Responding Inside, Reacting Outside: Performative Sculpture Creation in the Capital

• In Event: Response Abilities: Generating Arts-Based Research With Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this collaborative, contemplative arts-based performance is to use the body as a site of knowledge and performance through creating human sculptures. The two authors will take turns at one monument site reacting to some aspect of the monument, contemplating on their reaction and creating a human sculptor using the other author. The audience will then be invited to add to the sculpture, express their reactions, and perhaps engage in sculpting possibilities for the future. The non-verbal process of sculpting and followed by a discussion will also be a process of deep discovery and inquiry. The body will function as the bridge between response, reaction, and public discourse.

Perspectives
Influenced by the works of Boal (1993) and Spry (2011), the performative and interactive work are grounded in the assumption that performance is a form of inquiry within, guiding us to understand the embodied aspect of our experiences, emotions, feelings, and memories. Performance is also a representation of such inner journeys with an invitation to the audience to build relationship with the content of the performance and the performers. Key to this relationship is an authentic inquiry that allows an understanding of our bodies in spaces in relation to social issues in the world while understanding the self in relation to the other. We also lean on Boal’s (1993) work to invite the audience to react and think with us and imagine a possibility of a future where various forms of inequities in education might be addressed and erased.

Data
For the purpose of this paper, data will be emergent, based on how we bring our past sensibilities, current aspirations, and hope for the future to the ways in which we interact with the monument, use sculpting as part of understanding our inner negotiations, and represent our reactions. Data will comprise of the authors’ and audience’s responses and reactions using sculpting as space for inquiry, connectivity, and imagination.

Results
The results of this emergent research process will culminate in an invitation to dialogue further, to analyze the ways in which our reactions, responses, and aspirations continue to take form as a result of bearing witness to performative sculpting as inquiry. The monuments will be site of research and data collection, and analysis and reflection will occur after the conference via dialogues with participants and authors.

Significance
Arts-based educational research is generative (Barone & Eisner, 2012), and yet the traditional structure of research creates an isolated form of inquiry placing the author at the center of the inquiry. However, the generative aspect of arts-based inquiry allows for connectivity, reflecting on one’s position, reaction, and disposition in relation to broader sociopolitical discourses, while engaging in iterative meaning-making processes. In this project, we intend to cultivate the generative and connective aspects of arts-based research as inquiry, performance, and interaction to discuss critical issues in education and how such issues could be addressed with the insights gained from this interactive, dialogic performative inquiry.

Authors

• Meaghan Cochrane, Kansas State University

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University