Heritage and Art Education Through the Screen : Filling the Space by Performative Methodologies

Long before the pandemic, museums started to invest, experimenting with some performative practices (Bishop 2006; Lista 2006) as a method and tool to foster access and participation of different audiences to their heritage. Since the advent of the #culturequarantine, in which most of the educational activities have taken place through a digital space, care and attention to gesture and space have become a key to respond effectively to the needs of educators and users. After an initial phase of rejection and disorientation, teachers, educators and trainers had to find new answers. The aim of this contribution is to describe some of these answers looking at methodologies coming from the field of choreographic and performance research. The argumentation will pass through the narration of some international proposals, three action research experiences accomplished with museum educators and schoolteachers, through which it was possible to observe how the needs and requirements changed as the lockdown conditions changed. The outcome of the research, which took about one year, is the reconsideration of the body as a mediator of the educational and training experience. On the one hand we see the "body as archive" for new knowledge, on the other hand, the space of digital educational activities is reified, thanks to this new role of the body.