"I had never danced in a bathroom before": Using audio walks to engage theatre students in the world outside the classroom

Abstract

This essay investigates how audio walks function as a paratheatrical learning activity, by exploring how undergraduate participants at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) responded to audio walks in a large, introductory theatre course. It opens by examining the critical reception of And While London Burns, of a popular aesthetic audio walk, to explore how audio walks might stimulate learning. Responses to And While London Burns suggest that audio walks stimulate engagement across multiple learning domains, provoking not only cognition and feeling, but also psychomotor engagement and the capacity to respond through meaningful action. Viewed from an indigenous (Maori) perspective, these critical responses also suggest that the audio walk produces a sense of turangawaewae, or personal belonging in the environment represented and encountered in the performance. The discussion then shifts to our experiment at Victoria University, where first-year students in a large, introductory theatre course, trialed two audio walks as part of a learning activity designed to help them acclimatize to their new physical and academic environment. The analysis investigates how the audio walks help participants assimilate new knowledge about theatre and their post-secondary environment, reinforcing their sense of belonging, both in their discipline and at university.