Performing Publics/Creative Citizenship

• In Event: Response Abilities II: Generating Arts-Based Research With Martin Luther King Jr. and Maxine Greene at the Maxine Greene High School for the Arts and Imaginative Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose
Through a shared commitment to creative citizenship, public education, and the transformative potential of creative arts and imagination, this performance takes up Maxine Green’s heuristic of ‘wide-awakeness’ as a navigational tool in service to the notion of schools-as-monuments, and as sensory places of possibility and departure in our everyday lives and publics. The performance also provokes participants to consider schools and Greene’s ‘wide-awakeness’ as inarticulable spaces of both physical and virtual rebellion, pre-creative chaos and terror.

Perspective/theoretical framework
Scholarship in a range of fields continues its turn to the merging of the virtual and embodied, to performativity of virtuality, and to the role of love, emotion and imagination in service of both educational and social change (Hardt & Negri 2009). This performance asks participants to recommit to wide-awakeness as a public pedagogy, through techniques used both by performers and teachers, students and activists, and what it means to embody change and transformation in our own everyday ‘school yard’ practices.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: This presentation will be a performance of spoken word which incorporates video into its interrogation of monuments, everyday lives, publics, and our role as global citizens both virtually and corporeally. Drawing on Senft’s theorization of gendered online/offline hybrid self-representations, I will perform my spoken word piece in relation with my self-vlogging handheld device, incorporating passersby and both the MLK monument and the Maxine Greene high school spaces which serves as my co-performers.

Inquiry/methods
This performance can also be understood as a demonstration of a cultural model from Riceour, “where culture is seen as founded on triangular encounters between subjects, texts and contexts” (Fornas 2002, p 102), as a multimodal way of making sense of the intermediality of modern life. Broadhurst and Machon (2007) and Senft (2013) explore the ways in which performance collaborations between flesh bodies and digital bodies are changing society and education systems.

Scholarly significance/engagement with audience
This performance highlights through an engagement with the physical ‘monument’ in what I critically interrogate as a broader turn toward our urgent need for more humane and more effective democratic public engagement rather than the fear-based valorisation of political monuments, cultural fixity, and the myth of educational certainty and measurement under which we currently operate.

References
Broadhurst, S. & Machon, J (eds). 2007. Performance and technology: Practices of virtual embodiment and interactivity. NY NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fornas, Johan. 2002. ‘Passages across thresholds: Into the borderlands of mediation. Convergence: The Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 8(4): 89-106.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. ‘Of love possessed’ in (eds.) M Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press.

Senft, T. 2013. ‘Sex, spectatorship, and the ‘Neda’ video: a biopsy’. In (eds.) John Macgregor Wise and Hille Koskela, New Visualities, New Technologies: The new ecstasy of communication. London: Ashgate.

Authors

• Anne Harris, RMIT University

• Stacy Holman Jones, Monash University