Abstract:

The present study explores the potential of hybrid, intermedia and interactive movement-based performing arts as both technical and technological approach to embodied learning in the context of adult education. The research presents a case study treating the application of “Real Games-Performance Games for Everyday Life”, an intermedia, hybrid and movement-based art-pedagogical device as a tool for embodied learning in the context of a secondary school classroom in adult education. The “Real Games” are a web-based radio-dance/drama and a podcast that instead of being listened to is designed to be done. The podcast contains 21 real games, 21 audio-based dance scores and theatre games each to be performed in connection to a different everyday task. Learners can do the Real Games interactive performances in the classroom or as homework, by following the step-by-step audio-instructions in real time while doing a daily activity. Data are collected through open interviews about the learning “aftermaths” of the experience, putting special attention to the role of bodily imagination in the learning process of creativity. Based on growing field of Embodied Cognition, the mind is extended, and learning and cognition happen all over the body through interaction with the environment, being largely non conscious (Shapiro 2019, Damasio 2019, Jusslin et al. 2022; Nathan 2021; Macrine and Fugate 2022). Creativity is a central part of cognition (Johnson 1987) and an embodied phenomenon (Griffith 2022) that might be key to learning process. As a Performer and Art Educator I know that movement-based performing, and imagination is a practice that has to be built over a basis: the horizontal union between body and mind inside physical movement. Movement based performing arts, building on aware physical perception is the ground of creativity (Zarrilli 2020), hold a potential in supporting learning by facilitating the connection between reflexive knowledge with pre-reflexive knowledge, such as sensations, emotions and images, as well as by linking the construction of cultural meanings with lived experiences (Anttila 2015, Anttila 2018). Despite this scientific and artistic knowledge, in mainstream culture and education imagination is dissociated from the body and movement and mostly reduced to visualization (Zarrilli 2020), excluding oppressed and colonized embodied imaginaries and reducing creativity’s educational potential. In the urgency of decolonizing our educational system and of improving its quality, we must update it with embodied, creative and movement-based performing practices, towards envisioning and actualizing more inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

Keywords:

Participatory Art, Performing arts, blended learning, creativity, embodied learning.