Sensing in between : co-creating performance within diversity

Abstract

This thesis is the written component of artistic-pedagogical event Patella-floating bone that was created in collaboration with Theatre Pedagogy peer Elina Sarno, and performed over a four-night season in the Spring of 2018 at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. My research is an enquiry into the relational in-between spaces of a diverse artistic working group with dance and theatre practices as the frame for sensory exploration and making. Disability and difference as diverse embodied perceptions come to interrelate in a co-creative, process-oriented and practice-based mode of making, within a landscape of nonhuman material things as equal agents in opening other relational spaces and embodiments to sense with. The research examines the phenomena in and of the process, how artistic practice and the ecology of interdependence emerge, interweave and inform creative art pedagogy in action. The work studies the performative experience of practice and audience experiences within a cohabited immersive setting. The main question that mobilised this research is: how does interrelational sensing occur between divers embodied perceptions and mobilise processes of art making and learning? The work suggests that through artistic practice which privileges embodied sensory exploration in the context of diversity and the call of materiality, the in-between spaces become foregrounded as fields of events unfolding, arising phenomena and knowledge-making. The group’s diversity of embodied perceptual differences informs and develops artistic enquiry through engaging in practice, co-creation and performance, harnessing pedagogical value in the very seeds of process. The group ecology of the shared in-between spaces becomes the generator for these relational experiences in the making. The research in the thesis engages philosophical and artistic theories with particular reference to Erin Manning’s understanding of agencement, and to disability discourse in dance by Ann Cooper Albright, to reflect and critique broader societal frames of dominant structures. Dialogical pedagogy theories and self-reflective research, as pedagogue and facilitator of emerging unknowns within the group ecology, move through a phenomenological landscape of knowledge-making processes. The performance outcome becomes a motor of playful exploration, yet in itself not an outcome but a practice in process within a cohabited shared space, in which audience are invited to participate through sensory perceptual ways to the in-betweenness of the diverse group embodiment, dissolving nonhuman / human dichotomies along with ableist dichotomies. I intend a mode of facilitation that opens to collaboration, that surrenders the pedagogy to a group artistic agent and to an immanent directionality in art, while honouring the role.