Copenhagen October 15th - 18th 2019
Actual children, unique situations: improvisation and immersive pedagogy: A collection of vignettes from a collective of artist-educators Charlotte Arculus, Manchester Metropolitan University; Jessica Pitt, University of Roehampton
Abstract: Resisting dominant forces in arts funding and education policy that attempt to make pedagogy a fixed and measureable object, this paper discusses the practice of an arts collective that works with young children with communication difficulty. Foregrounding the practice of improvisation, as well as attending to the affective role of both the materials, space, and sound created through an immersive environment, it explores the potential of immersive pedagogy in terms of a thoughtful body. It explores the absence of adult speech and the possibilities that this non-representational space opens up for a worldy intra-action (Barad 2007) between all kinds of things.
I spoke about music between people, in refrains of gesture and sound.
I finished with a poem
Where Everything Is Music by Jelaluddin Rumi
Don’t worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out. We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see.
Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirit fly in and out.
from Rumi – Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne
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