Abstract:

Based on an Artistic Action Research in a Secondary School classroom, the present paper’s aim is to explore the kinds of learning elicited through movement-based performing arts lessons that focus on bodily imagination, and to analyze the learning experiences and emotions described by the participants, from the perspective of an interpretive inquiry. Actual eco-social crisis demands us to imagine sustainable futures (Herrero 2019), and stop being subject to our reality and start being co-creators of it. (Haraway 2016). General Education as a potential site for social transformation, must train imagination, in order to prepare students to envision and shape just realities and transform society (Brown 2017). In my experience as a Performing and Teaching Artist I know in first person that imagination is an embodied process, that is developed through an aware involvement of the body in the action of imagining something. In movement-based performing, aware physical perception is the ground of creativity (Tuisku 2019), and imagination is a practice that has to be built over a basis: the horizontal union between body and mind inside movement. Despite this artistic knowledge, in mainstream culture and education imagination is dissociated from the body and movement and mostly reduced to visualization. This disembodied concept of imagination responds to a sexist, capitalistic, colonial perspective that states the symbolic superiority of the mind over the body (Marshall 2005; Blackman 2008), and marginalizing the body-side of culture (the feminine, the non-white, the queer, the disabled, the indigenous, the natural, the non-human etc.), excluding oppressed imaginaries and weakening the collective power of vision. As Roxana Ng (2005) observes, this discriminatory principle is deeply integrated as an embodied attitude also by oppressed people, who are unconsciously reproducing an oppressive ideology through their behavior, and must be acknowledged through embodied learning. On the other side, in its effort to achieve Quality Education, and mainstreaming the Target 4.7 of UN 2030 Agenda-Education for sustainability, the European Union (European Council of 22 May 2018) recommends the adoption of arts-based methodologies to foster creativity at the ground of a new framework of Key Competences for Lifelong Learning and Sustainability. Notwithstanding this knowledge and recommendations, European School system remain mostly organized according to logocentric principles, marginalizing imagination, the body and the performing arts from teaching and learning. In the urgency striving successfully through the present crisis, we must decolonize our system and update it with embodied and movement-based performing practices in order to involve students as co-creators of just and sustainable futures.

Keywords:

Performing arts, bodily imagination, critical thinking, creativity, embodied learning.