Short fieldtrips offer unique opportunities to teach cultural relativism in context. Through travel, theatrical practices can be experienced as nodes in complex social webs, where the material aspects of performance are inseparable from the people who make, sponsor and attend performances. The author reflects on his experiences organising theatre fieldtrips to Indonesia over a six-year period (2013-2018) to think about the implications of travel more generally for the pedagogy of theatre, using concepts from geography, anthropology and theatre studies. Thinking of field trips as dramaturgical processes provides a framework to better devise, conduct and evaluate such trips.