The Project
As an embodied researcher, artist and teacher to “get to the heart of things…[I] need to take my body with [me]”. Merleau Ponty
What I set out to do
Arts-based and body-led thinking continually has to validate its existence in an education system that perpetually subjugates and marginalizes their value. Western-Liberal education reflexively privileges the mind-intellect which reinforces and prioritizes the value of text and numbers over other forms of knowledge production. If the education system continues to position the arts and their inherent embodied practices as unreliable, then what chance do the arts and the bodies that create them have in terms of being perceived as cognitively robust, educationally relevant and legitimate?
COVID-19 and its impact on how we navigate social and public spaces was the catalyst for an arts-based and body-led research project which was framed around the following questions:
- How are we attending to our bodies differently under a new set of conditions?
- What sources of visual, textual, sensory and material information implicitly or explicitly draw our attention to our corporeal experiences of space and “[turn] to the body as a ground for sense-making” (Merleau-Ponty in Buono & Gonzalez, 2017, pp. 6-7)?
- What information will body-led and choreographic thinking offer that will not come from a logical mind-first approach?
These questions address the central ideas about the value of movement as a means of inquiry and the body as a site of knowing. Sense-making requires a situated self-moving body to perceive, think, feel, and act in, with and on the world. This is highly relevant in education and the critical place of the arts in education in rendering visible “how the world touches us” (Merleau-Ponty in Cannatella, 2008, p. 105).
Arts-Based Research (ABR) is often characterized as being relationally oriented, participatory and heuristic. ABR deploys artistic processes and the making of artistic products as the primary method of inquiry and “ways of knowing and being in the world” (Finlay, 2012, p. 73). ABR was implemented in my research-creation as a meaning-making and knowledge generation process. ABR was mobilized through dance, somatic, choreographic and performative inquiries provoked by gathered visual, textual and material data. Knowledge was generated from an embodied (body-led) approach and represented by the aesthetic action of the choreographed/performing and filmed body. As a researcher in self-isolation (due to COVID-19), I enacted the role of researcher while simultaneously participating as the subject of that research. My intention was not to stand in for all bodies, but to speak to the spatial-temporal experience of my body as I made sense of the data.
The intention of the project is to build an understanding of how the body is wedded to perception, cognition and action.
My research methods draw from a variety of disciplines and fields such as embodied cognition, somatics, dance, psychogeography, choreography, performance and screen dance. These fields elucidate a research process that is both embodied and arts-based. My research process as you will see throughout the project website demonstrates multiple engagements with data. Engaging in a multisensorial interrogation and interpretation of the data led to scoring and performing the data as the main text of my research. This is evidenced in a final video work called Chalk Moves – Body as Teacher and Scribe in a Pandemic.
Highlights of my Methods
Gather and Collect Data
Photography, video and field notes were used to collect visual, textual, sensory and material data from public, office and commercial spaces.
Analyse and Organize the Data
Data was analysed and organized into data sets based on emergent patterns and themes. See edited videos of the data sets and themes below.
Interpret and Dance the Data
A variety of embodied and arts-based modalities, such as somatics, dance, composing, choreography, performance and film were used to make sense of the data.
Data Sets
The COVID crisis brought about observable changes in how we
navigate the public space. Photographing these changes became a significant part of the data collection for my research. Through field notes and photography I documented the visual, textual, and material strategies used to re-map and direct the movements of people in indoor and outdoor public spaces. I also documented my office building as it was in progress of re-mapping work spaces for the safe return to work. The collected data demonstrates an array of visual, navigational, relational and instructional strategies deployed in public spaces. The data was significant to my body-led research endeavors. The data inspired a multisensory compositional strategy in the sense-making process of interrogating, interpreting and performing the data.
The COVID-19 provincial shutdown invoked individual and collective art interventions that shared themes related to solidarity and hope. Many messages also implied ways of moving and being in this new world. These interventions appeared in locations such as forested trail systems, sidewalks, parks and other social gathering places like the Distillery District in Toronto. These interventions were catalytic in pursuing an arts-based and embodied research project that would be situated in a public space. This data set helped me consider the experience and qualia of space.
While schools were closed in the spring, elaborate chalk drawings began appearing in my neighborhood and local parks. The chalk drawings which contained familiar COVID(y) shapes were curiously organized along a timeline. They were in effect visual/spatial scores which carried elements of SHAPE, SPACE and DURATION. This inspired a methodology for analsying and interpreting my data via a visual/spatial scoring process. Similar to a musical score, my visual/spatial score was organized into “bars” or measured units of time and space. The score was 19-bars long – an ode to COVID-19. The other compelling feature of the chalk drawings was their locations. This inspired transposing and situating the data in a public space as a site for performance.
Making Sense of the Data
An Arts-Based & Embodied Approach