Embodied Storytelling: Exploring the Possibilities of Performance

• In Event: Community, Creativity, Curiosity: An Interactive Demonstration and Workshop Exploring Participatory, Arts-Based Methods Across Diverse Contexts

Abstract

The Body and Ecology Collective (BEC) is an intergenerational group of researchers and artists (ranging from high school-aged to postgraduate) who explore embodied and ecological learning through the creative and performing arts. Performance can be a generative exercise for exploring the multiple dimensions of social justice education in general (Boal, 1974; Gallagher, 2021, 2012; Medina and Campano, 2006; Whitelaw, 2019; Vasudevan et al., 2010) as well as climate and environmental justice education more specifically (Doyle, 2020; Gallagher et al., 2020, 2022; Osnes, 2018, 2017). An attentiveness to performativity and performance also invites an attentiveness to the body, and to the ways in which power operates through, within, on, and between bodies. The sort of storytelling through the body that comes into sharp relief through a “performance-oriented lens” can engender critical engagement with the ways in which socially, culturally, and politically cultivated scripts interact with human bodies in real time. At BEC, we consider how attentiveness to creative engagement with and through the body can inform how we understand the intersecting social and ecological systems that surround us. We are guided by the question: what stories can our bodies remember, as well as reimagine, about our relationship with the land?
Our current project aims to unpack the role of performance in remembering and reimagining African food and agricultural traditions throughout the Diaspora. Rooted in performance ethnographic methods, we are working with African Diasporic communities in both Philadelphia, USA and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to create immersive and interactive place and performance-based experiences that map the food and agricultural legacies that surround them. During this session, we will share how we are using writing-for-performance, that is, writing for embodiment on a stage or a screen, in our research process and invite participants to explore how this practice might inform their work as well. Building on Gallagher, Wessels and Ntelioglou’s notion of a “metho-pedagogy”, in which “using arts-based or participatory methods, asks the researchers to adapt fluidly to important affective moments as they arise in research sites and reshape the social relations within them” (2012, p. 239), we focus on how writing-for-performance can help researchers and educators become more creativity and dexterously adaptive to the emergent nature of participatory research design.
The body is the medium through which we experience all modalities, therefore an embodied lens lends itself to a nuanced understanding of expression, communication, and connection. In addition, building on ecological understanding of space and place, one rooted in the relationship between human and nonhuman bodies, is an important aspect of education research and practice invested in disrupting hegemonic systems of power that have destabilized both the human and nonhuman world. Embodied storytelling through writing-for-performance is one way researchers and educators can use creativity to unpack these dynamics in collaborative, multimodal, immersive, and inclusive ways. The session aims to be an illuminating experience for those invested in supporting communities in bringing about a more just and regenerative future.

Author

• OreOluwa Badaki, Teachers College, Columbia University