Against the Grain and Out Yonder

In a twenty-first-century post-industrial West, oppositional art-making which situates itself in local, communal, and somatic experience is an act of resistance. In university music education systems, in which outcomes and assessments drive influence, promotion, and finance, to attempt to recover the art of the local is both challenging and immensely important. Drawing on analytical frames from performance studies, the anthropology of performance, and practice-based research in team- and project-oriented learning, this paper investigates the production of a piece of site-specific immersive musical theatre, as undertaken by a multimodal team of university composers, dramatists, educators, and student performers, in partnership with a community-based non-profit. It investigates strategies for recovering the tactile, communal, and experiential in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. It argues that vernacular pedagogies — learning which, in its ethos, intentions, and models, is project- and apprenticeship-based — can provide a way forward from the trap of centralized, standardized, hierarchical, incremental, and canon-based university music education, and that they can model an artistic citizenship which is ethical, responsive, and engaged.