Somersault — Experience All Sided Games

Sport in Society, 2018

imove, which became Yorkshire and Humberside's regional programme for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, was inspired by 'the art of movement', and underpinned by the idea of transcending dualities of mind/body and art/sport. Art and sport were combined in various ways within the programme, and with different degrees and types of audience engagement and participation. This article draws on the evaluation data collected during the course of the programme to develop a typology of art-sport relationships: additive, interactive, and transformative. It defines and illustrates each instance with examples of particular projects and highlights the role of the participants/audience in determining the nature of the physical learning and new knowledge of the moving body that arises in each case. Finally, it considers the conditions under which hybrid forms of art-sport can innovate and flourish with reference to the concept of 'third space'.

'We Were Trying to Make Sense...' : Artist and Non-Artist Participation

ATHENS JOURNAL OF SPORTS

The disciplines of arts and sport are usually divided in education, research, professional practice and cultural policy, even though in the UK they both lie within a single department of Government (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport). In the UK the relationship between arts and sports can sometimes appear awkward, with the two disciplines often only bought together for large international mega sporting events. However, links between the arts and sport can enhance strategies to increase participation in each and promote cultural citizenship, stimulate experimentation, innovation and tackle challenging topics. This paper takes The Fields of Vision Project and the associated Fields of Vision Manifesto as a departure point to propose pioneering modes of practice that cross the discipline boundaries of sports and art, whereby a dialogue and community of practice develops that encourages audience diversity, community engagement and hybrid forms of practice. Utilising precedents from contemporary visual art, propositions are expressed for new experiences and opportunities for practitioners, producers and audiences that might offer impact and legacy beyond the mega sporting event.

Playing with aesthetics This paper will propose that Theatre for Development (TfD) needs a radical overhaul of its aesthetics of participation if it is to make an effective, resistant response to the world of neoliberal instrumentalism in which it currently operates. It is further contended that the required change of direction must be guided by a playful spirit that defies the external demands of mission statement, learning outcome, creative industry or knowledge economy. The dominant contemporary paradigm reduces imagination, creativity and play to commodities to be traded in the search for increased profit. But a transactional, business model of artistic practice is incapable of being used in the exploration of the utopian possible without which our survival is severely compromised.

Engage, 2012

"We are both interested in the idea proposed by this edition of the engage Journal that the Olympic Games might throw galleries and artists off their ‘core purpose’. The implication is that there is pressure to deviate from a self-determined programme or trajectory, and sell out in some way to a global, instrumentalised machine."

Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 2020

This visual/video essay tells the story of the author’s art-based research with immigrant youth of color in Edinburgh, Scotland. Despite experiencing racially motivated aggressions causing injury, harm, and trauma to them as individuals, and the institutions and communities they inhabit, youth created artworks expressing hope and healing as a peaceful and joyful form of resistance and resilience.

2015

The Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based coalition of choreographers and scholars, founded in 2004, has developed and cultivated a unique and highly structured mode of process-oriented long distance collaboration, which we keep honing based on the changing circumstances of our professional and personal lives and Needs. *(1) This process of adjusting our long-distance process, which can be described as a kind of looping is based on reflecting, planning, and evaluating the three major aspects of our process (artistic exploration, scholarly engagement, and organizational structuring) and their intersections in a circular way. Each member’s current artistic and/or scholarly interests and needs, along with experiences and insights gained from previous artistic processes, determine how we plan and adjust new processes. In this article I will first review selected notions and theorizations of collaboration and collective authorship as well as production. Then I will outline t...

2012

In all its functions and possibilities art has the option to be more embedded in societies, in dealing with social and political issues, than ever before. For example, community art became a common art practice during the previous decennia: artists temporarily work within particular communities to create art together with participating citizens. Also in design and design research we see a growing use of participatory practices in which the knowledge, experience and creativity of community members are valued beyond inspiration. But how can artists deal with the notion of togetherness when they are outsiders to the communities they work with? How can they overcome the colonial us-and-them dichotomy that is still a common handicap in community art and in other forms of artistic participatory practice? This conference paper discusses which conditions can help in the creation of a temporarily 'we' during participatory practices. Anthropological approaches and design methods are brought together with self-discovered insights of the artist-writer, picked up during many years of participatory practice and her artistic PhD research involving Arctic indigenous communities.