“We Are All Becoming”: Exploring the Design of Improvisational Activity within Researcher-Artist Collaborations

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging in Arts and Making as Acts of Transformative Identity Building

Abstract

Objectives
Artistic identities develop across time, through conversation, and within creative practices. Throughout a co-design project with five improvisational jazz artists, including co-design conversations and performances, artists drew on identity-relevant experiences to reflect on their distinct and developing roles as individuals and ensemble members. We focus on how one artist, a female painter and musician, embodies her role as a multidisciplinary performer in the context of this ensemble.

Perspectives
Drawing on socio-cultural theory (Rogoff, 2014; Williams et al., 2020), we understand identity development as both an individual and collective process, contextualized within cultural activity, and spanning across time. Learning alongside collaborating artists, we are coming to understand identity development as an ongoing process linked across generations and connected to “the divine art of living.”

Methods
This participatory design research project (Authors, 2016) draws on interpretive methodologies (Erickson, 1986) and interaction analysis traditions (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Modes of inquiry included co-design sessions, live performance, photography, conversational dinners with artists and audience members, studio visits, driving interviews and venue mapping, and one recording session.

Data Sources & Analysis
This analysis draws on 15 co-design conversations during which the artists discuss the evolution of their artistic identities in relation to one another and their ancestors. Using narrative analysis, we identified instances of second stories (Sacks, 1992), in which participants share stories in response to one another’s identity-based experiences. We focus on the ways in which co-designers’ story observations of one another’s processes of becoming, and how these stories shape the enactment of their live performances.

Results
Through storying, artists explored the multiple ways they understood their senses of self, roles in community, and how their creative work extends beyond their individual lives and lifespans. For example, one of the co-designers, L, identifies as a visual artist and harmonium player. During one conversation, a co-designer discussed how L’s identities shaped the performance space, pointing to a 15-year collaboration where L played the harmonium and displayed her paintings on stage. Similarly, another co-designer described how L’s paintings influenced the way audience members received the music. L also narrated her familial history and agentically positioned herself as a creator in ways that informed both her personal and artistic identities.

While discussing possibilities for an upcoming performance, L decided to expand her creative practice and shift between painting and playing the harmonium - something she had never done before this project. L discussed this as a move to strengthen her identity as a multidisciplinary artist and musician. Similarly, the artists understood the decision as both a challenge to audiences’ normative experiences and an invitation to reimagine what is knowable about “jazz” and what belongs in performances.

Scholarly Significance
The creative arts, and in particular improvisational musicing, are important spaces for identity-work across the lifespan. Collaborations that create conditions for storying histories of relations and enacting creative practices provide opportunities for artists who are considered experts in their craft and have performed together for multiple decades to see new possibilities in their practice and conceptions of self.

Authors

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Trinity Collins, University of California - Los Angeles

• Shivani Dave, University of California - Los Angeles

• Lindsay Lindberg, University of California - Los Angeles