Scene - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018

This article introduces a three-year project begun in 2018 that investigates the relationship between visual arts education and mental health recovery for prisoners and probationers. The project is delivered in custodial contexts in Leicester, UK. The research engages young offenders with mental health conditions in creating visual artwork for public exhibition and publication. Insight into mental health recovery is gained through semi-structured interviews with participants. Participant well-being is coded through the CHIME framework. Some early findings are that the workshops help to alleviate the deep boredom of prison life; they are a useful distraction and an opportunity for introspection; they promote future thinking; and they help prisoners to connect with families. The research is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good health and wellbeing; and Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.

The nature of Eje Festival in relation to gender is the subject of this study. The study deploys the tool of aesthetic as an instrument to particularly investigate the role of masquerades as a means of entertaining female members of the community periodically. Dwelling on aesthetics as a critical tool, the study unravels the performance of Eje Festival as a means of solving some perceived agrarian problems. The study concludes that the underlying reason behind the festival is subsumed in the quest for entertainment and the need for cohesion in the society especially as a means of enhancing the safety of members who might be married to people far and near.

This article explores sites of possibility for addressing the current refugee crisis through artistic collaborations and asks how we as artists negotiate artistic mediums to foster a collective dialogue about ethics of representation concerning migrant bodies and mediatized images of violence and destruction. In winter 2018, University of Central Florida’s Schools of Visual and Performing Arts offered interdisciplinary programming that addressed issues of exile, displacement and Otherness. The gallery exhibition Finding Home: The Global Refugee Crisis brought together fourteen artists from around the world whose work addresses themes including borders as geographical and symbolic dividing lines, displacement and asylum seeking, refugee camps and detention centres, and immigration and resettlement. The theatre production of David Edgar’s Pentecost and the staged reading of The Refugee Plays interweaved the past with the present to challenge how society responds to a refugee crisis and treats ‘precarious bodies’ of the displaced and wounded. This article considers the ways in which this collaboration united the visual and performing arts, decolonized the institution, adapted, transformed and negotiated media, performed difference and diversity, and demonstrated the ability of the arts to act for social justice.

In this article, I will examine the possible contribution that the (performing) arts have made to imagine the socio-ecological transition and the Anthropocene era. I will first examine the position occupied by narratives to document and explore these processes and the types of set-ups and approaches that are commonly used in artistic circles. I will then present two projects that were realized in recent years and will examine in particular their relationship with nature and their use of modern technologies. By steering clear of a normative approach, I will finally emphasize the space that these projects leave for their users, their potential dynamics and how they could inspire the performing arts.

With the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, Lyndon Johnson stated that ‘[...] we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish’. Today, we are facing the largest existential threat to human civilization as a result of human-made climate change. Research into the three dimensions of sustainable development articulated by the UN’s Brundtland Commission reveals that the arts have positive impacts in each area. The arts are drivers of social cohesion, and build our individual and shared identities. The arts contribute to the economy significantly above the rates of public and private funding allocated to them, especially at a local level. And, by congregating people together and sharing ideas have real and significant potential positive environmental impacts. These impacts offer evidence that society can become more sustainable with arts at the centre.

The Ecological Turn offers a unique perspective on the cyclic and continuous potentiality of things in scenographic practice. This Is Not Rubbish is an ecoscenographic project that investigates the journey of a material rescued from landfill, and its capacity to create immersive performance spaces and wearable artefacts. Inspired by new materialist notions of inhuman agency, the project seeks to dissolve the boundaries between more-than-human actants, installation and costume, site and material. The visual essay examines the potential for ecoscenography to lead to new modes of practice in scenography, where expanded ideas of material entanglement, across bodies, ecosystems and built environments, are central to performance design.

Life and Fate, adapted for the stage and directed by Lev Dodin, Maly Drama Theatre Company, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 12 May 2018

Life is a Dream, by Kim Brandstrup, Rambert Dance Company, Sadler’'s Wells Theatre, London, 26 May 2018

New Work/New Music, The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre, 8 February 2019