Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011

This article addresses how a selection of participatory art and memorial projects have engaged with public memory and interaction. The intention is to explore the tension between the artists’ strategies and the actual lifespan and use of the artworks by their audiences. The authors interviewed the artists Esther Shalev-Gerz, Alfredo Jaar and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (during 2008 and 2009) and examined specific works. In addition, one of the literally ‘groundbreaking’ works of process art by Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, was included in the analysis of cases that have provoked interesting social or collective memory debates and community interaction around public art.

There is an interplay between celebrations that value the individual, foster connection with others like oneself, those that seek to value diversity across communities and those that identify with the whole-of-community in ways that respect individual diversity. This article explores the contribution of celebrations towards valuing diversity and the importance of celebrations that are responsive to the dynamic, multidimensional nature of communities. It draws on doctoral research reviewing contemporary festivals held around Australia. Arguments are made for the consideration of celebrations that enable a shared experience and celebrate each individual’s uniqueness.

How adults with disabilities and health conditions experience creating art in a community art centre was explored in this qualitative study. Areas of interest included the influence of place on art making and art making on personal well-being. Eleven adults who regularly engaged in their own art at the Creative Spirit Art centre in Toronto, Canada were interviewed. Interviews were recorded and analysed thematically. Major themes were found: ‘presence in art’; ‘a culture for expression’; and ‘personal benefits’. Participants described how they were present with their art, which emphasized a sense of awareness while they were creating their art. They described how the relationship between the environment and personal energies influenced their art and sense of being valued and respected as artists. The findings from this study contribute to the power that art making in an enabling, supportive community setting as a valued activity influences identity, mindful occupational engagement and the well-being of individuals with disability and health conditions.

Disability Arts (arts created by people with disabilities as a political act), which grew out of the Disability Rights movement in the United States and in England in the 1970s–1980s, is not widely practised or recognized in Northern Ireland. Most arts practice in the region involving people with disabilities is based on an Arts and Disability approach (arts for people with disabilities by non-disabled people). This approach tends to attract criticism from the Disability Arts movement, as it relies on non-disabled facilitators and practitioners, who may not challenge the ownership and power dynamics of the dominant over the marginal group. This suggests that there is need for cultural and attitudinal change. However, history has repeatedly shown that it is neither appropriate nor acceptable to ‘cut and paste’ the British model into the Northern Irish context. Furthermore, the social model of disability embedded in UK legislation has recently been challenged by certain voices from within disability studies. The latter half of this article focuses on the initial stages of a participatory action research study with the theatre company Kids in Control, Belfast, in August 2011. The first in a series of three workshop cycles, this practice research had a focus on developing working relationships with young adults with learning disabilities, and observing the way in which they work individually and as a group using drama. Subsequent research will be used to investigate the development of an independent professional theatre company to be led by the young people themselves, given that this is their preferred outcome. Throughout the research process, some of the following questions will be investigated:

Given that contextually appropriate transformative cultural and attitudinal change needs to take place in Northern Ireland with regard to disability, how exactly should this happen?

What should these changes look like, and what should be the result?

How can models of good practice be developed and disseminated?

This article focuses on an educational theatre project, ‘Me and You and Us and Them’, carried out with University of Sheffield English and Theatre students in partnership with Museums Sheffield. Working with children from local inner-city schools, the brief was to create a performative response to Tate Britain’s touring exhibition ‘Picture of Us’ and to present this at the city’s Graves Arts Gallery as part of the exhibition’s closing event. The account of the project provides the basis for a critical/theoretical reflection on the nature and challenges of experiential learning, drawing in particular on the writings of John Heron and Michael Luntley. The article’s thesis is that the latter’s differentiation between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ conceptions of practice and Heron’s stress on ‘live encounter’ can enrich our understanding of experiential learning, of how we can help our students move from ‘knowing that’ to ‘knowing how’, from the simulation of the world in the workshop to immersion in what Foucault has called ‘the dramaturgy of the real’. The article is in three sections. Section 1 sets out the context for the project. Section 2 offers an impressionistic account of the process. Section 3 offers a summative analysis.

This article considers some of the methodological issues faced by a team working in the emerging field of participatory arts and health research. It argues that, in order to optimize research rigour, there is a need to address four fundamental issues. First, researchers should define the scope of the art(s) under study (in terms of domain, level of participation and potential impact); second, they should adopt a concept of health appropriate for the target sample group; third, the research method should be consistent with the extent and type of evidence already existing in the area and that to be sought; and finally, there is a need to select a means of data collection and communication that accurately represents both the outcomes/impacts of arts interventions and the experiences of research subjects, which may not be reducible to the language conventionally used in research. The issues are illustrated with an account of one research project being undertaken by the team.

The article examines ways in which arts-based educational approaches were applied to a group of African descendant youth in Western Australia, as a way of understanding challenges to their bicultural socialization and means to developing their bicultural competence. Drawing on African cultural memory as a cultural resource enabled participants to discover the relevance of African cultural memory and embodied knowledge to their bicultural socialization and bicultural competence. The article challenges the argument that successful integration into dominant culture is only possible when migrants remain focused on acquisition of dominant cultural values – ‘Fitting in’. The African Cultural Memory Youth Arts Festival (ACMYAF) offered an alternative conception of successive integration as a process inclusive of creative appropriation and revaluation of ancestral culture through cultural memory. The festival became a third space through which the participants explored embodied knowledge and African cultural memory towards a positive self-concept and bicultural competence.