Playing as Survival: Research-Creation as Spiritual Awakening

• In Event: Sacred Criticality, Trance, Markmaking, and Performativity: Spirit Nurturing, Awakening, and Aesthetic Practices in Educational Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper aims to re-member both the historical and personal dream of public education, with the current late capitalist imperatives of the academy and the education sector as output-oriented workplaces. This paper/performance seeks to create space for coming together as activist bodies, spiritual collaborators, and creative facilitators to re-imagine education and public spaces in which a return to the whole person is both good pedagogy and good citizenship.

Perspectives
This performance draws on a body of performance ethnography scholarship including Soyini Madison (2010) and Tami Spry (2016) who offer a nexus between ethnography and performance, in which gender, embodiment, and spirit are deeply entwined. Research creation which aims to reflect, critique, and extend society’s understandings of ourselves as individuals and collectivities, offers much to educators and the ongoing project of public education, through a re-commitment to critical reflection.

Modes of Inquiry
Spry (2016) has articulated the ways in which autoethnography and other performance ethnography “originates as a discourse from the margins of dominant culture” (p. 710), and current neoliberal education trends are increasingly characteristic of dominant cultures. Using Boal’s practice of ‘silent negotiation,’ this paper uses an innovative qualitative approach through use of body, breath and gaze as data-creation tools.

Data Sources
This work is informed by socially engaged art (Thompson, 2012) which functions as counter-hegemonic research tools. Performance ethnographers continue “to engage with timely issues by expanding their practice beyond the safe confines of the studio and right into the complexities of the unpredictable public sphere” (Pasternak, 2012, p. 9), as this performance seeks to do.

Results and/or Conclusions
This performance focuses on what we might do in making and thinking situations to create what Manning (2015) calls a research-creation, which redefines knowledge, asking us “to engage directly in a process that, in many cases, will not be or cannot be articulated in language” (p. 65) but is a “thought-in-the-doing” (p. 65).

Scholarly Significance
In this performance, I engage my audience and fellow panelists in a variety of creative modes, rather than passively consuming the work so that together, we will experience research-creation as collective critical pedagogical, as well as spiritual, awakening.

Authors

• Anne Harris, RMIT University

• Stacy Holman Jones, Monash University