Meanwhile, with barely any time to actually experiment with all the accordances of the Zoom medium, the online groups have been free to make some really interesting creative experiments with space & form.

IMAGINE what we could be doing if this was all we were doing.

Imagine.