Performing Arts
I Wish You a Good Life: Embedding Intergenerational Learning Into Pre-service Education Through Art, Community and Environment
The ‘Our Waste Our Place Our Actions’ Art-Reach project brings place-making formal and informal learning together. Through intergenerational learning the project built shared ‘waste wisdoms’ by activating a form of community-based art education that softened institutional divides while questioning our waste behaviours. By rethinking community through the porosity of waste/wildlife/land/sea/children/pre-service teachers/seniors/local/regional knowledge evoked through art we realized our interrelationship with other animals plants and entities (like waste). Together we became aware of local wildlife and their need for a waste-free life. Simultaneously participants reported a sense of feeling valued joyous and excited because of involvement with each other through art. The chapter explores these intersections of art wellbeing and ecological awareness as well as the role social networks and communities play in educational reform within pre-service teacher education. We need to reach beyond academia to community contexts if art education wants to remain relevant to real-world issues.
Intercultural Eye for Art: Becoming a Member of a Global Community Through Arts-Based Exchange
We introduce the Indiana-Hiroshima Intercultural Eye for Art Project from 2015 to 2021 aimed at developing a global community by interconnecting schools across borders using new information technology. We demonstrate through action research and arts-informed case studies how children cooperatively develop a transborder community by engaging in intercultural communication in schools.
International Art Symposia as a Space of Knowledge Creation and Creative Engagement
The chapter focuses on socially engaged art in education and its potential for sustainability as a response to ongoing environmental crises and eco-anxiety. Ecological crises call for artistic interventions and for art education to produce strategies making it possible to live in a humbler way to decolonize nature and deepen humans’ relations with non-human nature. Art-based action research was carried out to develop socially engaged art symposia as informal learning. The chapter presents three case studies using art-based action research to develop art symposia as community art education. Art symposia have potential to foster learning and create transformative experiences that encourage deeper and more respectful interactions among community members and non-human nature. Three perspectives on learning converge in the art symposia: those of the curators participating artists and community members.
Visual Ecologies: Artistic Research Transversing Stable, Dynamic and Interstitial Relations in an Australian Settler Colonial Context
Using artistic and scientific reference points I focus on two of my artworks that exemplify creative encountering as a self-organizational ecosystem. Alternative exhibition and educational sites beyond the archive locate my work in community art education as a space of creative practice and pedagogical knowledge creation. Locutionary work in alternative spaces entails traversing archives for interstitial ancestral stories with the artistic collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women ‘SISTAS Holding Space’ (SHS). Experimental visual ecologies are discussed in metaphoric and literal ways. A natural occurrence of desert ecosystems in Newman Western Australia exemplifies how networks can be conceived as an ecology of practice rather than reliant on individual dispositions. The concept of a ‘counter-encounter’ creates new interstitial pedagogical mechanics to countermand dominant discovery and progress narratives. The resultant visual pattern morphologies trouble historical ‘encounters’ and relations in the contested space of Australia's settler colonial context.
We Are Small, but We Have Loud Voices: Children Leading the Way to Support Community Connections Through Art
As a visual arts specialist I draw upon a/r/tography to refine my teaching practice to enrich my students’ civic engagement. This chapter showcases three arts-led projects at a small metropolitan school in Perth Western Australia demonstrating how community cohesion is instilled through visual arts. Each project embodies the school's motto ‘Achieving Together with Pride’. By embedding community-based art education into the school's regular art programme and establishing genuine partnerships with families and community groups the school positions itself as the local community hub to achieve a mutual goal of community cohesion.
Community Dance as an Approach to Reimagine Place in Aotearoa/New Zealand
This chapter weaves the themes of arts education place-based pedagogy and Indigenous Māori philosophies. Through reflections on encounters within a community dance project in Aotearoa/New Zealand ideas are highlighted about how bodily encounters and experiences with the environment provide possibilities to actively engage young people in learning. Such ideas while situated within a dance context are considered in relation to what they might offer arts education and more broadly decolonized views of education.
Infernal Learning: Becoming Members of Academic Communities
This chapter explores how dominant cultural norms of class serve to silence and marginalize people with less affluent socio-economic backgrounds or who otherwise represent cultural and linguistic diversity. We further inquire how experiences of discrimination impact the narrative experiences of people with academic aspirations in Finnish arts education institutions and education cultures. The research this project undertakes is based on feminist collective narrative inquiry.
Twenty-First Century Winter Journey: Exploring Comics, Adaptation and Community Art Education
This academic comic documents a project employing comics as a transversal language and a form of participatory and relational culture linking people and communities. The project's ultimate success lies in efficacious applications of Community Art Education (CAE) theory and connects two very different segments of the local community by offering a focus and a creative purpose for their joint efforts through the collaborative adaptation of an opera into a graphic novel. The investigation in question is a comics-based research (CBR) project that explores the ways making comics can impact communities on a local national and global level. However the process and outcomes of this collaborative project – between Year Two Comics and Graphic Novels students at Teesside University and the national UK charity Streetwise Opera – were dramatically heightened by the unexpected impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inclusive Dance
Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today.
Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm a locus for debate for change. Touch deprivation exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.
Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative.
Performance Generating Systems in Dance
Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic.
This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy dance education community dance or dance psychology.
Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House William Forsythe Ame Henderson Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.
Conversation I: Prinz Bettliegend in Australia and Bearing the Gift Forward
Chapter 5 presents excerpts of a conversation that the two directors and the lead researcher had in September 2020 shortly after the first drafts of most of the chapters were completed. Together we looked back upon the development process in Australia and on aspects of that process that were mirrored in South Africa. We recalled the visits of Terezin survivor Edith Sheldon to our rehearsals and Ian evoked Marcel Mauss's concept of the ‘gift economy’: the obligation to engage with the Terezín artists’ work as a gift we had received and the obligation to bear it forward. Key issues in the Australian development process manifested themselves differently in South Africa; for example in the ways that a cast in their fifties versus a cast in their twenties absorbed and animated the responsibility weighing on the Jewish leaders.