Futures of Performance: The Responsibilities of Performing Arts in Higher Education [1 ed.] 9781003316107, 9781032326658, 9781032326641

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FUTURES OF PERFORMANCE

Futures of Performance inspires both current and future artists/academics to reflect on their roles and responsibilities in igniting future-forward thinking and practices for the performing arts in higher education. The book presents a breadth of new perspectives from the disciplines of music, dance, theatre, and mediated performance and from a range of institutional contexts. Chapters from teachers across various contexts of higher education are organized according to the three main areas of responsibilities of performing arts education: to academia, to society, and to the field as a whole. With the intention of illuminating the intricacy of how performing arts are situated and function in higher education, the book addresses key questions including: How are the performing arts valued in higher education? How are programs addressing equity? What responsibilities do performing arts programs have to stakeholders inside and outside of the academy? What are programs’ ethical obligations to students and how are those met? Futures of Performance examines these questions and offers models that can give us some of the potential answers. This is a crucial and timely resource for anyone in a decision-making position within the university performing arts sector, from administrators, to educators, to those in leadership positions. Karen Schupp (MFA) is a Professor of Dance at Arizona State University, USA, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Dance Education. Her research examines postsecondary performing arts education, dance competition culture, and equity and ethics in dance education.

“What is most meaningful about Futures of Performance is the focus on what individual and collectives of college and university faculty can (and should) do to insure a vibrant and impactful future for the performing arts. Futures of Performance explores the intersection of the vitality of the performing arts in society with the profound potential tertiary education has on preparing vocational professional artists and avocational arts lovers to make and love even more art. The extent to which the volume investigates the socio-political, economic, media, and cultural systems inherent in both the making of art and its consumption, as well as upon the entire educational enterprise, is significant.” Tayloe Harding, Dean, School of Music, University of South Carolina, USA “Futures of Performance is distinct in that it places the performing arts in dialogue with each other through an interactive set of responsibilities—to the field, society, and academe—that continually influence and impact each other. One of the strengths of this volume is the personal journeys of the authors as they respond to devising new modes of interaction, the cultural history of their students, unanticipated historical events as well as the politics of the academy, the professional field, and society. Other strengths include the volume’s focus on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Throughout, there is an emphasis on wholistic student centered approaches, responsiveness to unique cultural histories, and an open attitude toward an ever-evolving historical context. The essays in this volume are successful in providing this discursive dialogue and therefore provide an important contribution to a consideration of the future of performance in higher education.” Barbara Sellers-Young, Professor Emerita, York University, Toronto, Canada

FUTURES OF PERFORMANCE The Responsibilities of Performing Arts in Higher Education

Edited by Karen Schupp

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Karen Schupp; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Karen Schupp to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schupp, Karen, editor. Title: Futures of performance : the responsibilities of performing arts in higher education / edited by Karen Schupp. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023010540 (print) | LCCN 2023010541 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032326658 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032326641 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003316107 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts--Study and teaching (Higher) Classification: LCC PN1576 .F88 2024 (print) | LCC PN1576 (ebook) | DDC 790.2--dc23/eng/20230508 LCC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010540 LCC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010541 ISBN: 978-1-032-32665-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-32664-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-31610-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107 Typeset in Galliard by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

viii

Introduction1 Karen Schupp SECTION I

Responsibilities to Academia9 1 Introduction Karen Schupp 2 Performance Across the Disciplines: Envisioning Transdisciplinary Performance Pedagogies in Postsecondary Education Jesse Katen 3 Ethics, Standards, Evaluation, and Support of Creative Research in Academia Ali Duffy, Isabella Gonzales, and Destanie Davidson Preston 4 Ugly Feelings and Social Justice: Interrupting Inaction in Times of Perpetual Crisis Lauren Kapalka Richerme

11

13

28

44

vi Contents

5 Hosting Co(n)fusion: Art Residencies as Invitation-Practices Janaína Moraes 6 Decolonizing Tertiary Dance Education Through Including Student Voices in a Curricula Change Project Camilla Reppen, Lovisa Lundgren, and Tone Pernille Østern 7 The Creative Spaces at HBCUs Avis HatcherPuzzo, Soni Martin, Denise Murchison Payton, and Amanda Virelles 8 Call of the Butterfly: The Tao of GenuineGenerosity Robert Farid Karimi SECTION II

58

72

89

106

Responsibilities to the Fields

123

9 Introduction Karen Schupp

125

10 The Distance of Education127 Adesola Akinleye 11 Performing Hartford: A Community Turns Its Head145 Rebecca K. Pappas 12 Integrating Disciplines—Disciplining Integration: Opera Curriculum through a Transdisciplinary Counter-Critical Pedagogy160 Kevin Skelton 13 Sustainable Futures in Performance Practice, Production, and Distribution Ecologies177 Max Zara Bernstein 14 Fighting for Equity With(in) Parasitical Resistance190 Jessica Rajko 15 A Tertiary Music Performance Education Through a Lens of Entrepreneurship206 Deanna Swoboda

Contents  vii

16 “Undervalued, Underpaid, Underappreciated”: The Lived Experiences of Adjunct Faculty in the Performing Arts221 Karen Schupp, Artemis Preeshl, and Joya Scott SECTION III

Responsibilities to Society

237

17 Introduction239 Karen Schupp 18 Performing Arts Education for Democracies: Are We Cultivating Citizens or Docile Laborers?241 Robin Raven Prichard 19 Revitalizing the US Baccalaureate Dance Major: Integrating Values of Diversity and Interdisciplinarity256 Sherrie Barr and Wendy Oliver 20 Interrogating the Academy’s Role in the Journey from Art Music to Heart Music273 Fiona Evison 21 Toward a Pedagogy of Care: Well-Being, Grief, and Community-based Theatre’s Role in Higher Education291 Rivka Eckert 22 Arts Education in Community Colleges: A Critical Connection305 Amy C. Parks 23 Pedagogies of Critical Embodiment: Activating Submerged Histories, Moving Toward Anti-Racist Futures323 Dasha A. Chapman 24 The Performing Arts in the Next America: Preparing Students for Their Future340 Peter Witte Index

360

CONTRIBUTORS

Adesola Akinleye, PhD, is a choreographer and artist-scholar. She is currently

an Assistant Professor at Texas Woman’s University.

Sherrie Barr, dance professor, taught at institutions such as SUNY Potsdam,

University of Oregon, and Michigan State University. Her research centers dance pedagogy through intersecting somatics and critical pedagogies. Max Zara Bernstein (they/them) is an artist, musician, performer, educator,

and diver. They received a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from CU Boulder.

Dasha A. Chapman is a scholar-practitioner-educator who writes solo and col-

laboratively, devises place-based performances with US and Haitian artists, and co-convenes transdisciplinary initiatives.

Ali Duffy (PhD, MFA) is a Professor, Graduate Director, and Associate Head

of Dance at Texas Tech University, and the Artistic Director of Flatlands Dance Theatre.

Rivka Eckert is a mother/artist, scholar, and abolitionist theatre-maker. She is

currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY Potsdam.

Fiona Evison is a Scottish-Canadian music educator, conductor, accompanist,

and composer invested in community music as a vital, inclusive activity of joy, connection, and well-being.

Contributors  ix

Isabella Gonzales earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in dance from Texas

Tech University, where she studied various dance forms and was heavily involved in dance research.

Avis HatcherPuzzo is an Associate Professor of Dance/Theater at Fayetteville

State University. Her work focuses on arts pedagogy relating to social development through culture. Robert Farid Karimi designs games and interactive performance experiences

to spark audiences/players, in all manner of civic spaces, to imagine worlds of mutual community nourishment. Jesse Katen teaches at his dance studio in Windsor, New York, and in the Eng-

lish Department at SUNY Broome Community College.

Lovisa Lundgren is a current bachelor student in dance pedagogy at Stock-

holm University of the Arts, with a major in contemporary dance.

Soni Martin is an artist and arts educator at Fayetteville State University. Her

areas of expertise are studio art and contemporary theory. She has exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Janaína Moraes is a Brazilian artist based in Aotearoa (New Zealand) who

works between dance, language, performance, pedagogy, and research within invitation poétics. Janaína is a dance PhD candidate at the University of Auckland. Wendy Oliver is a Professor of Dance and Women’s/Gender Studies at Provi-

dence College. She is co-editor of the books Rooted Jazz Dance and Jazz Dance. Tone Pernille Østern (Dr. of Arts in Dance) is a Professor in Arts Educa-

tion with a focus on Dance at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Rebecca K. Pappas makes dances that excavate the body as an archive for per-

sonal and social memory. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance.

Amy C. Parks, PhD, is Dean of Academic Affairs at the Metropolitan Campus

of Cuyahoga Community College. She is an accomplished musician, educator, and public speaker.

x Contributors

Denise Murchison Payton (DM, EdD) is Director of Choral Activities; Mu-

sic Area Coordinator; Instructor of Voice, Opera Workshop, Chamber Ensembles; workshop presenter; and Facilitator of Learning at F ­ ayetteville State University. Artemis Preeshl, Fulbright Senior Theatre Specialist, directs stage, film, inti-

macy, and dialects. Her books include Shakespeare and Commedia dell’Arte, Reframing Acting in the Digital Age, and Consent in Shakespeare. Destanie Davidson Preston is currently working to obtain her certification in

early education. She graduated from Texas Tech University with a master’s degree in dance. Robin Raven Prichard is an artist, scholar, Fulbright Fellow, NEA panelist,

dance professor, writer, and lover of democracy, autonomy, and cats.

Jessica Rajko is an Associate Professor in dance and big data analytics at Wayne

State University, where she researches dance’s computational legibility.

Camilla Reppen is an Assistant Lecturer in Dance Pedagogy and a project

leader at Stockholm University of the Arts. She holds a BA in dance pedagogy and MA in educational management.

Lauren Kapalka Richerme is an Associate Professor of Music Education at In-

diana University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on music education foundations, philosophy, and sociology. Karen Schupp (MFA) is a Professor of Dance at Arizona State University. Her

research examines tertiary performing arts education, dance competition culture, and equity and ethics in dance education.

Joya Scott (she/her) is the creative producer for the contemporary theater

collective Ghosteater and an Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University. Kevin Skelton has a multifaceted career performing, directing, choreograph-

ing, teaching, and researching. He specializes in 17th century music and experimental music theatre. Deanna Swoboda (DMA) is an Associate Professor of Music at Arizona State

University where she teaches tuba, euphonium, and music entrepreneurship.

Contributors  xi

Amanda Virelles (DMA) is a Cuban American pianist and professor of music.

She has performed throughout the United States, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Peter Witte serves as dean of the Conservatory of Music and Professor of Mu-

sic at University of the Pacific.

INTRODUCTION Karen Schupp

The more people one asks, the more apparent it is that the role of higher education1 is widely varied. For some, higher education exists to facilitate lifetime learning, and for others, it is a site for vocational training. While some believe attending college is a private investment that should be personally financed, others assert that it serves a public good and should be governmentally subsidized. Plus, a range of opinions exists on whether programs should prioritize traditions or innovations. How institutions are situated within these spectrums is the result of intersecting political, social, and cultural values. Systems of higher education are dynamic, reflecting the values and priorities of their regions and governance structures, as well as those inside the institution: students, faculty, and leadership. The performing arts—dance, music, theatre, and interdisciplinary performance—are enterprising reflections of their communities of practice. Performing arts practices explore and navigate a continuum of content and praxes from the past and present, with an investment in the future. In the future, as well as now, the performing arts will need to serve an array of artistic and cultural interests in communities, navigate shifting socio-economic realities, grapple with advancements in technology, and rethink their purposes in society. For many performing arts faculty, these future obligations drive their current teaching, research, creative activity, service, and administrative responsibilities. Institutions of higher education and performing arts have a symbiotic relationship. From colleges focused specifically on the arts, to the presence of large auditoriums on campuses that provide residencies and events, to the inclusion of guest artists in departmental programing, higher education has always integrated performing arts on campus. In this way, individual programs DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-1

2  Karen Schupp

directly participate in the larger performing arts ecosystem. On a curricular level, degree programs are built in relation to traditions and innovations in professional praxes. In doing so, performing arts programs prepare the next generations of practitioners who will shape future norms and expectations. While higher education and the performing arts each has unique obligations and contexts, they are mutually supportive in the pursuit of educating performing artists. The convergence of opportunities and challenges in both spheres shape current and future practices about how curricula, pedagogy, and research unfold, pointing to the possibilities for and responsibilities of performing arts in higher education. To gain an initial understanding of higher education in the United States, it is critical to consider both how the academy is perceived and who enrolls in it. In the United States, 37.9% of adults ages 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree (Schaeffer 2022). And while most Americans believe that a college degree is important, even if they have not graduated from college (Parker 2019), the majority of Americans (61%) believe that US higher education is headed in the wrong direction (Brown 2018). Rising tuition costs and the perception that students are not acquiring skills for success in the workplace are the two issues most offered from those concerned about where higher education is headed (Brown 2018). In addition, higher education is confronting longstanding systemic disconnections between stated intentions related to inclusion, diversity, access, and equity and the impact of exclusionary and inequitable practices. While US college student populations have become more ethnically and racially diverse, faculty populations have not. The racial and ethnic composition of campuses includes students who identify as Asian American (6.8%), Black or African American (12.6%), Hispanic or Latinx (19.3%), Indigenous (.66%), Multiracial (3.85%), Pacific Islander (.26%), and White (54.3%) (Hanson 2022). Yet faculty remain overwhelmingly White (74% of total faculty) (NCES 2022). About one-third (33.6%) of students receive Pell Grants (federal grants awarded to students with exceptional financial need) (NCES n.d.), and 56% of undergraduates are first-generation college students (RTI International 2019). This stratification of access is additionally buttressed through implicit socio-economic ranking of higher education institutions, where those that are “more selective” tend to be less demographically and ethnically diverse than those that promote inclusion and embrace the importance of having diverse student populations (Crow and Dabars 2020). This uncertain and changing landscape grounds the work of many leaders in higher education. Staley (2019) reminds us that universities have a history of disruptive innovation in response to societal demands, citing land-grant universities and experimental colleges as examples. Staley encourages faculty and administrators to imagine new futures that are unbound by current expectations, geographies, and frameworks, and that more fully integrate technology, public purpose, multidisciplinary approaches, and learning based in

Introduction  3

the real world. Also calling for a reimagining, Davidson (2017) advocates for centering creativity, collaboration, and adaptability through multidisciplinary real-world problem solving as the foundation for educating students and restructuring higher education. Furthering the discussion about who colleges serve and how, Crow and Dabars (2020), like their peers, advocate for positioning higher education in social contexts so that institutions actively contribute to the greater good of society while also questioning the hierarchal stratification of institutions in relation to access. Equally committed to advancing “inclusive excellence,” is Hrabowski who has successfully implemented numerous initiatives that advance ethnic, racial, and gender parity through targeted programs, making direct connections between curricula and industry (primarily in STEM) and promoting empowered, shared leadership within university structures (Hrabowski with Ross and Henderson 2019). When examined collectively, these leaders point to several emergent questions for faculty and administrators, including those in the performing arts, to consider:

• Who is higher education for and who does it serve? • What is the role of higher education in knowledge development and production?

• How does higher education serve or respond to its communities? • What is the social or communal purpose of higher education? • Who is responsible for the investment in higher education? • How does higher education best prepare students for rapidly changing fields and for the future?

• How can institutions prioritize transformative educational experiences, rather than transactional exchanges, in curricula and teaching praxes?

The global COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning in the United States, both which continue at the time of this writing, have further increased the urgency for addressing these questions, particularly as both have revealed numerous inequities within higher education. Although the above questions are posed in relation to higher education, they are remarkably similar to questions the performing arts are navigating in the midst of COVID-19 and the increased and urgent calls for anti-racist practices. While the arts sustained many people during the early stages of the pandemic, providing a reprieve from grief and confusion, the disruption caused by the pandemic cannot be denied while also illuminating issues that have long existed but have gone under examined or been ignored. Most performing artists found themselves suddenly out of work, raising questions about the economic sustainability of a life in the arts. Numerous artists moved out of urban areas, indicating the potential to rethink where and how performing arts exist. Similarly, while many are now welcoming the return of “live” performing arts, many enjoyed the ability to attend virtual events—a mechanism that

4  Karen Schupp

perhaps made performing arts more accessible. Calls for anti-racist action circulated within professional organizations, accrediting institutions, and in trade websites/­publications. Each call demanded a proactive investment in advancing equity. Performing arts are now at a decisive moment, a moment where they, like higher education, need to critically assess past and current practices to strategically determine how to recalibrate for equity and inclusion, actively recognize, in a non-hierarchical fashion, the multitude of ways performing arts exist in society, and imagine new ways for engaging with these practices. The pressures facing and shaping higher education and performing arts converge not only on campuses, but before students articulate into programs and continue after students graduate. In the United States, most traditionally aged undergraduate students received their PreK–12 education during the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a 2001 federal bill that linked standards-based curricula with high-stakes testing in an attempt to close the achievement gap. Because testing for math and reading were prioritized in NCLB, non-tested subjects such as visual arts, music, dance, and theatre, were negatively affected, primarily in the areas of federal funding and curricular prioritizing (Beveridge 2009). This means that today’s college students arrive on college campuses likely having had little formal engagement with the performing arts—particularly those who did not have the economic capacity to study dance, music, or theatre in a private studio, summer program, or through private lessons. They may have, however, engaged with the performing arts in informal settings, meaning they bring rich and varied experiences with the arts—although those experiences may not align with college programs’ current assumptions. On the other end of the spectrum, data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAPP) show that arts alums who can work across a range of arts-based occupations (i.e., generalists) are more likely to remain in the arts over their career span than those narrowly focused ­(Frenette et al. 2020). Arts alums have additionally indicated that while they value the emphasis on the liberal and fine arts aspects of their degree requirements, they are dissatisfied with the lack of emphasis provided on practical aspects connected to their studies, including entrepreneurial, business, financial, and networking components (Frenette et al. 2020). And while enrollment in college arts programs as a whole is becoming more ethnically and racially diverse, exclusion in the arts professions for arts alums who identify as Black, Indigenous, People of Color persists (Whitaker and Wolniak 2022). Performing arts faculty are obligated to facilitate students’ growth in a way that respects the knowledge and experience they bring and allows them to build futures that are sustainable and rewarding. As such, artists/academics need to be cognizant of how their programs serve the educational needs and passions of their students, contribute to the ethical and sustainable development of the performing arts, and responsibly exist in their surrounding communities and society as a whole.

Introduction  5

Although music, dance, and theatre each entered US higher education at different times, they have grappled with shared dilemmas, concerns, and questions. Since their founding in higher education, performing arts programs have prioritized Western canonical practices and values—think Western classical music, modern dance, and Shakespeare (Hays 1998; Canning 2018; Ross 2020). This is reflected in curricular content and the values that undergird these programs, even as programs have broadened what approaches and forms they include. There has long been a debate over the purpose of a performing arts degree: should studying the performing arts prepare students for professional careers in Eurowestern “high art” practices or provide a framework for engaging with the world and other areas of interest? This discourse is further reflected in the spectrum of degree types offered at the undergraduate level, where a Bachelor of Arts typically requires fewer credit hours in the discipline than “professional” degrees such as the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Music, which require a great investment of credit hours in the discipline. The curricular bifurcation between “theory” and “practice” reflects a Eurocentric separation of doing and thinking, despite the belief of many that the performing arts are sites to remedy this body/mind divide. While numerous graduate programs have blurred distinctions between theory and practice, the separation persists. For example, those focused on working primarily as performers, composers, and makers tend to pursue Master of Fine Arts or Master of Music degrees while those primarily interested in theoretical examinations pursue doctoral degrees. Accrediting associations (e.g., NASD founded in 1981, NASM founded in 1924, and NAST founded in 1965 [Arts-Accredit 2022]) additionally influence how curricula and teaching unfold. Some programs need to be accredited by an external organization and some do not, yet questions about how a program compares to nationally acknowledged standards can spark discussions about what is assumed to be standard in programs versus what is required to fully advance greater inclusion and innovation in performing arts programs. Cultivating the Future

The authors in this book believe that artists/academics have a responsibility to cultivate the future of performing arts in higher education in direct relation to the current artistic, cultural, educational, and socio-political landscape. They are dedicated to educating their students to create new pathways in the performing arts. By investigating the challenges and opportunities that performing arts programs currently grapple with in relation to the socio-political, economic, media, and cultural systems in which performing arts exist within academia, Futures of Performance illustrates potential futures for performing arts in higher education. By examining innovations currently in place or on the horizon, authors seed critical ideas about what needs to flourish in the future.

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Rather than organizing the book’s sections according to artistic discipline, the book is divided into three sections, each conceptually representing a key area of responsibility in building the future of performing arts higher education and the role of performing arts in the world. The three sections are: Responsibilities to Academia; Responsibilities to the Fields; and Responsibilities to Society. This organization fosters the interrogation of perennial and emerging questions across the performing arts while also honoring the unique attributes and capacities of each discipline. And while several chapters address the performing arts as a whole, many provide close examinations of trends and issues within a specific discipline while being written so that those from other disciplines can engage with key concepts. Each section opens with an introduction that frames the major themes under consideration while also giving a brief summary of each chapter; all three section introductions conclude with reflective questions. Because change can only occur if we each consider how to be active change agents on our campuses, the reflective questions are offered to examine how chapters may relate to an individual’s experiences and sites of practice. The authors and their chapters represent a variety of perspectives, professional experiences, geographic locations, academic program types, and campus contexts. In writing their chapters, the authors utilized a range of research methodologies such as empirical research, scholarly examinations, and contextualized reflections of teaching or curricular practices to investigate current practices and future potentials. While the majority of chapters address performing arts higher education within the United States, the book includes chapters examining practices in Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, providing insight into how performing arts education exists globally. Additionally, some chapters delve into the performing arts at small rural campuses, others look at large research universities or urban campuses, while still others offer a survey of trends that cross institution types and locations. Authors are at different points in their careers—from an upper division undergraduate student to faculty emeriti. What the authors share is a dedication to proactively guiding the responsible evolution of the performing arts in higher education through carefully thinking through who and what a higher performing arts education could include, and how those choices impact the futures of performing arts. This commitment comes through in each chapter. Higher education’s performing arts programs sit at the intersecting ecologies of education and arts. They are critical to advancing practices and knowledge development across dance, music, and theatre as well advancing the role of the performing arts in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts. Those in performing arts programs, particularly faculty and administrators, play an essential role in building frameworks to re-imagine how performing arts are situated in our communities and what it means to be a performing

Introduction  7

artist. To guide this envisaging while reading the book, the following questions are offered as starting points:

• How are the performing arts valued in contemporary higher education systems?

• How are performing arts programs approaching equity within their programs and institutions?

• What responsibilities do performing arts programs have to other stakeholders? • What are our ethical responsibilities to our students and how are we meeting those?

• How do each of these questions manifest in your own work and the practices of your institution?

Notes 1 The term higher education refers to institutional learning that happens after secondary education (i.e., high school in the United States) is completed. The term higher education is synonymous with the terms postsecondary education, tertiary education, collegiate education, and university or college education. Throughout the book, authors use the term that best reflects the educational context under examination.

References Arts-Accredit. 2022. About CAAA (Council of Arts Accrediting Associations). https:// www.arts-accredit.org/council-of-arts-accrediting-associations/about-caaa/. Beveridge, Tina. 2009. “No Child Left Behind and Fine Arts Classes.” Arts Education Policy Review 111 (1): 4–7. DOI: 10.1080/10632910903228090. Brown, Anna. 2018. “Most Americans say Higher Ed is Heading in Wrong Direction, but Partisans Disagree on Why.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2018/07/26/most-americans-say-higher-ed-is-heading-in-wrongdirection-but-partisans-disagree-on-why/. Canning, C.M. 2018. “Dramatic Criticism’s Imperial Ambitions: Brander Matthews and the Establishment of Theatre in US Higher Education.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32 (2): 53–65. DOI:10.1353/dtc.2018.0004. Crow, Michael M., and William B. Dabars. 2020. The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Davidson, Cathy N. 2017. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. New York, NY: Basic Books. Frenette, Alexandre, and Timothy J. Dowd with Rachel Skaggs and Trent Ryan. 2020. “Careers in the Arts: Who Stays and Who Leaves?” Strategic National Arts Alumni Project Special Report. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. Hanson, Melanie. 2022. “College Enrollment & Student Demographic Statistics” Education Data Initiative. https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics. Hays, Timothy Odell. 1999. “The Music Department in Higher Education: History, Connections, and Conflicts, 1865–1998.” Doctoral dissertation, Loyola University Chicago.

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Hrabowski, Freeman A. III, with Philip Rous and Peter Henderson. 2019. The Empowered University: Shared Leadership, Culture Change, and Academic Success. ­Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2022. “Characteristics of Postsecondary Faculty. Condition of Education.” U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc. ————. n.d. “Characteristics of Postsecondary Faculty. Condition of Education.” U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Accessed June 3, 2022. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/35. Parker, Kim. 2019. “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/ the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/. Ross, Janice. 2020. Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. RTI International. 2019. “First-generation College Students: Demographic Characteristics and Postsecondary Enrollment.” Washington, DC: NASPA. https://firstgen. naspa.org/files/dmfile/FactSheet-01.pdf. Schaeffer, Katherine. 2022. “10 Facts about Today’s College Graduates.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/12/10-factsabout-todays-college-graduates/. Staley, David J. 2019. Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Whitaker, Amy, and Gregory Wolniak. 2022. “Socioeconmic and Racial/Ethnic Exclusion in the Arts.” Strategic National Arts Alumni Project DataBrief 10 (1). https://snaaparts.org/findings/databriefs/socioeconomic-racial-ethnic-exclusionin-the-arts.

SECTION I

Responsibilities to Academia

1 INTRODUCTION Karen Schupp

When thinking of performing arts programs in higher education, attention often immediately goes to the students, their voices and experiences, goals and interests, and the faculty, their work as educators/artists/scholars and what they teach and how. This section, Responsibilities to Academia, prioritizes what happens inside learning, creative, and research spaces to probe enterprising and germane approaches to knowledge development. And while students, faculty, pedagogy, and curricula are centered across the book, this section specifically addresses the obligation to shape innovative and ethical experiences and understandings of performing arts. Authors analyze and contextualize potential and extant opportunities for facilitating student learning in relevant ways and advocating for the performing arts as domains of knowledge. By sharing examples of current practices and research that center students’ and faculty members’ identities and voices, creative practices, and interdisciplinary connections, this section’s chapters seed visions for the future that are rooted in equity, embodied knowledge, and creative thinking. Chapters stem from questions about where and how performing arts learning can and does exist; what performing arts programs should prioritize and who is included; and how performing arts knowledge is valued and evaluated. Opening the section is Katen’s “Performance Across the Disciplines: Envisioning Transdisciplinary Performance Pedagogies in Postsecondary Education.” Through situating teaching and learning as acts of performance, Katen proposes a pedagogy that emanates from implicit expertise embedded in the performing arts yet is applicable across disciplines and contexts. Next, Duffy, Gonzales, and Preston assess how creative research is situated across US postsecondary dance programs in “Ethics, Standards, Evaluation, and Support of Creative Research in Academia.” They offer recommendations for defining and DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-3

12  Karen Schupp

measuring creative research, mentoring faculty, and establishing and maintaining ethical expectations and practices. “Ugly Feelings and Social Justice: Interrupting Inaction in Times of Perpetual Crisis” by Richerme delineates the dangers of prioritizing musical processes over ethical considerations related to equity in music programs. Richerme propounds that exploring “ugly feelings” can assist in enabling more ethical and equitable approaches to music pedagogy and curricula. In “Hosting Co(n)fusion: Art Residencies as InvitationPractices,” Moraes inquires into how embodied knowledge can be situated to confuse and fuse art and education experiences. Using her experiences in artist residencies, Moraes shares her research on invitation poétics to discuss the coexisting needs and desires of both academic and art practices. Reppen, Lundgren, and Østern analyze and describe their efforts to create space for student agency in “Decolonizing Tertiary Dance Education Through Including Student Voices in a Curricula Change Project,” demonstrating both the challenges to and potentials for student involvement in developing curricula. In “The Creative Spaces at HBCUs” authors HatcherPuzzo, Martin, Payton, and Virelles chronicle their individual and collective approaches to expanding the role and presence of music, dance, and visual arts while maintaining traditions in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The section closes with Karimi’s “Call of the Butterfly: The Tao of GenuineGenerosity,” which explores the potential of centering generosity and genuine relationships as the foundation for introductory acting courses. In doing so, course experiences center human development, caring, and openness within a broader conception of performance-making. Readers might contemplate the following questions while moving through this section:

• How are performing arts programs approaching equity across curricular, pedagogical, public programing, research, administrative, and internal infrastructures? • How do performing arts programs navigate, negotiate, respond, or reshape institutional pressures and frameworks? • What responsibilities do performing arts programs have to non-arts programs on campus? • What are the responsibilities of performing arts programs as they navigate, negotiate, respond, or re-shape standard assumptions about how and where learning occurs?

2 PERFORMANCE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Envisioning Transdisciplinary Performance Pedagogies in Postsecondary Education Jesse Katen

Teaching as Performance

My experiences as a performing arts educator have convinced me that all teaching involves elements of performance. Thus, performing arts educators are uniquely equipped to offer powerful pedagogical insights to their colleagues working across a broad range of disciplines within the context of postsecondary education and beyond. Here, I offer both a general theoretical framework as well as practical examples of how pedagogies, practices, and assumptions about teaching emerging from the lived experience of performing arts faculty members can expand the pedagogical repertoires of our colleagues across disciplines and extend further into community and corporate settings. I begin with my own professional experience as a methodological starting point. I teach dance at a private studio I own, I travel as a professional dance competition judge, and I teach college-level writing composition in a community college English department. The intersections of my various professional roles offer me a unique vantage point to observe, theorize, and practice the pedagogical syntheses afforded by these experiences. My methodology, then, comprises teacher reflection and performance guided by an autoethnographic perspective enabled by my position both as an educator of written composition and of dance. This positionality renders me a cross-cultural “edgewalker” (Chang 2016, 28), able to make productive use of the “tension between insider and outsider perspectives” (Reed-Danahay 2009, 32; Adams, Jones, and Ellis 2014, 1) and employ autoethnography and teacher reflection as methodologies to develop and provide rationales for my theorizations. I conceive of these emergent approaches as “transdisciplinary” in nature for they bear the potential to transcend “the division of DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-4

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academic labor into traditional disciplines such as English, sociology, or geology” ­(Bernstein 2015, 1). Transdisciplinary thinking begins “with a commitment to the notion that understandings, whatever their origins, are always incomplete and that the task is to recognize and make productive use of that incompleteness by noticing similar patterns across an array of largely independent lines of inquiry” (Grobstein 2007, 17). Performance, as I envision it in this chapter, is one such pattern of the human experience that transcends disciplinarity. Faculty members specializing in performance possess expertise of this unique translatability. My transdisciplinary orientation toward teaching afforded me the opportunity to offer corporate trainings through the Workforce Development Program at the college where I teach. When a community-based healthcare network sought training for their employees in creativity, collaboration, and communication, I drew almost exclusively on my performing arts background to design the curricula for these courses, and it became apparent to me that other performing arts educators could extend their pedagogical spheres of influence in this way as well. I envision a future in which teachers of the performing arts, valued for their transformative practical and theoretical pedagogical knowledge, share their teaching practices with colleagues across disciplines, enriching pedagogical insights across the landscape of postsecondary education and beyond. Theorizing Performance Pedagogy

To conceive of “performance” writ generally, I combine Schechner’s (2012) phrase, “behavior put on display” with Parker and Sedgwick’s (2013, 3) “an action that generates effects.” As Schechner’s use of the word “behavior” indicates, performance is not exclusively and externally apprehended by the observer. It is a phenomenologically transformative act for the performer—lived through and felt—for whom the doing results in a being done to. In other words, in taking to the stage, a performer inhabits the position of both subject and object, actively opening oneself to be passively transformed. Audience and performer are both changed by the encounter; both are subject to performative effects. In my theorization of performance, the “effects generated” (Parker and Sedgwick 2013, 3) by performance can be divided into three categories, which I emphasize to all my students: the expositive, the demonstrative, and the affective. Expositive effects are those associated with the introduction to novel experiences. For example, if an individual has never attended a theatrical performance before, in doing so, they are presented with new knowledge about the world. Demonstrative effects refer to the performer’s display of capabilities. For example, in dance, the performer’s technical skills are placed on display for the viewer. Affective effects refer to the shifts felt by the audience during a performative encounter (i.e., laughing at comedy, being moved by drama). The

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performer, further impacted by the affective states of the audience, generate responsive affect in a reciprocal relationship with the audience. Performance, from the perspective of the performer, is the subjective experience of crafting an intersubjective experience—one that offers the opportunity to expand one’s enactive, cognitive, and affective capabilities. A particularly insightful theoretical approach to understanding the interrelationship between performance and subjective experience (including aspects of thinking, feeling, and doing) stems from the emerging field of 4E cognition (Katen 2021b). The four E’s, embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition, are united by the overarching concept that cognition—understood as the making sense of one’s world—is not limited to something that happens within the brain (Colombetti 2014; Penny 2017; Varela et al. 2017; Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher 2018). Instead, cognition occurs inside a body, within a context, in relationship to an environment, while performing actions that shape one’s world (Di Paolo 2018), or any possible combination of these. What makes 4E theories especially conducive to understanding the possibilities of performance is that they concern themselves with the same ambiguities and complexities that surround the performative acts: namely, the amorphous boundaries between brain and body, self and other, internal and external worlds, and the complex relationships between thinking, feeling, and enaction (doing). Teachers of the performing arts have virtually always innately, and even if unconsciously, understood these phenomena. Essentially, the cognitive and affective demands of performance constitute a performative encounter and, therefore, a site of situated learning. Temporary experiences can have longlasting effects, and repeated, recursive encounters can produce accumulated changes, much like my own methodology of evolutionary growth through lived experience as a teacher. The performative is indeed transformative. As a dancer and writer, my pedagogical approaches are informed by my recognition that both dancing and writing are kinds of recursive processes in which the artist (either dancer or writer) creates by “inventing and revising at the same time” (Anson 2013, 224). The writer generates a piece of writing by developing and revising multiple drafts; the choreographer makes a dance by creating, rehearsing, and refining movement phrases. The ephemeral nature of dance makes the recursive process more readily apparent. As Symonds and Taylor (2013, 210) point out, “at each moment the performance is both a reiteration and a present live moment, a performance that is rehearsed but that is also provisional and changeable.” However, while the writing process is also the result of multiple “provisional and changeable” iterations, they are not often apparent in the final written product. This sense of the creative process as a series of iterations, underlies my pedagogy for both writing and dance. As a result, the Project Performance Rubric (PPR) I developed (see Appendix 2.1) and have previously presented to an audience of dance teachers (Katen 2021a) considers writing as an enactive and recursive process.

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As a dance educator, I bring an appreciation of performance as an emergent experience with enactive, cognitive, and affective elements to my practice of teaching college-level composition courses. Writing is performative in the sense that the writer assumes that the words they commit to the page will ultimately be read and interpreted by an audience of readers, even if asynchronously. However, my appreciation for embodied experience inspires me to examine the embodied, subjective experiences of my students as they compose. In the dance studio, I can model movement for my dancers and offer feedback in real time as they move. However, I am not physically present with my writing students as they compose and revise their work. In alignment with my conception of performance as a subjective and cognitive experience, I believe that the most critically important and transformative time those students spend developing their skill is that time spent within the experience of writing, and knowing what that process feels like. I am interested in their individual creative processes including how they approach the task of writing, how they reach their cognitive judgments as they write, and how they feel during the process (i.e., are they reinforcing positive or anxiety-ridden attitudes toward writing?). An approach based in 4E cognition theory helps us see that the distinctions between these categories—the enactive (doing), cognitive (thinking), and affective (feeling)—are nebulous and indistinct and that these aspects, however combined, constitute one embodied, subjective, and intersubjective experience that transforms both audience and performer in anticipated and unanticipated ways. I contend that these same principles that fundamentally define the pedagogical practices of the performing arts are indeed transdisciplinary: capable of finding strong relevance across virtually all academic disciplines. I encourage teachers of the performing arts to find ways to share these insights with colleagues in ways that advance pedagogical repertoires across the disciplines. Performance in Transdisciplinary Professional Development

I offer two cases from my own experience to show how frameworks from performance offer innovative ways to rethinking the teaching of other disciplines. Both the inclusion of multimodality in composition and my creation of a PPR are examples of how I have brought an awareness of the transformative power of performance into another discipline. I have also shared these techniques and practices with other composition teachers in both departmental and campus-wide professional development workshops, as well as at conferences for teachers of English and composition with overwhelmingly enthusiastic responses. My intention is to offer possibilities so that others may adapt my methodological model of reflective transdisciplinary teaching experience for their own purposes and contexts.

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Performance and Multimodality

I realized the impact of performance in my writing composition course in the fall of 2021. After several semesters of virtual learning during the COVID-19 global pandemic, my writing students were completing their first fully in-person semester. In a celebration of their hard work, I invited students to develop multimodal creative projects in lieu of formal academic presentations of their final research papers. Multimodality, or the practice of incorporating modes of expression other than the traditional, written, academic text in composition courses, has been shown to “help students generate and express meanings potentially unavailable in other modes” (Chisholm and Olinger 2017, 122). While providing students with new modes of self-expression, multimodal projects also respond to calls within composition to decenter “text-based forms of writing to the extent that we rarely address the specific invention, delivery, and rhetorical possibilities of other types of composition in our classes” (Alexander and Rhodes 2014, 3). I envisioned that students could turn to the visual and performing arts to fulfill the deliberately open-ended requirement, provided that the principal concepts of their research papers were expressed in ways not possible with a traditional presentation. To provide students with inspiration for their own multimodal projects, I showed them two episodes of In It to Win, a parody web series created by dance researcher (and editor of this volume), Karen Schupp (2017a). In this series, Miss Karen, performed by Schupp and created in collaboration with student dancers and filmmakers, is “an exaggerated personification of the stereotypical values and practices of the competition dance world” (Schupp 2017b, 18). Accompanied by her conventional scholarly work on competition dance, In It to Win acts as a multimodal project that further deepens and expresses the points made in Schupp’s more conventionally formatted scholarly work on competitive dance. Schupp describes this project as “performative autoethnography,” a methodological approach that, in her words, “has required me to unify my scholarly and artistic pursuits” (2017b, 18). Schupp’s explanation echoes the aims of compositional multimodality: “The use of a performative autoethnography approach, particularly in the project’s creative components that informs and is informed by qualitative research approaches and collaborative interdisciplinary creative practices, fuels the research” (19). The screening of In It to Win met an enthusiastic reception, including laughter and cries of, “That’s just like my dance teacher!” Alongside the videos, we considered a scholarly article of Schupp’s (2018) to see how research conclusions can be translated into another mode. Since the series features acting and dancing, Schupp’s incisive points about the values supported by dance competition culture were rendered clearly and vibrantly. Using Schupp’s work as a model helped to unlock my students’ creativity and fulfilled the promise

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offered by multimodal pedagogy. Students found themselves actively engaged, inspired, and supportive of each other, and they worked more deeply to convey their academic insights. The affective power of these performances highlights the transformative potential of multimodality in the classroom and illustrates ways in which the performing arts can be seamlessly incorporated into other disciplines. Project Performance Rubric (PPR)

An overarching debate within composition studies for the last century has centered around the value of product- versus process-based pedagogies, with the latter dominating at the current moment (Anson 2013). A pedagogy of performance offers a third option. Rather than focusing primarily on their process or their final product, a pedagogy of performance enables me to recognize both as I facilitate and assess students’ performative subjective experience. Rather than grading a final product or even teaching writing as a process, I teach writing as a performative experience. My PPR (see Appendix 2.1) is part of a more elaborate strategy that considers the writing process in terms of the enactive, cognitive, and affective aspects of performance. In my approach, students develop their essays over the course of several weeks and electronically submit multiple drafts of their works in progress. Alongside each draft, they are required to submit what I call “meta-performative commentary” on how the process is going, what changes they have made to this draft, what challenges they are facing, and how they feel at the given moment (see instructions in Appendix 2.2). The meta-performative commentary provides the evidence to assess and grade aspects of students’ performative experience such as their cognitive judgments and their affective engagement, or what Colombetti (2014, 1) refers to as a “lack of indifference.” What makes the PPR particularly unique is its use of a principle I refer to as “implicit contract grading.” Contract grading, an alternative to traditional grading practices that can be traced back to the 1920s (Cowan 2020), is a system that evaluates student work based upon objective measures such as completion. Contract grading systems tend to promote a positive affective experience for students as they go about the creative process. Several studies show that contract grading systems tend to be appreciated by students and reduce student anxiety (Spidell and Thelin 2006; Potts 2010; Lindemann and Harbke 2011; Ward 2021). Such affective freedom allows students to focus upon subjective feedback rather than concerns over grades (Reichert 2003; Spidell and Thelin 2006; Danielewicz and Elbow 2009). My PPR also considers criteria less commonly assessed in composition grading practices—although Reichert (2003, 64) does use grading contracts to consider “meta-cognitive skills”—such as creative/cognitive judgment, affective investment, and a consideration of performative impact. The PPR utilizes

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the “objective” nature of contract grading by relying on a yes/no/partial grading scale to assess student evidence of subjective performance experience. The criteria that assess students’ engagement in multiple iterations of drafting and revision also reinforce the recursive process of creative and performative feedback. Thus, the recursive practice of consistently adjusting to feedback (such as a performer gleans from an audience) is reinforced. I refer to the system behind my PPR as one of “implicit” contract grading. The rubric, although presented and explained at length early in the semester and used and reviewed throughout the duration of the course, is not the result of a negotiation between the students and me as some models use (Hiller and Hietapelto 2001; Danielewicz and Elbow 2009; Litterio 2016). The contract is not presented as an objective guarantee of a particular grade, but rather acts as a set of clear behavioral expectations, which fosters a sense in the student that they remain charged with the complex task of crafting a subjective experience for an audience. To reduce grading criteria to an explicit and objective transactional system diminishes what I see as a subjectively experienced performative encounter between artist and audience to the mere spot-check of a finished product, which is a perception I do not want the students to develop. This philosophy stems entirely from my perspective of writing as a performative act. Employing both the PPR and the implicit contract grading system provides for greater equity within the classroom for, consistent with Feldman’s (2018) recommendations, it offers opportunities for redemption through recursive iteration (opportunities to revise), considers growth rather than a fixed final product, and allows teacher and students to focus on qualitative feedback. Consistent with some other forms of contract grading (Danielewicz and ­Elbow 2009; Lindemann and Harbke 2011; Ward 2021), some students from historically marginalized backgrounds have found themselves earning higher grades than had been otherwise, which reflects the conclusions of research that has shown that contract grading systems tend to be successful in “reducing power inequities; and mitigating race, class, and gender discrimination” (Cowan 2020, 8). Teaching and assessing writing as a subjective experience with cognitive, affective, and enactive elements is a powerful pedagogical insight that I could only have drawn from an understanding of the power of performance. To assist faculty in translating these concepts to other disciplines, I offer an alliterative mnemonic device: acknowledgement, abstraction, application. Acknowledgment involves discovering and labeling a useful concept. As they teach classes, conduct rehearsals, and otherwise interact with students, educators can make note of the themes, concepts, and assumptions that underlie their teaching. Once identified, educators can move on to the next step. Abstraction involves the extraction of the concept from its context within the performing arts. Teachers can ask themselves: what is the essential concept that

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remains intact, relevant, and powerful if removed from the situation where it first emerged? As an example, my realization that affective engagement is a powerful part of a creative process, which I first discovered first in the dance studio, remains relevant even when removed from the studio setting. Then, it is important for the educator to imagine how that now-abstracted concept can find transdisciplinary application in other contexts. For example, incorporating affective engagement into criteria within my PPR in a composition course illustrates a cross-disciplinary application with transdisciplinary potential. Teachers in other disciplines may choose to incorporate that same concept into their own pedagogies. Performance in Workforce Development

It was my performing arts experience that prompted my college’s Workforce Development Program to seek my expertise when they were approached by a community-based healthcare network to offer corporate training for their employees. In the process of launching “social impact programs” to better address the social determinants of health affecting multiple demographics in the community, the healthcare network felt that their employees needed to expand their creative, subjective, and intuitive thinking and skills, capacities central to performance. I developed and taught a seven-hour workshop focusing on the creative process and featuring strategies to enhance individual and collective divergent thinking. Its success resulted in an invitation to develop another sevenhour workshop on subjective communication skills that the employees could use in both internal and outward-facing communications with partnering organizations. Both workshops were heavily based upon my theorizations of performance. The demand for such workshops highlights a trending need in industries we do not often envision as being potentially filled by performing arts disciplines. However, the heightened demand for subjective skills essential to creativity and communication falls well within the purview of performing arts teachers and the implicit expertise I argue they possess. In offering an overview of the theories, skills, and strategies I taught during these workshops, my hope is not to prescribe a curriculum for teachers of the performing arts to use in their own potential offerings, but rather to offer examples of the range of possibilities and a methodology for distilling one’s own implicit expertise into explicit content that finds transcendent applicability. Translating Performance for Corporate Workforce Trainings

In the first workshop, my goal was to emphasize the “messiness” of the creative process and to dispel conventional assumptions. Inspired by my own

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experience as a choreographer, I emphasized that creative processes are not linear or reducible to neatly delineated steps. I explained that the creative process is dominated by “I” words. Whether we are choreographing a piece for the stage or developing a community health program, we can begin by setting an intention, envisioning the desired effects of our creation. We then open ourselves to invitation, characterized by a sense of openness to consider all ideas as they emerge. Improvisation plays a role as we spontaneously seize opportunities and address challenges that arise from our environment, following our own intuition. Eventually, we reach a moment of insight, where the contours of the project become clearer and the way forward becomes apparent. However, the process is never-ending and recursive, requiring adjustment and development throughout its existence. Explaining creativity in this way—by making references to the choreographic process—was not only illustrative for the workshop attendees but offered a fresh and exciting perspective on their own work. I also encouraged attendees to question the assumptions that might underlie their views of their work. While many of them originally described themselves as proud of their ability to work under pressure, I was successful in opening their minds to insights offered by the intersection of creativity and positive psychology. Exposing them to the work of Frederickson (2004; 2009), on the importance of positive emotions in her “broaden and build” theory they began to consider the importance of positivity (“feeling good”) in creative work. Positive affect has a significant role to play in finding oneself in the “flow” state, ideal for creative endeavors. I emphasized that feelings of pressure inhibit rather than enhance the flow state by referring to the work of Csikszentmihalyi (2008; 2009). I was also able to touch upon 4E theory by stressing the possibilities of affective scaffolding, drawing upon the work of affective scientist Colombetti (2014; 2017; 2020). Our discussion culminated with the understanding that how we feel (affect) impacts how we think (cognition) and how we function (behave) within a given environment, which is no different than a dancer moving and feeling in space. I used real-life anecdotes from the studio and stage to bring these concepts to life, further employing teacher reflection and performative experience as the products of an autoethnographic methodology. In the second workshop, I aspired to present all interpersonal communication as a performative encounter. Informed by Schechner’s (2012) conceptualization of performance as behaving “as if,” I led an exercise wherein participants imagined a real or likely scenario during which they would interact with others with relatively high stakes. I took them through the process of envisioning their target audience, articulating the desired effects of the interaction through exposition, demonstration, and affect, and asked them to envision, create, and adopt a persona that would render those desired effects. The focus of this exercise was not to assist in crafting the content of the interaction but to create a persona to guide their behavior in an interaction—essentially

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playing a theatrical role. Behaving “as if” opened the attendees up to speech, gestures, responses, and new levels of confidence they had not previously seen as part of their own identities or familiar repertoires of behavior. Developing Performance-Based Curricula for Corporate Trainings

In this section, I delineate a process for approaching the development of trainings similar to those I have described. First, at a preliminary meeting with the organization seeking such training, I suggest asking questions to ascertain short- and long-term goals for their operations and projects and to identify what issues they hope the training could address. Once you understand the issues the organization is facing, the next step is to imagine analogous situations within one’s own lived experience as a teacher of performance and to envision relevant strategies and solutions. I try to imagine specific instances where I overcame or helped students overcome such challenges to abstract translatable skills and principles that apply to the relevant domain. It is often challenging to effectively instill principles and teach skills in the time allotted for training. This is the point at which a teacher’s pre-existing pedagogical expertise and experience is most helpful. All performing arts faculty members are experts at developing pedagogical practices from given learning outcomes. In this instance, the learning outcomes are the principles and skills needed to overcome the challenges identified by the client. Including time and space for open discussions can prove incredibly insightful. During these, topics of discussion ranged from how to overcome creative “blocks” to how to reconcile differences of vision with colleagues to how to address differences in working styles. These relatively unstructured discussions, both early and later in the workshops, proved remarkably valuable for they allowed me to gain a deeper sense of the issues faced by the attendees so I could refine my teaching to be consistent with their needs. Later in the sessions, open discussions helped to elucidate connections when attendees could share possible applications of my ideas to their specific tasks on the job. The result is a beneficial discussion that invites targeted solutions that are helpfully connected to the attendees’ concrete situations. Being asked to think about their challenges through the lens of a performer is often a form of thinking divergent enough to spark innovative ideas amongst the attendees themselves. Even those with limited performing arts experience are often fascinated and entertained by tales from the studio and stage and find themselves energized and enlightened by making connections to their own work. It is important to note that, in teaching in such contexts, a performing arts educator may encounter resistance or reluctance among attendees for whom the relevance of the performing arts for a field like healthcare is not immediately clear. Although the feedback from those attending the workshops was overwhelmingly positive, a small minority struggled with the most subjective “soft” skills I was offering. However, their resistance seemed to be overcome

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by a willingness on my part to engage directly with “real-world” scenarios provided by the attendees themselves. Offering time and space for the attendees to imagine and articulate connections from my performance principles to tasks and scenarios faced in their own workdays further helped to clarify relevance. Institutional Impacts

I was surprised and inspired to find how much my own expertise in matters relatively commonplace to those of us in the performing arts offered insightful and fresh ways of thinking to those in such a seemingly unrelated field. My conclusion is that educators of the performing arts should not hesitate to market themselves as experts in transdisciplinary skills such as creativity and communication. The value and demand for education in these skills seems to be growing and my college’s Workforce Development Program welcomed my unique offerings. My advice to faculty members wishing to undertake this rewarding and inspiring work is to reach out to the workforce development office on their own campus, ask to meet, and perhaps offer basic proposals for workshops they would be willing to offer. At the level of the institution—the college or university—offering trainings such as those I have described can illustrate the value of the institution’s contributions to the community and private sector and therefore also enhance the perceived value of performing arts departments within the institution. Although I remain committed as ever to the notion that the performing arts are intrinsically valuable for their own sake, demonstrating novel applications of their unique expertise can provide powerful leverage as such departments advocate for allocation of resources within the institution. Expanding the impact of performing arts pedagogy into new contexts can only enhance the opportunities available to these departments and secure their futures. Performing for New Audiences

I acknowledge the uniqueness of my positionality; most faculty members in strictly academic disciplines lack performing arts experience. They require the insights provided by their performing arts colleagues to make sense of these theories and practices that can provide new dimensions to their teaching, but they are unlikely to seek them out initially. There are many pragmatic ways that teachers in the performing arts can seize opportunities to display their unique expertise to the broader education community which, I hope, in turn, can transform how the performing arts are perceived as we all face a future of postsecondary education with an increasingly evident focus on the translatability of skills, the employability of our students, and the development of workforces. These may not have been the needs that drew us as teachers of the performing arts into our disciplines, but they are the applications of our expertise that may safeguard their future.

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By remaining siloed within performing arts departments and divisions, teachers of these arts, even those relatively conservative in their practices, tend to overlook the potentially transformative power of their expertise and experience, should it ever be given the chance to encounter, and find relevance in disciplines across our respective campuses. Teachers of the performing arts must recognize and embrace their unique and powerful position to offer deeply enriching insights into the processes and practices of the truly transdisciplinary nature of performance. We mustn’t hesitate to do what we do best: take to the stage with confidence and courage and transform our audiences, our selves, and the futures of our disciplines. References Adams, Tony E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis. 2014. Autoethnography. ­ Kindle edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. 2014. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies. Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Anson, Chris M. 2013. “Process Pedagogy and Its Legacy.” In A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, 2nd edition, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and Hessler H. Brooke, 212–30. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bernstein, Jay H. 2015. “Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development, and Current Issues.” Journal of Research Practice 11 (1): Article R1. Chang, Heewon. 2016. Autoethnography as Method. Kindle edition. New York, NY: Routledge. Chisholm, James S, and Andrea R Olinger. 2017. “‘She’s Definitely the Artist One’: How Learner Identities Mediate Multimodal Composing.” Research in the Teaching of English 52 (2): 122–55. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Kindle edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2017. “The Embodied and Situated Nature of Moods.” Philosophia 45 (4): 1437–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9817-0. ———. 2020. “Emoting the Situated Mind. A Taxonomy of Affective Material Scaffolds.” JOLMA. The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts 1 (2): 215–36. https://doi.org/10.30687/Jolma/2723-9640/2020/02/004. Cowan, Michelle. 2020. “A Legacy of Grading Contracts for Composition.” Journal of Writing Assessment 13 (2). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j28w67h. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2008. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Kindle edition. New York, NY: HarperCollins e-books. ———. 2009. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Kindle edition. HarperCollins e-books. Danielewicz, Jane and Peter Elbow. 2009. “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching.” College Composition and Communication 61 (2): 244–68. Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. 2018. “Chapter 4: The Enactive View of Life.” In The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, edited by Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, 71–94. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Feldman, Joe. 2018. Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Fredrickson, Barbara. 2004. “The Broaden–and–Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 359 (1449): 1367–77. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1512. ———. 2009. Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio that Will Change Your Life. New York, NY: Harmony. Grobstein, Paul. 2007. “Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, and Beyond: The Brain, Story Sharing, and Social Organization.” Journal of Research Practice 3 (2): Article M21. Hiller, Tammy Bunn, and Hietapelto Amy B. 2001. “Contract Grading: Encouraging Commitment to the Learning Process through Voice in the Evaluation Process.” Journal of Management Education 25(6): 660–84. https://doi. org/10.1177/105256290102500605. Katen, Jesse. 2021a. “Enacting the Narrative: The Creative Potential of Affectively Scaffolded Performance Pedagogy.” Presentation at the National Dance Education Organization Annual Conference. October 2021. ———. 2021b. “Competition and Cognition: Theorizing an Autopoietic Pedagogy of Performance within Competitive Dance.” Journal of Dance Education 21 (3): 140–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2021.1928140. Lindemann, Dana F., and Colin R. Harbke. 2011. “Use of Contract Grading to Improve Grades among College Freshmen in Introductory Psychology.” SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244011434103. Litterio, Lisa M. 2016. “Contract Grading in a Technical Writing Classroom: A Case Study.” Journal of Writing Assessment 9(2): 1–8. Newen, Albert, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 2013. “Introduction: Performativity and Performance.” In Performativity and Performance, edited by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kindle edition, 1–17. New York, NY: Routledge. Penny, Simon. 2017. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Potts, Glenda. 2010. “A Simple Alternative to Grading.” Inquiry: Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges 15 (1): 29–42. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2009. “Anthropologists, Education, and Autoethnography.” Reviews in Anthropology 38 (1): 28–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00938150802672931. Reichert, Nancy. 2003. “Practice Makes Perfect: Contracting Quantity and Quality.” College Composition and Communication 31(1): 60–68. Schechner, Richard. 2012. Performance Studies: An Introduction - What Is Performance Studies? YouTube.com. Routledge Companion Websites. https://www.­ youtube.com/watch?v=YrRmXb4FLwQ. Schupp, Karen. 2017a. In It to Win! Miss Karen Makes a Movie (Season1, Episode 1). YouTube.com. Miss Karen Wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5bbMzkI9Yo. ———. 2017b. “Miss Karen Is in It to Win: A Performative Autoethnography Approach to Investigating Dance Competition Culture.” Dance Research Aotearoa 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.15663/dra.v5i1.59. ———. 2018. “Dancing the ‘American Dream’: Dance Competition Culture in Times of Shifting Values.” Nordic Journal of Dance 9 (1): 32–43.

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Spidell, Cathy, and William H. Thelin. 2006. “Not Ready to Let Go: A Study of Resistance to Grading Contracts.” Composition Studies 34 (1): 35–68. Symonds, Dominic, and Millie Taylor, eds. 2013. Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance. Kindle edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. 2017. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised edition. Kindle edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ward, Emily. 2021. “An Integrated Mixed-methods Study of Contract Grading’s Impact on Adolescents’ Perceptions of Stress in High School English: A Pilot Study.” Assessing Writing 48 (April). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2020.100508.

Appendix 2.1: Project Performance Rubric

Students: Your major projects will be assessed according to this rubric, which considers the process experience through which you developed your paper as well as the final product. Minimum Expectations**

Does this final draft closely adhere to the minimum expectations (page length, assignment guidelines, formatting, etc.)? (Yes/No; 30%) **Note to teachers: This first criterion was initially intended to be only Yes/No. For example, if a student didn’t submit the minimum number of pages, they received no points. I have since, after one semester of implementing this rubric, decided that it would be more helpful to allow a partial credit (15%) option—like the other criteria below—to accommodate students with more minor errors or deficiencies (such as coming close to but not meeting minimum page requirements). Creative Process Experience (“Behind the Scenes”/Effects Upon the Author)

Throughout the project, did the author remain earnestly engaged in its development, submitting and considering every opportunity for feedback? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%) Throughout the project, did the author make decisions that showed conscious and deliberate thought in response to the feedback offered? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%) Throughout the project, did the author show affect (a lack of indifference) toward the project? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%)

Performance Across the Disciplines  27

Overall, throughout the project, did the author show evidence of growth and the development of new skills? (Yes/No) 5% Presentational Experience (“In the Spotlight”/Effects Upon the Audience)

Does this final draft reflect an intentional concern for organization? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%) Does this final draft reflect an intention to convey a unique argument from a unique point of view to the audience? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%) Does this final draft reflect an intentional concern to avoid errors of convention (mechanics, grammar, syntax, spelling, word choice)? (Yes, significantly/Partially/Not significantly; 10%) Overall, does this final draft bear the potential to make an impact on the intended audience?  (Yes/No) 5% Appendix 2.2: Meta-Performative Commentary Instructions for Students

Students: Please leave me notes in the “Comments” section when you upload your assignment. Some thoughts you can consider sharing include: What changes were made in this draft? How is the paper going? What are you working on or changing? How are you feeling and growing as you write it? Are there any challenges or new skills you are noticing? Is there a problem or strength you’d like to point out to me? Do you have any specific questions or comments for me? Remember that the Project Performance Rubric considers your engagement and thought processes that you demonstrate through these comments!

3 ETHICS, STANDARDS, EVALUATION, AND SUPPORT OF CREATIVE RESEARCH IN ACADEMIA Ali Duffy, Isabella Gonzales, and Destanie Davidson Preston

Introduction

Like their colleagues across academia, dance faculty members are expected to teach and engage in research. For many dance faculty members, research is creative in nature. Creative research may involve artistic activities including choreography, improvisation, performance, screendance, multimedia work, and interdisciplinary work. These forms of research represent a diversity of approaches with a vast array of process, outcome, peer-review, and assessment strategies. Questions often arise as to how to properly evaluate creative research in dance and how to make it legible for those evaluating it for merit, tenure, and promotion mechanisms. An exploration of how tertiary institutions consider creative research in dance, we believe, may provide greater clarity for faculty members in the arts and for colleagues who evaluate creative work as part of tenure, promotion, and merit-based retention and advancement systems. In this chapter, therefore, we survey scholarly perspectives to lay a foundation of how creative research is interpreted in US tertiary institutions and to distinguish how the scope of institution and faculty position type may affect the way creative research is supported, conducted, produced, and assessed. Within the structure of a narrative qualitative research design, we then explore participants’ descriptions of how their creative research is conducted and evaluated and the benefits and challenges of conducting creative research in postsecondary settings within the particularities of their differing academic positions. Based on participants’ described challenges, we outline a set of recommendations for tertiary institutions regarding the ways dance faculty members are mentored in research, how creative research could be better identified and DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-5

Ethics, Standards, Evaluation, and Support of Creative Research  29

assessed in academia, and steps dance programs could take to clarify expectations and to set reasonable research goals for faculty members. By describing the unique ways creative researchers contribute to the academy, this study aims to support dance educator-artists working toward various professional goals and to inform their colleagues so that they may better mentor and evaluate dance faculty members.

Major Challenges in Creative Research: Support and Legitimization

Across US dance programs, a lack of consistency in how creative research is valued and assessed equates to a wide-ranging field of ambiguous purpose and variable definitions. Dance faculty members whose work involves creative research are often burdened with the task of legitimizing their creative work through unstandardized and inconsistent peer-review processes or, in some institutions, by including significant written work to translate its significance to colleagues. Creative research is not subject to institutional review board policies nor any other kind of consistently applied ethical rules of engagement. These irregularities can cause confusion for faculty members and administrators in and outside of arts disciplines and can position creative research as out of alignment with institutional values related to responsible, rigorous research. Additional fundamental problems are often cited by dance faculty when discussing their creative research: lack of funding, shortage of time, and copyright issues (Warburton and Stanek 2004; Robinson 2016; Duffy 2018). Reed (1998, 504) asserts, “it is indeed ironic that, despite the considerable growth of interest in the anthropology of the body, the study of moving body remains on the periphery.” This marginalized status of the moving body in research is evidenced by the lack of funding and support for dance-related creative research. According to Byrd-McPhee (2009, 16), most National Endowment for the Arts grants are awarded to dance faculty to support the “restaging, performance, and documentation of [existing] significant works,” suggesting that the development of new works or collaborative creative endeavors is undervalued. Many scholars agree that government support for the arts has been in decline since the Reagan era. “This is both a symptom and a cause of persuasive skepticism about dance, especially dance as a valued national asset worthy of tax-dollar support and especially dance as a form of individual expression” (Munger 2001, 16). Without monetary support, creative researchers struggle to justify the legitimacy of dance research. Further, dance faculty members working in research institutions face an additional dilemma as they simultaneously face ever-growing expectations to secure external funding support. Dance researchers also face an uphill battle with deepening controversies and demonstrated inequities at the intersections of intellectual property, choreographic copyright, race, gender, and class. Creative choreography was

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not recognized as a legitimate copyrightable work until 1976 when the Federal Copyright Law “explicitly extended protection to choreographic works” (Kraut 2011, 43), yet even under protection of US law, racial and genderbased disparities have prevented artists from being afforded equal opportunities for “original author” status over their artistic work. Further, separating entire systems of technical training from distinct examples of choreographic expression has been historically difficult to parse when considering cases of choreographic copyright and decisions are often tainted by bias and marginalization (Kraut 2016). Kraut contends that recognition or denial of copyright has always depended on an artist’s “position in a raced, gendered, and classed hierarchy, and on the historical conditions in which they made, and made claims on, their dances” (2016, xiii). Adding complexity to discussions about choreographic copyright are ongoing debates about dance as a commodity worthy of monetization and financial profit (Foster 2019). While research does not necessarily require financial profit in the academy, many academic dance programs rely on season ticket sales to meet departmental budget metrics and achieving financial success persists as a marker of value within an academic setting that inches ever closer to a business model where profits rule all. This is further complicated by the fact that, according to Foster, choreographers working with students in postsecondary settings often focus on the alignment of their artistic processes, rather than products, with their pedagogical principles. Creative Research in Academia

Creative research is a relatively new—and largely unstandardized—addition to postsecondary research repertoire, and its legitimacy and relevance are less understood and acknowledged than more recognizable forms of research, such as scientific or qualitative inquiry. With its “elevation” to the status of a “field” of study, Minton (2000, 111) contends that dance researchers can utilize a wide range of investigative models, such as qualitative, quantitative, and scientific research methods. Field status has also increased the visibility of dance research among multiple stakeholders including public schools, private studios, and other academic institutions and other disciplines. Dance research aligned with scientific, applied, and scholarly work greatly impacts the recognition and perceived legitimacy of dance as a research field and is imperative to the future of dance research (Minton 2000; Brown, Gough, and Roddis 2004; Borgdorff 2012; Bonbright 2013; Van Aken 2016). Minton suggests that the legitimacy of dance as a field of inquiry is tied to areas of research more easily recognized across disciplines. This is an important nuance because some of the participants in this study describe feeling that scholarly or “traditional” research is more highly regarded and better understood by their peers than is creative research.

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Collaborations incorporating multiple key players such as dance scholars, choreographers, educators, and students are vital to dance research and contribute important new knowledge interweaving elements of theory/practice. These collaborations, which feature significantly in practice-based research, are based upon research questions that arise within dance practices and the practice of exploring said research questions (Candy and Edmonds 2018). “Practice-based” research, as a way of contextualizing and clarifying certain kinds of creative research conducted in the studio, has trended over the past 20 years, yet some scholars reject the term because it emphasizes the dichotomy of theory/practice (Frayling 2021). Thus, the term creative research is maintained, though its definition is fluid and evolving. Nevertheless, nonconforming processes and collaborations within practice-based research are integral to centering choreographic research as a unique, fundamental area. As a counterpoint, Fraleigh and Hanstein (1999, viii) describe dance research as “objective, value-free, and subject to verification by others.” Capitalizing on the fluid nature of dance research allows dance to become a distinctive field of inquiry and methods, however, poses a threat to the legitimization of the research itself. Due to its atypical nature and recent disciplinary status, there is an absence of clear boundaries within differing methodologies of dance research, and an “absence of hard and fast rules like those” in traditional scientific research approaches (Fraleigh and Hanstein 1999, viii). Tenure, Advancement, Merit, and Stability in Relation to Creative Research

Recent scholarship unpacks debate surrounding academic tenure and faculty advancement as related to creative dance research (Wood 1992; Duffy 2018). For dance to become more widely understood and legitimized by faculty across disciplines, the criteria for tenure and advancement in dance must be more precise. A predominant criterion in tenure guidelines for research excellence is scholarship, defined largely by presentations and publications. This definition is “too limiting” for institutions that promote dance as an “an integral part of any of its disciplines” (Wood 1992, 110). Inevitably, the faculty in such universities fight for the inclusion and integration of creative endeavors as research, and difficult discussions about the value and assessment of artistic work emerge. Creative researchers in non-tenure-track positions face perhaps even more ambiguous guidelines than their tenure-track colleagues. Although they may also produce choreography, perform, or develop community-engaged work, their creative work is more closely aligned and evaluated within the scope of their service or teaching assignments. Further, if their creative research is of a comparable—or higher—level of quality or prestige than their tenure-track peers, this adds confusion to already muddy waters. Non-tenure-track faculty

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members may also be disadvantaged by institutional hierarchies that award workload credit and support for creative work differently for tenure- and nontenure-track faculty. Academic institutions assess creative research in dance differently based on a number of factors including whether the institution is research- or teachingfocused; whether its dance program is accredited by the National Association of Schools in Dance (NASD), which adopts its own standards for research conduct; whether the institution grants doctoral and graduate degrees or solely undergraduate degrees; and depending on the institution’s and program’s mission, scope, size, and historical treatment of faculty dance research (Risner and Barr 2018; Duffy 2020). Some schools adopt peer-review processes in which supervisors, colleagues, and/or external evaluators are invited to assess faculty members’ creative works in writing, similar to peer-review for journal publication. Others adopt student feedback instruments to capture process-based or methodological accomplishments in faculty choreographic projects. Some schools value external grant funding and awards of creative activity, citing evidence of adjudication and, thus, positive peer review. Some institutions rely on self-reflexive written statements from faculty members who conduct creative research to document the rigor of an artistic process and a self-assessment of the resultant product. As is evident in the following analysis of this study’s participant responses, faculty researchers hold strong opinions about which of these methods of evaluation are fair and which help or hinder them as they work toward artistic growth, academic tenure, and/or advancement. Prevailing Processes for Evaluating Creative Research

The ways creative research is evaluated include internal (institutional) and external procedures. Typically, a department chair, director, or head of a dance area evaluates each faculty member’s work annually. In some programs, faculty members are also evaluated by a committee of faculty peers from inside and outside dance. Some faculty have the benefit of working with a supervisor who is well-versed in dance and can contribute useful and relevant evaluations. Often, though, dance programs are led by administrators outside of the dance area, so refer to expert opinions of external evaluators, through assessing venue prestige, and/or by reviewing internal peer or self-evaluations of research. Wide-ranging perspectives about how to evaluate choreographic or performance-based research for artistic excellence, rigor, methodological concerns, and ethical standards pervade academia. This lack of consensus among institutions—­ even individuals—leads to inconsistent and potentially unfair assessment of faculty research. Further, it opens the door to scrutiny of creative research from colleagues and areas that fall outside of dance and/or the arts. Assessing creativity and ethical conduct within choreographic inquiry, for

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example, is nearly impossible, unless standards of peer review and/or participant (dancer) feedback are utilized. Also, discrepancies may emerge between differing evaluation processes—a direct result of a lack of ethical guidelines specifically geared toward dance research. Implementation of peer-review and feedback strategies could dismantle possibly harmful power dynamics between dancers and choreographers and highlight differences between various modes of creative process and outcome (Clements, et al. 2018). Since creative research does not fall under a code of ethics, it is often overlooked by Institutional Review Boards, which are responsible for assessing a research study’s integrity and legitimacy (Anderson 1996). In 1981, the US Food and Drug Administration designated the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to formally review and assess research involving human subjects ­(Anderson 1996). The IRB has the authority to either approve, disapprove, or modify research applications and “serves an important role in the protection of the rights and welfare of human research subjects” (FDA 2019). Without the oversight of an IRB, creative research risks encountering issues of integrity and verisimilitude. IRB standards offer legal protection for the researcher, institution, and participants and, if used for creative research, could more clearly align dance with other disciplines and modes of research. One of the roadblocks for creative researchers who might wish to seek IRB approval is in trying to fit their methods and processes into a template made for quantitative, qualitative, and scientific projects. Choreographers typically do not select dancers as qualitative researchers would select study participants, for example. At face value, these differences are not necessarily problematic, but the disconnect between the processes and language creative researchers use compared with that of their traditional researcher colleagues in social sciences and STEM fields creates a distance that creative researchers are compelled to bridge. Further, it would behoove creative researchers to define and develop standards for ethical research to ensure they, their institutions, and their participants are protected and treated ethically in creative research processes. A Growing Need for Ethical Standards for Creative Research in Dance

Although dance research has boomed since the mid-1900s, it remains overlooked and underdeveloped. Researcher integrity is an important aspect of any study and, in dance, there is a growing need for ethical standards and pedagogical interventions to educate and protect researchers and research participants (Welsh 1999; Anderson 2016; Romano 2016). Roughly one-third of dance researchers lack integral standards and resources for an effective, ethical study (Anderson 2016). Further, as researchers incorporate individualized standards most likely adapted from other fields, inconsistencies arise and become apparent within the processes and outcomes of studies (Welsh 1999). By defining experimental research as the systematic measurement of a performance or

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choreographic work under a controlled environment, scholars emphasize the discernible need for a specific set of ethical standards engineered for choreographic research (Welsh 1999). The NASD handbook provides guidelines for institutions to follow in their accreditation and maintaining of ethical codes. A brief section of the handbook directly corresponds to dance research, but it ultimately leaves these decisions about ethical research up to individuals or groups who can shape the ways that “creativity, inquiry, and investigation are used to produce works,” (NASD 2022, 104) allowing for major differences across institutions. Proposed Ethical Standards for Choreographic Research

Ongoing discussions about whether standardization could negatively impact or minimize the purpose of choreographic research is outweighed by the impending issue of protection for researchers and participants. By utilizing elements of ethical codes from adjacent disciplines as a template, dance can further legitimize and protect its researchers and research participants (Welsh 1999; Deane 2014). The American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) and Dance Movement/Therapy Certification Board (DMTCB) developed a set of standards intended to minimize the risk of misconduct or inconsistencies in dance research. These guidelines instruct researchers to: (1) Obtain consent from participants; (2) Protect welfare of participants; (3) Avoid exploitation and influence over participants; (4) Protect participants’ confidentiality; and (5) Debrief participants with an explanation of the results and findings (ADTA 2020). These standards guide and support researchers throughout the research process and prevent misconduct and inconsistencies in experimental choreographic research (ADTA 2020). ADTA and DMTCB also suggest some best practices for dance researchers: (1) Respect participants; (2) Follow informed consent and confidentiality regulations; (3) Maintain professional relationship boundaries; (4) Include a clause on the use of touch within research practices; (5) Use assessment tools for choreographic research; and (6) Document and attend to emotional or personal connections with the study. People Dancing: The Foundation for Community Dance, an organization based in the UK, has also developed a code of ethics to “translate the core values of community dance into responsible practices for professionals” (People Dancing 2021, n.p.). This code defines community dance and its values and outlines a clear set of guidelines for expectations, approaches, and attitudes that instructors and researchers should follow. The guidelines include: (1) Ensure professional competence; (2) Establish and maintain responsibilities as an artist, educator, and community member; (3) Ensure there are safety measures in place to protect both the researcher/educator and participants (i.e., informed consent forms and regulations); (4) Establish and present assessment tools for creative research; and (5) Provide and maintain a basis of documentation and commitment to the code at hand. These examples of ethical standards for creative

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research could clarify the expectations of postsecondary dance faculty whose jobs require them to conduct research and could support a better understanding and respect for dance as a discipline and diverse set of research practices. Study Methods and Participant Recruitment

To present a rich perspective on the ways that dance faculty members develop and present their creative research and how it is evaluated, we developed a qualitative study that incorporates elements of narrative inquiry, which positions participants’ lived experiences within social and cultural contexts and underlines the interpretive nature of data analysis (Moen 2006; Creswell and Poth 2017). Before collecting data, we sought and received approval from the Texas Tech University Institutional Review Board. We developed and distributed a questionnaire to a targeted pool of participants to gather data about experiences conducting creative research in academia. This questionnaire included demographic prompts to gauge participants’ geographical region, position or title, types of creative research they conduct, funding sources, and the type of institution in which they work. Participants could select to remain anonymous and could opt to share as much or as little about themselves as they wished. We also included open-ended prompts to encourage participants to share their experiences working on creative research in the academy. We distributed this questionnaire through social media platforms, through online dance organization forums, and within our personal networks of academic, creative researchers. The questionnaire remained publicly open for seven months, and we collected responses from 56 participants. To analyze data, we conducted three rounds of coding, which helped us perceive themes and categories emerging from the data. The first round was Initial or Open coding in which we sought a general sense of the responses overall and searched for repeating sentiments, ideas, or themes running through the data. The second round, In Vivo coding, uses the participants’ own words as codes. We selected In Vivo coding because we wanted to “honor the participants’ words” (Saldaña 2015, 66) by quoting them in this chapter. Finally, we conducted a round of Values coding, which helped us perceive the participants’ “values, attitudes, and beliefs, representing [their] perspectives or worldviews” (Saldaña 2015, 91). These methods supported our exploration of participants’ described experiences conducting creative research in postsecondary institutions within the context of differing backgrounds, perspectives, and approaches. Overview of Participant Pool

Demographic data helped us sense how identity may play into expectations, perceptions, and experiences. The participants in this pool represent every geographical region in the United States. They range in their professional

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roles, length of service, tenure status, and type of institution. Because several participants chose not to divulge any demographic information, we feel a comprehensive analysis related to demographics is not yet possible and points us toward necessary follow-up research. Of the 56 questionnaire responses we received, ten of the participants selfdefined as Assistant Professors, 14 as Associate Professors, 17 as Professors, two as Instructor or Lecturer, three as Adjunct Professor, and ten as “Other” (e.g., Retired Professor, Visiting Assistant Professor, and Director). Thirty participants hold tenure, and 26 do not, either because they hold non-tenuretrack positions, or they have not reached the end of their probationary tenure and promotion period. Forty-eight participants state that creative research comprises between 10–50% of their total job responsibilities, and they rely on their home institutions, grants, and self-funding to support their creative research. When asked to describe their institutions, 24 describe working in a research-focused public university; 20 in private liberal arts colleges; seven in teaching-focused public universities; and five in community colleges. Participants were asked to identify the kinds of creative research in which they engage by selecting areas provided in a dropdown menu. Of this pool of participants, 50 participate in choreographic research, 37 in performance, 36 in interdisciplinary projects, 19 in community or socially engaged research, and five of the participants also included written descriptions identifying their research among the following: “praxis,” “historic dance preservation,” “evolving dance technique,” and “design and production.” Upon initial analysis of these data sets, we acknowledge some limitations in this pool of participants. Firstly, while it represents a small portion of the entire population of postsecondary dance faculty in the United States, there are enough responses to warrant an analysis for the purposes of this study. Also, some participants did not provide their demographic information, so we cannot fully analyze the ways these particularities relate to their experiences in creative research. Since we are most interested in making connections between dance faculty members’ experiences in creative research and the factors related to their position type and other institutional contexts, we determined not to gather additional details that could diffuse the impact of the participants’ experiences as described. A follow-up study that explores these more complex factors will be an important next step. Creative Researchers in Postsecondary Dance: Perspectives and Ideas

The participants were prompted with ten open-ended questions about their experiences conducting creative research in their postsecondary dance roles. Their responses varied widely, and the commonalities and discrepancies among them point to a dance field—and larger academic system—still grappling with defining, assessing, and valuing creative research in its diverse forms.

Ethics, Standards, Evaluation, and Support of Creative Research  37

Defining the Research: Ethical and Rigorous Approaches

When asked how they ensure their research is conducted ethically and rigorously, participants shared a variety of strategies, leaning heavily into consistent discussion, self-reflection, collaboration, and questioning throughout a research process and reliance on trusted colleagues for guidance and informal assessment. In the studio working with student dancers, several participants cited the importance of checking in with students to ensure comfort and understanding of expectations. Participant 35 described using: multiple layers of feedback via faculty and outside colleagues. We utilize Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process in our pedagogy with students and in our own creative processes. We ask questions and receive feedback through anti-racist, anti-oppression practices (engaged in the creative process and in feedback sessions). Nothing goes live, onstage, or virtual without peer consultations, dramaturgy, etc. Other participants described working within “industry standards,” utilizing research assistants, documenting process decisions and rehearsal and meeting activities, committing to honesty and transparency, and continuing to work on unconscious biases as strategies for ethical and rigorous research. Participant 11 stated that they could not understand “how dance research could be conducted unethically,” which illustrates to us a presumption that dance and dance making is inherently ethical. This assumption illuminates a need for consistent, rigorous education about creative research, perhaps through graduate programs and early career mentorship, as well as a need for standards about the ethics of creative research among dance faculty members. Many participants described initiating their own informal means of ethical research via collaborative and ongoing discussions with the artistic stakeholders in each project, including performers, artistic directors, technical designers and crew, and department chairs. These collaborations and discussions seemed to be ways for participants to ensure alignment between their work and a larger production. Five of the participants described not understanding this prompt, which provides further evidence of the need for determining ethical frameworks in conducting creative research.

Evaluation of Creation Research

When asked how they are evaluated on their creative research and whether they believe these evaluations are clear and fair, responses were mixed. Only 12 participants described having clearly outlined and documented procedures for evaluating their creative research. Participant 42, for example, described using “peer review and critical professional reviews when available. We also

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consider prestige of venue and location. Selectivity is nearly impossible to determine, though, because most producers don’t announce their acceptance rates.” Other methods of assessment cited include self-reflective written narratives about the process and product of their work, formalized annual evaluations, and external peer review. Some tenure-track faculty members consistently referred to documented institutional and departmental policies on tenure and promotion, however, many had varying levels of success in understanding or relating these policies to creative research. Participant 22 stressed that evaluation at their institution is “not fair at all. There is no rubric or defined codification of excellent, good, fair, needs work, etc. This institution very much enjoys saying ‘you did this wrong’ but never giving you the appropriate material or guidance to know what is expected.” Participant 14 asserted that “creative research is little understood and, as far as I can tell, not evaluated at all.” Understandably, this lack of clarity and attention to creative activity as a kind of research worthy of evaluation can lead to frustration and unfair assessment of faculty. One participant mentioned they felt that some of the responsibility of the academy’s ignorance of creative research falls on artists themselves. While this represents an outlier opinion, it could point us to an important avenue for future investigation about who bears responsibility for understanding discipline-specific outcomes in the academy. Six of the participants, one tenured and five non-tenure-track faculty members, expressed that the extent of their required creative work comprises only the choreography they set on their students. Because this research is conducted and produced on campus, there are few opportunities for elevating the work to regional or national status or to adjudicate the work externally. These participants noted an ambiguity in expectation and assessment of this research: “Because of the nature of creation and subjective evaluation of aesthetics, there are not clear guidelines on what work is good or bad. If the work is complete and performed, the work is accepted as a check mark on the CV” (Participant 48). This is problematic for a few reasons: 1) The subjective nature of evaluation could present an unfair merit system for dance faculty; 2) Without adequate or focused feedback and evaluation, dance in academia becomes even more vulnerable, lacking basic structures for knowledge creation and development in the discipline; and 3) When faculty are limited to presenting their research only on campus, they and their research are delegitimized and marginalized. On the other hand, one of the non-tenure-track participants described that the low stakes of her creative research on campus made it easier for her to pursue her external interests in performance and choreography. Support and Legitimization of Creative Research

Some of the challenges participants described illustrate interwoven or overlapping issues that can compound for faculty members in dance. The most often

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cited challenge in this pool of participants is lacking or inconsistent funding for dance research. Participant 8 asserted, “I have really good support overall at my institution, EXCEPT for funding! We recently moved into being an R2 institution and research expectations have increased, however there is no funding provided [to support additional research expectations].” Two participants described a value hierarchy of funding availability in their institutions, claiming that faculty members conducting scientific or STEM-centered research were awarded more internal funding than those in the arts. As an aside, it is worth noting that tenure-track faculty in STEM fields are often required to secure large federal grants and they utilize internal funds to leverage large-scale projects, whereas this requirement is practically non-existent for dance faculty. Nevertheless, perhaps if dance were properly supported and legitimized across all sectors, more funding would be available for dance from multiple sources, including federal and institutional. Three of the participants described wanting a system or committee similar to the IRB to which faculty members could submit creative research proposals for review and approval. In counterpoint, four other participants opined that they appreciate not having their artistic processes and products “policed” or “standardized,” one participant equating an IRB review to censorship. Another interesting perspective mentioned by three participants was a perception within their dance departments or programs that dance scholarship was considered more worthy than creative research. Several of the tenured participants described “gatekeepers” as an obstacle to their creative research receiving the legitimacy it deserves. Participant 56, for example, asserted that: I went up for a promotion last year and a well-known scholar evaluating my dossier demanded to know selectivity rate (impossible to know in choreography) even though my choreography had been positively reviewed and well-funded for years. Sometimes, the colleagues with the least amount of respect for or trust in my creative work comes from within the dance discipline, which is hugely disappointing and really does nothing to further artistry or the field at large. Fortunately, I had the option to discount this gatekeeper’s opinions, but the experience was deeply hurtful and discouraging. Interestingly, none of the non-tenure-track participants described the role of gatekeepers as obstacles. We are curious to know more about this and wonder if tenure-track faculty members are assessed more rigorously, even unfairly, on the merit of their creative work and whether a field-wide set of agreedupon standards should exist to underline fair and reasonable expectations and evaluation. A lack of understanding or respect from colleagues across campus and in communities has led some of these participants to feel the need to defend their

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research, particularly when it crosses into politically provocative areas. Participant 55 stated, “As I engage in more community work and place an anti-racist and socially aware lens at the forefront of my work, I get a lot of pushback from the local community and warnings from my institution. I have had to defend my approach to my work.” One participant mentioned that making art in her public university in Texas was difficult because of politically-driven “limitations to artistic and educational freedom” (Participant 56) instituted by politicians in that state. This, too, deserves follow-up research because it is clear that state and local politics affect dance faculty members’ approach to making art in their academic positions. Recommendations for Institutions, Administrators, and Faculty

Based on the participants’ responses, we close this chapter by outlining a set of recommendations for tertiary institutions regarding the ways dance faculty members are mentored in research, how creative research could be better identified and assessed in academia, and steps dance programs and individual faculty members could take to clarify expectations and set reasonable creative research goals: 1 Every dance program or department, with collaboration and input from all faculty members, should establish a clear set of guidelines and assessment tools for creative research. These should be customized to the faculty members’ various ranks, roles, and responsibilities and should address ethical research conduct, evaluation metrics, and a definition of how dance is valued in that department and university. 2 Department chairs and heads of programs should be provided continuous training specific to dance so that they are capable of fairly and effectively evaluating faculty members’ creative research. 3 Each dance program or department should provide faculty members with opportunities to contest evaluations of their creative research and should be given space to self-advocate, perhaps in writing or orally, as to the meaning, value, and prestige of their work. 4 Each dance faculty member should have the opportunity to select or be assigned a mentor who will support their advancement in creative research. This could include providing feedback or peer review; reviewing a colleague’s CV or dossier; conducting annual peer evaluations of creative work; helping faculty resolve conflict, misunderstanding, or errors; and serving as a soundboard for creative ideas, project goals, process roadblocks, questions, and support sources. Additionally, because participants in this study have pointed to issues related specifically to their gender and race, strong mentorship should include attention to the ways intersectional identities

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5

6

7

8

converge to create unique experiences, both positive and negative, for individual faculty members. It could be beneficial for creative researchers in dance and across all performing arts to adopt a set of commonly acknowledged ethical practices, standards for recognizing prestige and rigor, and evaluation practices for creative research outcomes that could be understood and adapted by those in and outside of the arts. These standards may or may not align or be affiliated with larger institutional review board procedures. If colleagues outside of the performing arts are expected to evaluate dance faculty members’ creative research, they should be provided with education about how to view accomplishments in this area as they often appear very different than those in other areas on a CV or dossier. Universities and colleges must increase their support of creative research. This includes providing more opportunities for faculty members at every level to achieve internal and external funding to create and produce dance and interdisciplinary work, and to pursue external community- or socially engaged projects. This support should not come at the expense of scholarly, scientific, humanities, or pedagogical research. If institutions promote the ideals of creative research, then it should be supported equitably. The NASD and professional academic dance organizations have a responsibility to advocate for dance faculty conducting creative research and should also uphold and restate the above recommendations.

These recommendations are offered in the spirit of recognizing and understanding the diverse and vibrant ways creative research exists in the academy. The ethics, evaluation, and value of creative research in dance are intricately interwoven and specific to time and place, and these recommendations offer a starting point to clarify expectations and goals. Still, they may not answer larger questions related to how dance and creative research align with or hold tension against traditional academic structures and value systems. For instance, how can the artistic ideals that prevail in academic settings of freedom, innovation, and creativity be emphasized in standardized systems of evaluation of dance and performance? How can creative research achieve legitimacy in a postsecondary educational system that continues to lean into the business model, emphasizing profit over learning and product over process? If postsecondary institutions do not invest in or support creative research, how can dance faculty members compete for resources and advancement and how can dance and arts programs survive at all? These important questions, we believe, will shape discussion and decision-making in the future as the above recommendations are applied and point to necessary advocacy and change-making across the arts.

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References American Dance Therapy Association. 2020. “The Code of Ethics and Standards of the American Dance Therapy Association and the Dance/Movement Therapy Certification Board.” https://www.adta.org/assets/docs/Code-of-the-ADTA-DMTCBFinal.pdf. Anderson, Misti Ault. 2016. “Pedagogical Support for Responsible Conduct of Research Training.” The Hastings Center Report 46 (1): 18–25. Accessed April 12, 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44159197. Anderson, Paul V. 1996. “Ethics, Institutional Review Boards, and the Involvement of Human Participants in Composition Research.” In Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, edited by P. Mortensen, & G. Kirsch, 260–285. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED400543.pdf. Bonbright, Jane M. 2013. Evidence: A Report on the Impact of Dance in the K-12 Setting. National Dance Education Organization. https://www.arts.gov/sites/ default/files/Research-Art-Works-NDEO.pdf. Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press. Brown, B., P. Gough, and J. Roddis. 2004. Types of Research in the Creative Arts and Design. Bristol, UK: E–Papers, University of Brighton. http://folksonomy. co/?permalink=532. Byrd-McPhee, Michele. 2009. “Challenges of Small Dances Companies Meeting Artistic and Administrative Demands.” MS thesis, Drexel University. Candy, Linda, and Ernest Edmonds. 2018. “Practice-based Research in the Creative Arts.” Leonardo 51 (1): 63–69. Clements, Lucie, Emma Redding, Naomi Lefebvre Sell, and Jon May. 2018. “Expertise in Evaluating Choreographic Creativity: An Online Variation of the Consensual Assessment Technique.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (1): 1–8. Creswell, John W., and Cheryl N. Poth. 2017. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among the Five Approaches. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Deane, Kathryn. 2014. “ArtWorks Code of Practice.” Paul Hamlyn Foundation. https://www.artworksalliance.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ArtWorkscode-of-practice-pdf.pdf. Duffy, Ali. 2018. “A Delicate Balance: How Postsecondary Education Dance Faculty in the United States Perceive Themselves Negotiating Responsibilities Expected for Tenure.” Research in Dance Education 20 (1): 73–84. ———. 2020. “Identities, Academic Cultures, and Relationship Intersections: Postsecondary Dance Educators’ Lived Experiences Pursuing Tenure.” Research in Dance Education 21 (2): 188–208. Food and Drug Administration. 2019. “Institutional Review Boards and Protection of Human Subjects in Clinical Trials.” https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/ center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/institutional-review-boards-irbs-andprotection-human-subjects-clinical-trials. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2019. Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, and Penelope Hanstein, Eds. 1999. Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Frayling, Christopher. 2021. “…to Know the Place for the First Time…Exploring and Researching through the Arts.” In The Artist and Academia, edited by Helen Phelan and Graham F. Welch, 23–41. New York, NY: Routledge. Kraut, Anthea. 2011. “White Womanhood, Property Rights, and the Campaign for Choreographic Copyright: Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance.” Dance Research Journal 43 (1): 2–26. Accessed April 12, 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23266823. ———. 2016. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Minton, Sandra. 2000. “Research in Dance: Educational and Scientific Perspectives.” Dance Research Journal 32 (1): 110–116. Moen, Torill. 2006. “Reflection on the Narrative Research Approach.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (4): 56–69. Munger, John. 2001. “Dancing with Dollars in the Millennium: A Ten Year Summary of Trends.” Dance Magazine. April 1. National Association of Schools of Dance. 2022. “Handbook 2021–2022.” https:// nasd.arts-accredit.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2021/12/D-2021-22Handbook-Final-12-08-2021.pdf. People Dancing. 2021. “Professional Code of Conduct.” People Dancing. https://www.communitydance.org.uk/membership-ser vices-and-join/ professional-code-of-conduct. Reed, Susan A. 1998. “The Politics and Poetics of Dance.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 503–532. http://www.jstor.org/stable/223381. Risner, Doug, and Sherrie Barr. 2018. “Tenure Trials in Postsecondary Dance: The Basics of Your Case.” Dance Education in Practice 4 (2): 25–32. Robinson, Shannon M. 2016. “Artists as Scholars: The Research Behavior of Dance Faculty.” College & Research Libraries 77 (6): 779–794. Romano, Angela. 2016. “Ethical Review as a Tool for Enhancing Postgraduate Supervision and Research Outcomes in the Creative Arts.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 48 (13): 1368–1380. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1111130. Saldaña, Johnny. 2015. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Van Aken, Katherine L. 2016. “The Critical Role of Creativity in Research.” MRS Bulletin 41 (12): 934–938. https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2016.280. Warburton, Edward, and Marie Stanek 2004. “The Condition of Dance Faculty in Higher Education.” In NDEO Conference Proceedings: Merging Worlds: Dance, Education, Politics and Society, East Lansing, MI, October 22–24, 420–425. Silver Spring, MD: NDEO. Welsh, Thomas. 1999. “Ethical Standards for Experimental Research with Dancers.” Dance Research Journal 31 (1): 86–99. Wood, Jessica. 1992. “Tenure and Promotion of Dance Faculty.” In Dance in Higher Education, edited by Wendy Oliver, 110–114. Reston, VA: National Dance Association.

4 UGLY FEELINGS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Interrupting Inaction in Times of Perpetual Crisis Lauren Kapalka Richerme

In the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, concert halls went dark, the music of churches and graduation ceremonies was silenced, and informal gatherings of garage bands and other groups were forbidden. The label “nonessential” descended over arts venues and rehearsal spaces, and music makers were confronted with a collective sense of inaction. Yet, like a dammed stream forced to change course, individuals and groups found new tributaries. Multitudes of Italians sang from their balconies, professional Spanish musicians performed for audiences of plants, and adherents to even highly traditional music art forms, ranging from elementary school bands to collegiate madrigal groups, adapted their work to virtual platforms. Professional opera singers Jamie Barton and Ryan McKenny’s short video entitled Coronadämmerung (Barton, McKinney, and Kelly 2020), a riff on an excerpt from Richard Wagner’s opera Gotterdämmerung, was my personal favorite.1 However, the role of specific feelings within music making went largely unchanged. Popular artists continued singing about heartbreak, classical musicians forwarded the grand emotional swings of symphonies and operatic characters, and arts advocacy groups, including the American National Association for Music Education (2020, n.p.), declared: “Arts education is essential.” In the words of Cheng (2019, 57), such action suggests a framing of “disruption as concession [and] normalcy as quiet victory.” Being essential means a return to the status quo, or at least as close to it as possible. Those who understand themselves as essential have little reason to change. While my privileged position as a white, educated, American citizen enabled me to avoid the worst of the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic only worsened the already precarious lives of so many others. Concurrent with the pandemic, the killings of unarmed Black citizens, including George Floyd and Breonna DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-6

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Taylor, and shooting of Asian women at a spa in Atlanta brought world-wide attention to the tragic injustices Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian (BBIA)2 individuals continue to face. Yet, despite sustained, widespread protests, little has fundamentally changed in our society. Across the world, contemporary global capitalism creates a precarious geographically displaced underclass. Robinson (2020, 14) explains: “To the extent that [capitalism] is simply unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment,” including via boarder walls, deportation regimes, and mass incarceration. Moreover, authors of a Credit Suisse (2021) report on global wealth describe that while the richest 1% own 43.4% of all wealth, 53.6% of the world’s population (adults with less than $10,000 in wealth) own a total of 1.4%. In the United States, the K-shaped pandemic economic recovery meant that the rich have gotten richer, while those with less economic stability— a disproportionate number of whom are BBIA individuals—have seen their fragile finances dissipate. Yet, what has gone largely undiscussed amongst calls for social justice within the music education profession is the role of capitalism, or what Paris (2019, 221) calls “racialized settler capitalism,” in sustaining a racial underclass. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between capitalism, social justice, and different types of music making. I begin with an overview of capitalism and explain how it contributes to inequality and racial injustice. Next, I argue that by attaching ourselves to musical processes (i.e., performing, creating, or other engagements with particular types of music making), rather than to social justice aims or other ethical considerations, we create situations of what Berlant (2011) terms cruel optimism. Subsequently, I demonstrate that musical processes are not inherently ethical, but only ethical in relation to one’s context, including capitalist economic contexts. Finally, after explaining what Ngai (2005) calls “ugly feelings” and examining how ugly feelings might aid in resisting cruel optimism, I consider possible applications for practice. Overview of Contemporary Globalized Capitalism

Capitalism relies on the circulation of goods and money. Marx scholar Harvey (2018, 78) summarizes: “Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.” Through this circulation, capitalism creates profit for those who own the production process, or what Marx (1976) deemed the capitalist class. Take, for example, the owner of a music performance venue, who is a member of the capitalist class. The owner outlays the initial funds to book music performers and to cover costs, such as building maintenance and insurance. The owner then sells tickets to the event and keeps the profit, meaning anything in excess of what they paid to the performers and for other costs.

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The capitalist class exists in tension with the proletariat or working class, which Marx (1976) understood as anyone not owning the means of production. Stated differently, capitalism involves a pyramidal structure in which “a small ruling class lords over a large portion of the population” (Leonardo 2013, 62). Since the capitalist class reaps the profits from the working class’s labor, absent government intervention, they accumulate ever more wealth and power. In musicologist Ritchey’s words: “The principal tenet of modern capitalism is that those with capital must try to accumulate more[…] Whether or not all individuals have the legal right to better their own personal position within this system via hard work or luck does not change the basic inequality on which the system functions” (2019, 120). In the aforementioned music performance venue example, it is in the owner’s best interest to pay the performers, ticket takers, janitors, and other workers as little as possible, thus maximizing their own profit. Exploiting workers enables greater profits for members of the capitalist class, which in turn provides the capitalist class ownership of more production practices and hence opportunities to exploit an ever-growing number of workers. Music educators have critiqued the role that universities play in reinforcing the capitalist ideals of ongoing measurement and competitive rankings (Allsup 2015; Woodford 2018). More specifically, Benedict and O’Leary (2019) consider how music educators’ use of certain technologies at the P–12 (primary and secondary education) and collegiate levels can advance dominant commercial interests while subordinating students’ creative music making. Alternatively, Louth (2020) explains how the increasing emphasis on standards and state-wide testing within P–12 schools, which ultimately informs the work of collegiate arts teacher educators, works in tension with key contemporary capitalist ideals, such as nonintervention and decentralization. Yet, apart from Abramo’s (2021) observations regarding relationships between capitalist dematerialization and contemporary cultural practices, such as the transition from purchasing individual songs to music streaming service subscriptions, sustained attention to capitalism remains relatively rare in music education literature. Racialized Capitalism and Centering Recognition

In aiming to exploit workers, the capitalist class benefits from turning workers against one another. While a unified working class could work together to demand higher wages and better working conditions, a divided one resists collective action. Moreover, a divided working class provides some workers a sense of superiority. This can lead to situations in which white workers cling to whiteness “because in some fundamental sense it is all they have” (Leonardo 2013, 73). A worker might tolerate relatively low wages if they know that other individuals, particularly those whom they believe to be lazy or otherwise unworthy, receive lower pay than they do. As long as capitalism exists there

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will be economic winners and losers, and as long as there are winners and losers, individuals—particularly those lower on but not at the bottom of the economic pyramid—will attempt to keep BBIA individuals from advancing their economic standing. While I focus the remainder of this chapter on race, it is worth noting that capitalism also reinforces hierarchies based on gender and other distinctions (e.g., Federici 2020). Racial, gender, and other hierarchies are not just a byproduct of late global capitalism but a key enabling factor of it. In Leonardo’s (2013, 58–9) words: The greater concentration of people of color within the lower ranks of the division of labor, the material deprivations of ghettoization and general housing segregation, and the preparation of students in an equally segregated schooling experience all point to the internal dynamics of capitalism[…] Racist behaviors and policies produce economic outcomes because racism strengthens and complements capitalism. While racism may still exist absent capitalist economic practices, examining contemporary racism without attending to current economic practices omits a key motivator and reinforcer of racism. While movements such as Buy Black aim to shift who benefits from capitalist practices, they do little to address the fundamental inequalities and exploitation inherent in contemporary capitalism. Such movements can also encourage a possible populist backlash from those perceiving that they are, or risk becoming, the lowest rung on the capitalist ladder. Yet, music educators focusing on social justice (e.g., Benedict et al. 2015) continue to emphasize issues related to recognition—meaning awareness and attention to certain identities and interests—rather than distribution—meaning how wealth, ­resources, and power are allocated. Fraser (2019) argues that by keeping Americans locked in a debate over diversity versus anti-immigration nationalism, politicians avoid crucial populist agreement about the exploitation inherent in contemporary economic practices. Likewise, calls for including more diverse forms of music engagement or more composers from historically marginalized backgrounds center issues of recognition, while omitting direct attention to questions of distribution. For example, in 2016, the College Music Society Task Force for the Undergraduate Music Major authored a document making recommendations based on the three pillars of creativity, diversity, and integration (Campbell, Myers, and Sarath 2016). These leaders use the term “access” in relationship to musical diversity while making no mention of resource distribution. Following their logic, a tertiary music program that offers or requires classes in a diverse array of musical genres is superior to one narrowly focused on any one music genre or skillset. I wonder: what if the former program enrolled primarily middleand upper-class students while the latter enrolled and worked hard to support

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and retain primarily students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds? While diversifying music content can coincide with the continued exclusion of certain individuals, attention to material needs and other forms of support may improve diverse individuals’ access to music education, regardless of a program’s content. As such, aiming for diversity absent attention to issues of resource distribution does little to fundamentally challenge the material inequities central to capitalism. Although issues related to recognizing student and musical diversity certainly demand examination, Abramo (2021) and Bates (2019) argue that inattention to distribution divides the working class along race and other lines, thus limiting opportunities for class cohesion that can challenge capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, Leonardo (2013, 53) explains that such action enables BBIA artists and artistic practices to become “enjoyable spectacles that distract consumers from the workings of the political economy.” This raises the question: What assumptions encourage social justice focused music educators to emphasize diversity rather than to confront capitalist exploitation and material inequities directly? The Cruel Optimism of Musical Attachments

One assumption that may encourage music educators to focus on diversity rather than material inequities is understanding certain forms of music making, particularly the ones to which they are most attached, as ethically good. It seems obvious that music educators are attached to music making,3 or at least to some forms of it. Few would enter and sustain within the profession absent a sense of joyful fulfillment from musical engagement. These emotional attachments build up throughout one’s life, including outside of formal educational experiences. Individuals cannot easily disregard either the competitive music making that brought them local recognition or the music making associated with certain friendships and intimate communities. My husband and I named our daughter Isolde after an opera character; I am clearly attached to certain forms of music making. The language surrounding one’s preferred musical practices often reveals the nature of their musical attachments. Cheng (2019) posits that individuals may personify musical practices, particularly when they perceive instances of mistreatment. He explains that when individuals make statements such as “A singer butchered or mangled the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at the Super Bowl. An under rehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin’s classics. An orchestra didn’t quite do justice to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ‘Requiem,’” they treat music as a sentient companion capable of experiencing injury and therefore deserving of fierce protection (Cheng 2019, 2). Such devotion and defensiveness suggest the potential strength and influence of musical attachments.

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Berlant explains all attachment as optimistic. She defines optimism as “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own” (Berlant 2011, 1–2). For those focusing on social justice, attachment to certain forms of music making can provide a sense of hope and satisfaction associated with more ethical thinking and action. In Berlant’s words: “Nearness to this thing” (e.g., a certain form of music making) “will help you or the world to become different in just the right way” (e.g., perhaps by encouraging more socially just action) (2011, 2). For instance, a song protesting military involvement might help one to feel aligned with a more peaceful world, or playing a sorrowful song written by someone from a historically marginalized group can make one feel connected with and supportive of that community. Optimistic attachments protect not just the object, such as a particular form of music pedagogy, but the desire, such as aiming for social justice, that attached one to that musical practice in the first place. Objects of optimism promise “the endurance of something, the survival of something, the flourishing of something, and above all the protection of the desire that made this object or scene powerful enough to have magnetized an attachment to it” (Berlant 2011, 48). For example, imagine a tertiary music administrator who starts a major in hip-hop to promote social justice by centering the study of a Black artform. The existence of the hip-hop major may protect the administrator’s aim of being more socially just. Stated differently, social justice focused music educators may find that their attachment to certain music education experiences (e.g., hip-hop) encourages them to feel that they have achieved socially just aims, when, in reality, the music making has become a stand-in for those aims. Berlant explains that optimistic attachments “become cruel when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011, 1). Applying this idea to music education means that an attachment to certain forms of music making can impede the aim of more socially just action that brought one to those forms of music making in the first place. For example, music educators who become attached to hip-hop music making with the aim of honoring a predominantly Black artform may spend significant time learning the details of how to create and recreate hip-hop aesthetics. Such action may take time away from, and thus impede, difficult discussions and decisions related to issues such as college admission procedures or retention initiatives that exclude Black students. It follows that attachment to music with the aim of promoting social justice or other forms of ethics risks blurring the line between music and ethical considerations. While it has become cliché to say that Hitler’s love of Wagner debunks the notion that musical practices possess inherent ethical value, Cheng (2019, 21) notes: “The Nazi card is itself revelatory, for the gambit’s enduring popularity raises the question of why the card needs to be played at all if the

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wisdoms therein are by now, in fact, so conventional.” In other words, whenever the notion that classical musical practices possess ethical value arises, a frequent retort is that Hitler—the epitome of an unethical person—was highly devoted to Wagner’s music, and, thus, classical music making cannot instill ethical values. The continued circulation of such exchanges within collegiate music programs suggests that the assumed link between ethics and certain forms of music making persists. The need to keep reiterating that music making, or for that matter education, is not inherently ethical demonstrates that such understandings continue to permeate contemporary societies. To illustrate further the idea that music is not inherently ethical, I consider intersections between specific musical practices and capitalism. Selling Hip (Hop): Music and Capitalism

At first glance, teachers and students might assume that classical music making inherently contributes to thriving within capitalism (e.g., Allsup 2015) and that, given their counterculture roots and often anti-establishment lyrics, hiphop practices inherently challenge or work in tension with capitalism. Indeed, classical music institutions have relied on individualistic competition and halls built by the wealthiest 1%. There is even a recent, delightful pro-capitalist opera about Steve Jobs—recording available on Amazon. More specifically, in an extensive qualitative study of European conservatory musicians, Bull (2019, 6) observed: “The middle classes’ common commitment to education as a way to retain their social position suggests that classical music education is a particularly good way of both signaling and reproducing class position.” However, certain classical music making may subvert or challenge capitalist ideals. Consider, for instance, the four operas constituting the Ring Cycle, in which composer Wagner drew heavily on Bakunin’s anarchist thought (McGee 2001). Throughout the operas, greedy, gold-seeking characters face troubling repercussions, and wealthy Valhalla burns in the final act. Similarly, more recent compositions like Ted Hearne’s 2009 Privilege indirectly address capitalist practices by raising awareness about systemic social inequalities. While the social relations surrounding the performance of such pieces, including the systemic exclusion of certain individuals from performance and attendance opportunities, could still reinforce current capitalist ideals and hierarchies, their musical content has the potential to awaken awareness about problematic aspects of capitalism. Alternatively, while a handful of Black artists and producers have economically profited from hip-hop’s success, Leonardo (2013, 53) explains: Mainstream Black artists’ success is bound up with Whites’ expectations of an acceptable Blackness. It is then no surprise that the narrowed choices for Black representation in musical lyrics, magazines, and other populist

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venues for commercial hip hop is tethered by White desires to either transform Blackness into palatable forms, such as Snoop Dogg’s reality television show or Ice Cube’s partnership with Martha Stewart, or criminalize it, as in the 1990s gangsta rap. The range in between, from the Black Eyed Peas to Nicki Minaj, becomes enjoyable spectacles that distract consumers from the workings of the political economy. The same goes for how hip-hop music makers treat capitalist ideals more broadly; anti-capitalist messages are either adapted to make them more palatable for a mainstream audience or treated as part of a deviant culture that listeners may perhaps valorize but do not directly embrace. While hip-hop songs, such as Kanye West’s “It All Falls Down” offer a critique of capitalism, Taylor (2016) explains that the record industry still profits from the work of musicians who portray themselves as counterculture or anti-capitalist. Likewise popular music making is defined by its success within capitalist business practices. Although songs like “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant offer a critique of capitalism, most popular musicians either ignore or reinforce capitalist ideals. For instance, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” which was Billboard’s top song of the 2010s, glamorizes white gold, Chucks shoes, and the expensive Saint Laurent brand. Even when certain music making has the potential to challenge problematic aspects of capitalism, teachers and students undertaking such practices could still reinforce capitalist ideals. For example, P–12 or collegiate students replicating Lorde’s popular song “Royals,” which centers the rejection of upperclass materialism, might leave such experiences wishing to purchase more of Lorde’s music or to grow their own self-brand on social media. Similarly, since music composition and improvisation usually occur within the boundaries of certain genres, or at minimum influenced by the genres to which a music maker currently listens, such action does not inherently challenge capitalism. In short, when music educators assume that existing musical attachments can and should serve social justice aims, they enable music to become a placeholder for considering various forms of ethics. Since music making is not inherently ethical, one’s attachment to music making may impede the overarching aim of justice-oriented practices, thus creating a situation of cruel optimism. While this does not mean that tertiary arts educators and students should retain the pervasive single-minded focus on classical music or other bounded artforms, they might avoid understanding teaching and learning hiphop, popular, or other music making as inherently ethical. Interestingly, one of the earliest and most prominent music writers to critique capitalism, Adorno (1997) also deemed certain music genres, particularly the atonal music composed by his intellectual contemporaries, best suited to awaken music makers to their surrounding socio-economic conditions. While I find Adorno’s centering of atonal music and dismissal of jazz and popular

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music logically indefensible, he makes an intriguing observation about the potential for certain music experiences to reflect one’s own capitalist alienation back to them. For Adorno, this occurs when music making interrupts individuals’ passive acceptance of their place within capitalist societies. Rather than focusing on the transformative potential of certain music genres, teachers and students might collaborate in asking: what individual and collective feelingful experiences could interrupt existing world views, potentially raising awareness about capitalist inequities? Ugly Feelings

Extending Adorno’s work, Ngai (2005) proposes the possibilities of what she terms ugly feelings. According to Ngai, ugly feelings can include anxiety, paranoia, and envy. Ugly feelings may serve as a starting point for considerations about the sensations that can jar arts educators and students from their current habits. I interpret Ngai as proposing three interrelated aspects of experiences involving ugly feelings. First, ugly feelings involve striving away from, rather than toward. Ngai (2005, 11) writes, “Trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction” organize ugly feelings. This is in part because ugly feelings, like envy, are “saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values.” For example, in contrast with more typical popular music that encourages one to envision themself living life alongside the super-rich, imagine a song that encourages one to envy the super-rich. The ugly feeling of envy is associated with pettiness; one does not celebrate envying another. Envy might therefore cause individuals to recoil, thus encouraging repulsion rather than attraction. Yet, it is through this recoiling and repulsion that students might become aware of the problems of glamorizing unrestrained material consumption made possible through global inequalities and resource exploitation. A second aspect of Ngai’s (2005) argument is that ugly feelings distance individuals from practical aims, including capitalist market practices. For example, when artistic engagement produces anxiety, the feeling of anxiety may overwhelm other pressing aims, such as where one might eat or shop following a music performance. Through this distancing, the experience of anxiety disrupts one’s habitual practices and can encourage a critical consciousness about those practices. While non-ugly feelings such as joy may provide a certain amount of distancing from everyday routines, individuals generally want to feel joyful and often seek out music making that can enable it. Likewise, while individuals may not necessarily aim for sadness, songs about heartbreak rarely carry social stigma. Since those facing loss or uncertainty often seek out opportunities for sad music making, such feelings may serve as a form of attraction that connects individuals to routine life moments and previous habits.

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Alternatively, Ngai (2005, 6) emphasizes that the ugly feelings are explicitly “noncathartic” (emphasis in original); they offer neither satisfaction “nor any therapeutic or purifying release.” Returning to the example of sadness, it follows that individuals may seek out sad music making because it can enable a sense of release from the feeling of sadness. In contrast, music making centered on the ugly feelings of anxiety or paranoia often encourages those feelings, rather than causing them to subside. A third aspect of ugly feelings is that, through their repulsion and distancing from practical aims, they raise awareness about one’s own inaction and thus complicity in problematic aspects of capitalist systems. Ngai (2005, 346) elaborates that capitalist markets’ tolerance of art “assumes its social ineffectuality or innocuousness.” Rather than strategically moving to overcome this lack of agency, ugly feelings arise when one diagnoses this inaction as such. Ngai (2005, 36) explains: “Art thus comes to interrogate the problematically limited agency of art.” Awareness of one’s present inaction can encourage critical encounters with unjust practices. For example, Lebron (2013) explains that shame arises when those who do not perceive themselves as racist become aware that they have contributed to societal practices incompatible with their own moral expectations. In other words, teachers and students may experience shame when they realize that principles they affirm, such as equity and diversity, have been violated. As such, ugly feelings like shame often involve a sense of disorientation and bewilderment (Ngai 2005, 14), which may further reflection and learning. This aspect of ugly feelings recalls Ahmed’s assertion that feminist teaching begins with a “pause or hesitation, which refuses to allow the takenfor-granted to be granted.” Such encounters may move students from a sense of assurance to disbelief to wonder, perhaps encouraging them to ask: “How did the world come to take this shape?” (Ahmed 2004, 182). In short, since ugly feelings both temporarily distance individuals from a superficial sense of empowerment and interrupt joyful capitalist consumption, they can encourage critique of and resistance to the largely affirmative culture of market societies. This raises the question: How exactly might ugly feelings resist cruel optimism? First, since ugly feelings involve repulsion rather than attraction, they resist the process of attachment and may encourage teachers and students to trouble their past and present musical attachments. Finding oneself repulsed by the artmaking that one has long enjoyed enables a moment of reflection about the nature of that art making. Second, given that ugly feelings distance teachers and students from practical aims and present habits, they have the potential to encourage reflection on one’s current contexts, including the racist capitalist market practices and other systematic injustices embedded within them. Through the experience of ugly feelings such as envy, teachers and students might reflect not only on the limits of their beloved forms of art making, but on their

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positionality within and contributions to the exploitation key to capitalist economic practices. Third, the disorienting nature of ugly feelings can encourage a critical consciousness about one’s present inaction, perhaps eventually encouraging more significant justice-focused actions. In experiencing envy, teachers and students might take actions that address the concerns of students envious because they enter tertiary education with relatively few resources, including not only artmaking supplies but knowledge about how to navigate college life. Moreover, while joyous music making can blur the distinction between music and social justice or other forms of ethics, the three aforementioned qualities of ugly feelings—repulsion, distancing, and disorienting—emphasize that music making is not inherently ethical. I now consider possible implications for practice. Possible Implications

While it is hard to imagine an entire P–12, collegiate concert or even class period devoted to ugly feelings, music educators at all levels might experiment with including them sporadically throughout their curricula. For example, consider a music creation assignment in which collegiate students draw inspiration from their own life stories or local community to create a composition or multi-media project portraying one or more ugly feelings. Educators might setup for this endeavor by discussing and improvising with various forms of ugly feelings, such as envy or anxiety. Alternatively, imagine a collegiate class focused on preparing future teachers to work with elementary students. The preservice teachers might consider potential experimentations involving the adding of a specific ugly feeling, such as envy, to a children’s book based on a clichéd storyline, such as a tale about the children of royalty. Imagining the perspectives of characters residing beyond the castle walls, the class might compose music to reflect their envy of the royal children’s privileged lifestyle. Or maybe given a story in which a character is bullied or neglected, the teacher and students could imagine and create music portraying the ugly feeling of shame experienced by bystanders who did not intervene upon witnessing the mistreatment. When developmentally appropriate, embracing the disorientation and repulsion indicative of ugly feelings could involve centering what Jace Clayton (also known as DJ/rupture) describes as sonic disruption that parallels the experience of Black bodies in contentious public spaces. Clayton (2020) explains that much of Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy album uses barely audible bass waves that necessitate upgraded speaker systems. Such sound waves are bone rattling; they literally penetrate concrete walls. By creating visceral discomfort and disorientation, including perhaps through the ugly feelings of anxiety or paranoia, Clayton explains that these waves draw attention to the presence and precariousness of often excluded BBIA bodies in primarily white spaces. While

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I am not advocating that P–12 or collegiate music educators and students form an attachment to Cardi B’s or similar types of musical engagement, they might consider how the resistance and disorientation of musical practices such as a bone-rattling bass line can foster ugly feelings that may interrupt habits, in music making and beyond. For example, imagine if tertiary arts educators began a brainstorming meeting with various artistic processes designed to invoke the disorientation and hesitation key to ugly feelings. Considering how they might work with and from, rather than avoid or move past, ugly feelings like anxiety and envy, the group might brainstorm how problematic aspects of capitalism limit their work within and beyond the university as well as how they create obstacles for collegiate students. Still drawing on feelings like anxiety and envy, they might imagine how, both individually and as a faculty, they could mitigate or work against these problematic aspects, including through their curricular content, pedagogy, artistic endeavors, and administrative policies (e.g., admission practices and retention efforts). While tertiary arts educators might acknowledge that they benefit from and are in large part currently beholden to capitalist systems, faculty members and administrators might imagine and experiment with challenging capitalist inequities through the practices they most directly control. Additionally, tertiary arts education programs might prioritize an attachment to ethics and ethical considerations, rather than to specific forms of artmaking. Imagine if every undergraduate and graduate arts student took an ethics class during their first semester. Instead of defaulting to liberal ethics— as the music education profession so often does (Richerme 2022)—the class might focus students’ attention on conservative ethics; different subsets of liberal ethics; Marxist and other critiques of liberal ethics; feminist, Confucian, and Buddhist ethics; as well as various forms of Indigenous ethics. Awareness that ethics is not a singular set of ideas and the ongoing willingness to trouble current ethical attachments and reflectively position oneself among diverse understandings about ethics may serve as important starting points for further discussions and experimentations. Perhaps the final project for the course could involve designing a participatory artistic event that centered on two or more ethical philosophies. As opposed to the restrained audience involvement at a museum-like art show or seated classical music, dance, or theatre event, students could brainstorm ways to engage audience members in aspects of ethical decision-making and reflection. Building on this initial course, maybe students could be required to participate in an ethics-focused artistic engagement, which could involve enacting aspects of their imagined participatory event, prior to earning their degree. This culminating project could also involve undertaking various forms of artistic interaction, which is distinct form outreach in that it involves two-way exchanges, with one or more historically marginalized communities, ranging from students with disabilities to residents of women’s shelters.

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More broadly, centering ethical considerations will inevitably mean that tertiary arts educators and students challenge current artistic attachments. Such action demands not just lone individuals but communities that imagine, discuss, and feel the world as it could otherwise be and become. In such creative spaces the disorientation and interruption of ugly feelings have a chance of taking hold and leading elsewhere. Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic have taught me that interruption can have value, and interruption does not start with a joyful melody, but with ugly feelings—a collective scream. Notes 1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ChqaZxLT4&t=1s. 2 While similar to BIPOC, I use the term BBIA because, at present, it is the preferred term within music education scholarship. Since Brown and Asian individuals might not identify as People of Color, the term BBIA is clearer and more inclusive when referring to systems or practices that impact these music makers. 3 I use the term “music making” to indicate any form of musical engagement, including, but not limited to, performing, rehearsing, composing, improvising, and listening within, across, and beyond various musical styles and genres.

References Abramo, Joseph. 2021. “Whence Culture and Epistemology? Dialectical Materialism and Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 29 (2): 155–73. https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.29.2.03. Adorno, Theodore. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Allsup, Randall. 2015. “The Eclipse of Higher Education or Problems Preparing Artists in a Mercantile World.” Music Education Research 17 (3): 251–61. https://doi. org/10.1080/14613808.2015.1057996. Barton, Jamie, Ryan McKinney, and Kathleen Kelly. 2020. Das Rheingold: Coronadämmerung [Video] YouTube. Accessed April 12, 2023. https://www.­youtube.com/ watch?xv=n_ChqaZxLT4&t=1 Bates, Vincent. 2019. “Standing at the Intersection of Race and Class in Music Education.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18 (1): 117–60. https:// doi.org/10.22176/act18.1.117. Benedict, Cathy, and Jared O’Leary. 2019. “Reconceptualizing ‘Music Making:’ ­Music Technology and Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 18 (1): 26–43. https://doi.org/10.22176/act18.1.26. Benedict, Cathy, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford, eds. 2015. Oxford Handbook on Social Justice and Music Education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bull, Anna. 2019. Class, Control, and Classical Music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Campbell, Patricia Shehan, David Myers, and Ed Sarath. 2016. “Transforming Music Study from Its Foundations: A Manifesto for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation of Music Majors.” College Music Society. https://www.music. org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=233&Itemid=3288. Cheng, William. 2019. Loving Music Till It Hurts. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Clayton, Jayce. 2020, September. White Noise (Muted) Zooms. Paper presented at Indiana University Global Popular Music Symposium, Bloomington, IN. Credit Suisse. 2021. Global Wealth Report. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/ en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html. Federici, Silvia. 2020. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2019. The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Reborn. New York, NY: Verso. Harvey, David. 2018. A Companion to Marx’s Capital: The Complete Edition. New York, NY: Verso. Lebron, Christopher. 2013. The Color of Our Shame. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Leonardo, Zeus. 2013. Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Louth, Paul. 2020. “Emphasis and Suggestion versus Musical Taxidermy: Neoliberal Contradictions, Music Education, and the Knowledge Economy.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 28 (2): 88–107. https://doi.org/10.2979/ philmusieducrevi.28.1.06. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin Books. McGee, Bryan. 2001. Wagner and Philosophy. East Sussex, UK: Gardners Books. National Association for Music Education. 2020. May. NAfME Joins 52 Other National Organizations to Support Arts Education as Essential. https://nafme.org/ nafme-joins-52-other-national-organizations-support-arts-education-as-essential/ Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paris, Djengo. 2019. “Naming beyond the White Settler Colonial Gaze in Educational Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 32 (3): 217–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1576943. Richerme, Lauren Kapalka. 2022. “Naming Moral-political Discourses in Music Education: A Philosophical Investigation.” Journal of Research in Music Education 70 (1): 48–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224294211019942. Ritchey, Marianna. 2019. Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, William. 2020. The Rise of the Global Police State. London, UK: Pluto Press. Taylor, Timothy. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Woodford, Paul. 2018. Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth. New York, NY: Routledge.

5 HOSTING CO(N)FUSION Art Residencies as Invitation-Practices Janaína Moraes

As your eyes drop into the words here inscribed, I would like to open this text by borrowing Brazilian indigenous philosopher Krenak’s (2019, 62) words: We’ve fallen to different degrees and in different places across the planet. But we’re still terrified of what will happen when the next topple comes. Why do we hate the sensation of falling? It happens that’s all we’ve been doing of late. Falling, falling, falling. So why are we so upset over it now? We feel insecure, paranoid even, because all the other outcomes we can see require the implosion of the house we inherited but live in fear of losing. Let’s put our creative and critical capacity to use making some colourful parachutes to slow the fall, turn it into something exciting and edifying. As Krenak is encouraging us to imagine what is possible in an in-between space that is in motion (fluid, gravitational), I am encouraging us to think about what is possible through existing/thriving in the in-between spaces of academia and artist residencies. Putting forth the importance of being in relation and moving beyond (or into) what is unknown, but already in existence, I discuss in this chapter the responsibility of the performing arts communities to co(n)fuse tertiary education structures as a response to plural and ever-shifting socio-political landscapes. Co(n)fusion is a provocation to perceive “fusion” as a modulation in experiences of togetherness. The prefix con- is a word-forming element meaning “together, with:” “With fusion,” “with togetherness.” Co(n)fusing logics and formalities of the traditional spaces of art and academia is an invitation to inhabit a third space between confusion and co-fusion. These are invitations to navigate a given context via displacement through practices of co (-llaboration, -mmunity, -nviviality, -existence). Through displacing the DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-7

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context of when, where, and how knowledge may be shared and assessed, fixed pragmatics of teaching-learning experiences may be challenged. In response, alternative situations that foster embodied knowledge may emerge. This chapter reflects on co-fusion and confusion as tensioning devices for addressing other modalities of needs and desires within academia. Moreover, it dwells with experiences that do not try to get rid of states of confusion straight away, but rather decide to learn from these disordering or disorienting experiences (Ahmed 2006). As British-Australian feminist scholar Ahmed (2006, 135) suggests, “The moments when the body appears ‘out of place’ are moments of political and personal trouble […] it involves disorientation: people blink and then look again. The proximity of such bodies makes familiar spaces seem strange.” It is this very estrangement that this chapter attends to. In this writing, I weave threads of an ecological imagination, entwining artists’/scholars’ viewpoints with my own art residency experiences. An ecological imagination is an act of “paying attention to the webs of relationships that you are enmeshed in, depending on where you live. So, those are all the things that give us life, all the things that we depend on, as well as all the other entities that we relate to, including human beings” (Donald 2010, 39:01). In this case, my ecological imagination is situated in purposely displaced occurrences of tertiary education—experiences that dissolve, or blur, institutional borders. Displacement can be understood in multiple ways—it is the very act of moving, transitioning, migrating. But displacement is ultimately an ability to welcome other modes of perception and to find a disposition (encontrar disposição) for the extra within the ordinary. Before I delve into my experiences “in residence,” I contextualize my practice to orient the unfolding discourse. I have been working with the notion of invitation poétics1 as a set of strategies, values, and sensory/meaning structures that explore different aspects and concepts of invitation, especially hosting and displacing. The narratives I share here offer opportunities to rethink how faculty might “co-fuse” and “confuse” their curricula. These narratives come from personal stories in which I share arrangements to versify sensitive, conceptual, and procedural contents of my experience as an artist, student, researcher, and teacher. I narrow my focus on invitation to the coexistence of needs and desires to create parallels of potentialities on how artistic thinking can invite tertiary education communities to navigate and re-invent their relationships. The more I engage in conversations about needs | | desires, it is ‘vs’ that seems to, initially, fill the space in between. As if needs are oppositional to desires. One against the other. Needs vs desires. If you do a quick online search in your browser’s dictionary, you may find a definition of need as being the ‘essential or very important rather than just desirable.’ I find it so intriguing the ways language plays with our experience of the world… The tensions between those terms, being based on antagonism, may create the fallacy of a moral need and a perverse desire. One is the greater good, the other is the vain (or even sinful) impulse. On other

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lenses, there is also the fallacy of a capitalistic need, to be in an undesirable state of precarity—the consumerist desire that becomes advertised as the ultimate need for success. Well, within invitation poétics, it is neither this nor that wanting-ness I am referring to. I want a counter-notion. It is one of the micro-politics, as the politics of desire. (Journal entry, December 20, 2021) Philosopher Guattari and curator/art critic Rolnik refer to micro-politics as the politics of desire: “strategies of the economy of desires into social fields” that act as counterpoints to macro-political conventions and systems ­(Guattari and Rolnik 1996, 14). While macro-politics are established and usually structure normative modes of access and interaction within the world, the politics of desire are fragmented. They are less-rigid structures and more like assemblages found “at each step […] in the invention of reference modes, of praxis modes. Invention that, at the same time, allows [one] to elucidate a field of subjectivation and effectively intervene in that field, both inside and in its relations with the outside” (Guattari and Rolnik 1996, 30). Within tertiary education, I propose that thinking of invitation poétics as strategies for displacing power relationships in academia reclaims a (micro) politics of desire that enchants the word “desire,” that frees it from neo-liberal perspectives of transactionality and allows it to perform more generative perspectives of wanting and, therefore, desiring in academia and having pleasure in it. In that sense, needs and desires echo each other as they reveal tonalities of the same spectrum of a wanting-ness. How could we find desirable experiences within the systems of needs we may be situated within? Or else, how do we learn new operations and fundamentals through attentive pleasure and desire? These are some of the ways that invitation poétics informs my practice as one of micro-politics. (Journal entry, December 14, 2021) To ground this discussion, I offer three practical examples to illustrate some of the current shifts in academia. The first is a paper on art residency experiences2 organized by artist and professor Christus Nóbrega at The University of Brasília (Brazil) for tertiary students that I attended in 2018. The second is when I hosted my master’s defense in my own home, back in Brazil, in 2019. The third is my PhD’s Provisional Year Presentation, also organized as an art residency in a co-working space in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand).3 These examples include discussion on the potentials and dilemmas such strategies may activate to navigate multiple modes of course delivery and assessment (or, as I will further explore, the transmission of knowledge). They aim to re-think systems in which performing arts and tertiary education may coexist through relational and situated knowledge experiences. Such practices foster teaching-learning relationships as acts of informed, transformed, and performed experiences of knowledge. After all, “knowledge always has a material as well as conceptual reality” (Brown 2019, n.p.). Brown (2019, n.p.) mentions choreography-as-research as a practice of wayfaring, “a coming to know through being in and through place.” Similarly, Fabião (2018, 1) places her practice as a matter of “respectfully acknowledging

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the fact that our co-materiality is a matter of fact, that our co-existence is the matter that acts, that our co-constituency is the matter that matters, that difference is what we all have in common.” Finally, Mãe (2016, 8) indicates that “all things are equivalent in value to poetry, the raw material is the full extension of the existing vocabulary and the one to be invented.” By sharing a commitment to a thinking, embodied, situated body, these artists offer models for artistic thinking that imbues their practices of life. The artistic thinking I bring to attention is the thought that occurs in the act and because of the act of being curious in and with the world. Trans-mission of Knowledge: Performing Displacement and “Rights” of Passage

My experiences with education are also associated with a sense of home. During my early education, I lived less than a mile from school and seemed to spend more time there than at my own house. As a kid, my deepest experiences of learning occurred between classes, among friends, assistants, and janitors. In high school, the image drastically shifted and prison was the one that came to the forefront, where I associated school, at many points, with a sense of imprisonment. Even in language, I noticed a change. Grade horária and disciplinas started to frame the behaviors and (lack of) expectations one should entail within scholarly life, as our names were replaced by numbers in the roll so as not to “waste time” in the busy routines of learning. Grade horária can be translated as “hour grid,” a term that refers to the student’s timetable. Disciplina, translated as discipline, refers to topics of study (such as math, Portuguese, science). As one might infer, Brazilian schools in the 20th century were influenced by the military, oriented toward the idea of disciplining bodies to act in accordance with rules in the promise of developing and “finding progress.” Tertiary education is (or perhaps should be), a crucial transitional space, where the “highly educated” will face, most for the first time, a “return” to critical thinking. I mention a return as I believe, many children, consciously or not, have once embodied a glimpse of deep curiosity and sense of inquiry that many seem to forget on our journey to literacy. At the same time that Western universities tend to be the place of critical thinking, they also tend to be embedded with profound roots of normative thinking and exclusionary embodiment. Within this awareness, I invite a transition of the idea of transmission (transmitting knowledge) to the poétics of trans-mission—a queer mission, a re-orienting device (inspired by Ahmed’s [2006] queer phenomenology) as the “mission of transitory experiences” and “transformative relationships.” These are missions that we should not only advocate for as much as perform4 within education systems: missions of passage; othering. A pedagogy of hospitality. Síveres and de Melo (2012, 36, 39) propose a reading of Lévinas’s “ethics of otherness” as a pedagogical process on hospitality, where hospitality is

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an experience of welcoming the “other” through opening the doors of one’s home to the adventure of living together and sharing different worlds and perspectives that intersect and intertwine in its interior. Hospitality, in this sense, would not be about the “thematization” of the other, but, rather, the exercise of sharing one’s personal world and the other’s reality. Within the ethics of otherness, hospitality is embodied through deep listening to the other where relationships may unfold. Instead of pre-established rules or methods, a relationship that creates an internal logic of operation and iterative embodiments of a poétics is established in the relational episodes between artistic and pedagogical thresholds. Such threshold experiences invite us to reflect on the role of artistic thinking as the plural and ever-shifting embodiments of situated experiences. Experiences that invite us to reconsider the norms of affection and attend to the extraordinary operations within ordinary life, such as Brown’s (2019) wayfaring, Fabião’s (2018) mattering, and Mãe’s (2016) valuing, for instance. What if lecture theaters became less lecture and more theater? What if students learned how to un/learn behavioral expectations? What if classes became artifacts and professors became artists? I am not referring here to a replacement, instead I am suggesting a displacement—displacing one to find out another. I am also talking about trans-placement, transitioning bodies and spaces in order to (re)invent wor(l)ds. I am talking about transit. Transitory. Transitional. Transformative. Transfigured modes and molds of education systems. I am asking, could tertiary education learn from artistic thinking and could artistic thinking shift how and where learning occurs on campus and how it is assessed? Learning Through Coexistence: Dancing Memories in the Stranger’s Home

In 2018, I participated in a course at the University of Brasília’s Fine Arts Post-Grad Department designed by professor and artist Christus Nóbrega. Nóbrega’s research is focused, among other things, on issues of house, travel, and displacement as art methods. Since 2017, he has offered a post-grad paper on art residencies with three phases. In the Preparatory phase, participants review theoretical studies about residence, community, hospitality, and poetics of space. In the Residency phase, participants engage in an immersive experience through practices of perception and an analysis of the lived space. In the Evaluation phase, participants present the results generated during the residency including an artistic exploration that emerged and text in the form of a travel report or journal. It was also intended that during the residency there would be the emergence of an artistic work/experiment either in a finalized or project format, accompanied by the production of a text in the format of travel report/journal. The report should describe the process of artistic endeavor,

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articulating the perceptions of experience with the theories studied, as well as with the activations of other artists. During the Residency phase in 2018, our nine-member cohort lived at the Center West Art Center (Núcleo de Arte do Centro-Oeste) in the city of ­Olhos D’Água for seven days. Throughout the phases of the project, the course’s focus was to investigate the concept of territory, sine qua non situation for discussion/experience in an art residency and the relationships between host and guest within a situated learning experience. According to Derrida (2003, 43), “a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things, the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or borders; between the familiar and the non-familiar, between the foreigner and the non-foreigner, between the citizen and the non-citizen.” Such rigorous delimitation, however, is confused as the very experience of hospitality is embodied through the aporetic notion of host-guest of a territory (or situation). “The one who welcomes is first welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one whom he invites” (Derrida 1999, 41–2). Before traveling to the residency site and informed by the intricacies of such co(n)fusing relationships, we were encouraged to engage with the territory and our imagination by studying the space from afar. Through this virtual contact, we made initial interactions with the community by posting a poetic gesture in the form of a postal art to a selected address of our choice. For me, this poetic act was a kind of a “reverse welcoming”—one in which the guest (the foreigner, the stranger) offered a “souvenir” as an announcement of their arrival. It was possible that one would never know whether their “art piece” reached their unknown addressee or not. However, the promise of this imaginary relationship created a very particular sense of belonging and desire to my own arrival as an artist-to-be-living in that territory. As philosopher Onfray (2019, 9, 31) proposes, “a journey begins in the site of desire” —the will to (be) displace(d onto) the unknown. Moreover, Onfray proposes that “traveling presupposes the confusion of all the senses, then its reactivation and its recapitulation in the verb.” After a few weeks of studying and imagining the space of residence, we “actualize” the travel. On the route for Olhos D’água (Goiás, Brazil), I notice the time slowing down as I enter the village where “countryside meets urban contemporary art.” One thing comes to my attention: so many open doors! Different from “the city,” we can see the interior of the houses from the outside—no fences or walls to shield. (T)here, we start a regular practice of walking. For the next five days, that was the only directive: walk through the village. In the afternoons, we would have lunch together and talk about our (dis)encounters, what caught our attention, who did we cross by, which impulses have we indulged or resisted? In the evening, we would usually share specifics about our projects-to-be. Finding materials, references, dreams… Discussing actions, objects, territories within the territory, making allies and projecting schedules.

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During the second day of (solitary) walks, I decided to entertain my curiosity towards the open doors and started taking pictures of every single “open house” that I could see. At the same time, I started looking into signs of invitation—­ everything that, in my interpretation, felt like an invite to engage with. I read a billboard at the edge of the village: “everything household appliances. come talk to us at any time.” I do not hesitate to look into the address and marching directly to the place. There I find Andrea, a single mother that works in the store. We begin talking after I say: “Hello! I saw the sign saying I could come to talk and, as I don’t know many people around, I thought it would be nice to have someone to talk with. What can we talk about?” Andrea suspiciously laughs, but she buys the idea. We talk for a moment before she has to “go back to work.” I think “This is my last chance.” A previous performance of mine comes to mind (in this performance I invite people to tell me memories that I can dance with/for them). I instantly offer: “Hey! I sometimes dance people’s memories. Could I visit you this afternoon to dance one of yours?” There my work begins––for the next four days I walk around Olhos D’Água to invite myself into people’s homes and dance their memories, choreographing the memories I invent not to miss what I did not live. (Journal entry, November 2018) Experiencing this course was important to me, not only as an artist but also as a scholar that transits between the roles of student and teacher myself. Such experiences, multiple, subtle, personal, and yet so communal and collective, made us (both students and teacher, on that occasion) constantly discuss how to encompass those seven days of studies into the containers of the institution “academia.” How many hours did we study/work? When did the work/study begin and when did it end? How should we be assessed by the end of the paper? Which are the rubrics that can account to the experiences, and who do they actually account for? Bringing the Work Home: Defending Collectiveness

From 2017 to 2019, I began to engage with the notion of invitation poétics in my graduate research. The displacement of focus from the choreographic progress toward the choreographic process, and the relationships within its pathways, guided me through an unplanned obsession with art residencies. By the end of my master’s program, I had engaged with ten residency programs as a host and or a guest. These experiences reshaped my methodological approach, making residencies key to the unfolding poétics of invitation. The influential role of the residencies might be linked to how they allowed me to evoke both artist and educator within myself. As a third space between professional and pedagogical, art and education, art residencies revealed themselves as great unfixed containers for accommodating my entangled practice. The smell of coffee and couscous getting ready at 9:30am. An hour later, swimsuits, towels and seven books: the sun bathes a collective reading in the front yard

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of my urban house, in my hometown. 11:30am we divide the team—some organize the bedroom, others pick up Rita, the guest examiner, at the airport, and others start to cook. This is not ‘any’ meal. It is the preparation of a ritual that started two days ago: setting up home to accommodate my Master’s presentation, the “defense.” It always sounded funny to me that one would choose to name this moment in that way: the “time to defend yourself.” On this occasion, I wasn’t alone. I decided not to be alone. Or else, I decided my defense wouldn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) take place as one (student) “against” three (examiners). Instead, it has started before, since I opened the door of my house to four artists. That was the deal: my defense would take place for 55 hours. Endurance. Durational experience. Moreover, a relational episode. First, I defend it to you, artist, friend. You come into my living space, we arrange beds and bathrooms, we learn how to cook and talk and move and think together. We coexist. And here we are: defending a practice-led research in Performing Arts. (Journal entry, August 2019) When I chose to frame my final presentation as an art residency, it did not come easily. There were a lot of bureaucracies I had to convince in order to host the panel at my home. After issuing letters and gathering support from a range of institutional representatives, I persuaded the department head of the importance of displacing this rite of passage. Officially (for the academic institution) the date and time was set for August 2, 2019, at 2 pm. Officially (for my communities), it started on July 31, 2019, at 12 pm, with the formal arrival of four guest artists (Sandra Kelly Lima Silva, Leonardo Rodrigues, Lucas Mattozo, and Matheus Avlis) who spent 55 hours with me in this “residency defense.” Since day one, the research presentation was activated in the kitchen, living room, balcony, bathroom. I chose to shift the forms of the rite of passage in order to perform the discourse: a reclaim to the right of passage. The right of passing through, crossing norms, and traversing scholarship. Trans-missioning knowledge by ventilating it through and beyond academia. In the second evening of residency, after the energetic intensity of chaos, the sense of settlement came much more out of desire rather than of a need. Collectively we came up with a schedule for the “last day of defense”: 9:30am breakfast—black out poetry with drafts of the dissertation 10:30am sunbath reading—collective reading of books from the reference list 11:30am rsvp lunch—testing Anna Halprin’s compositional tool for cooking 1:31pm sonic coffee—courtesy of sound artist Lucas Matozzo’s composition for a coffee set 1:48pm free fall—invitation to throw excerpts of the dissertation from the second level 2pm panel 3:15pm afternoon cake *counter-attack: sonic-choreographic installations present at all times and activated through interaction.

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This agenda allowed us to collectively own the sense of hosting and, in some instances, to “confuse” power relationships in a situation where they tend to be strongly delineated. This allowed the space to be open enough for other affections to unfold. From the many relational episodes that I witnessed during my research defending itself, there are three special moments I hold dearly:

• Assistir árvores no buraco da sauna. When I noticed, in one of our

“house expeditions,” that one of my recent performances in collaboration, in which we invite audience members to cross the streets to “watch trees,” had actually begun ages ago, when, as a child, I used to stare at the neighbor’s tree from the rip in my sauna’s wall. This became a micro-performance within the arrival of the general public on the formal day of my master’s presentation. The performance consisted of one-on-one invitations to take a stroll through my house, where I would guide guests to watch the neighbor’s tree from the rip in my sauna’s wall while talking about childhood and imagination. • Dona Lina apresentando o neto no meio da defesa. When, in the middle of my panel’s “formal presentation,” I was interrupted by Lady Lina, my neighbor, to be introduced to her grandson and hear her memories of how she played with me when I was his age. This happened seconds before I mentioned to the panel about the importance of giving value to the affections of home and its dreams, memories, and intimate experiences as choreographic (re)sources. At this point, I deliberately decided I would not shorten my encounter with Lady Lina despite its impact on the 20 minutes allotted for my presentation. There, everyone was witnessing, as much as I was, the invitation poétics unfolded itself beyond my own sense of agency. • Dirce em queda livre. When I saw friends, strangers, supervisor, examiners, and peers queuing up to grab a sheet of my dissertation pages, setting an intention, and throwing it from the second-floor window. We stared at the fall of written words, blank pages, errors, and images. Some pages got stuck in between objects, some reached the ground, and others accumulated in blind spots that took me months to find after the “post-event clean-up.” These are some of the moments where I witnessed the embodiment of invitation poétics taking place through the forces of relationships. There was no way I could have planned interruptions, such as from Lady Lina materializing my research arguments as it was being made or the symbolic and ritualistic gestures that momentarily crumpled hierarchies when supervisors, examiners, and strangers threw fragments of academia from the window. The poetics of these moments make me remember that there are things that can only be expressed through their breakdown or interference.

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Displaced Academia, Artistic Disposition: Activating FAR to Approximate Relational Experiences

At the beginning of 2021, I created a problem to reside with. Stealing my own strategies, I recreated the scenario of an academic presentation in the shape of an art residency. Despite having more chronological hours, the format felt much more compressed, and it was thought of as a simulacrum of a residency—a Flash Art Residency (FAR). FAR was a 72-hour residency to encapsulate and leak the boundaries of a Provisional Year Presentation for my doctoral research. I invited Auckland-based artists Christina Clarke (England), Katherine Mandolidis (Canada), Neža Jamnikar (Slovenia), and Ruchi Ahuja (India) to live for 72 hours in a historical building in Mount Eden (Aotearoa/ New Zealand), recently transformed into a co-working space called MoveSpace. During FAR, we invented/attempted to invent modes for crossing the ocean to interconnect with artists Leo Rodrigues, Ivana Mota, and Gabriel Guirá in Brazil. Over three days, intimate explorations encapsulated notions of residence, fabricating choreographic relationships amongst those who frequented MoveSpace. Through desires of the self and the collective, a thread of micronarratives emerged. During the last three hours, the general public was invited to enter a space infused with fragments of our quick, intense burst of experimentation. When in the space, audience members were given a map with the words: Behold the map, a souvenir. Souvenir, evolved from the French word venir—“to come” and sub—“up from below,” appeared during this residency as a reimagining of what it may mean to re-member. Use this piece of paper as a tool to navigate the flesh-ness of the personal and collective experiences the group of artists have encountered and embodied (t)here. The motivations of this program were similar yet different from the experience of my 2019 master’s presentation in Brazil. This time, the stakes were higher and the plans were looser. The desire to approximate real-time questioning and assimilating guided me through the very sense of co(n)fusion, where co (-llaboration, -mmunity, -nviviality, -existence) were contents and containers for the fusions between practice and theory, performance and research, art and academia. In saying that the stakes were higher, I particularly mean my sense of foreignness. The foreign language, the less familiar community, and the guesthost fluidity within the space enhanced my vulnerability within the situation. This time, I could feel the effects of confusion changing my body as my body changed (with) the space. Added to the challenge of activating such an openended experience as my choice of “assessment,” this event marked another

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milestone in the timeline of my course. If, in 2019, the Master’s presentation configured an ending, in 2021, the FAR presented an opening ground of questions. The point of arrival from that year was transformed into the point of departure for this year, where art residency became an experiment with form as well as with concept. Now it was dear to me that I attended it as “researching” in the very moment of “presenting.” The bases and conditions were that the five of us would collaborate on personal yet collective projects within the environment of MoveSpace. Within all the unknowns in my practice, I do know that invitation poétics refers to an alternative to making-thinking dance and choreography where these forms are intended to be devised from situations when (or where) desires, once shared, become something else: a process of event-ing. What are invitations if not the potentiality of the event-to-be(come)? The nature of an invitation resides in what may unfold from its response, the “else” which is about to happen. FAR, as a Provisional Year Review art residency, was an attempt to experience this something else between art practice and practice research. In a seminar speech on liminal practices, Feitosa (2017) mentions that “to invite is to assume the risk of not knowing how the guest is going to behave.” This risk, however, is also for the guest who engages in a situation that is directly affected by all the involved parts. Guest(s) and host(s) become accomplices—or hostages—of the event itself (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2003). These zones of risk, however, are operated by the tonalities of desire: open-ability, available-ability, desire-ability. Invitation asks us, as complex beings, to exercise our numerous resources, primarily our abilities to listen and to respond—skills that were practiced while being assessed during this event-in-the-threshold. Within the event-ing of this experience-in-the-fold, we had one common goal as artists in residence: to live together and to work through the ­poétics of invitation that my research discusses. The relational, binding nature of this research, however, asks for a changeability of processes that inquires how the body and the body of the work itself is transformed as material through ­togetherness. Such experiences in togetherness reflect relationships that co(n)fuse power relations through open-ended processes that echo the participation of oneself through the embodiment of a collective. In a way, such co(n)fusion of power relationships creates a blur that unsettles normative readings on authorship and ownership of knowledge. For instance, one of the first questions I was asked by the panel of reviewers, during this experience, was “How do I know where your work ends and your collaborators’ begins?” I took a while to realize (or feel brave enough to own) my response: “Well, you don’t!” This is unsettling when dealing with institutionalized knowledge that requires intellectual property and ethics applications, that sees in the sole author the norm for the “granted authority” to create narratives (Krenak 2020, 16). Krenak (2020, 29) mentions that “we need to

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replace the present-day ‘monoculture’ of Western scientific thinking, which attempts to homogenize ‘valid’ knowledge, with an ‘ecology of knowledge’ that ‘opens up the dominant canon’ and affords ‘an equality of opportunities to different kinds of knowledge.’” I am not suggesting that we should freely and thoughtlessly mingle voices within voices, as this tends to further erase those who have already been removed from visibilized positions of power. I am wondering, however, how can we foster practices that acknowledge the polyphonic borders of here and there, self and other. Experiences in art residencies offer us opportunities to exercise unsettling experiences in tertiary education through making/doing-WITH. How can we experience intimacy, face dilemmas, and learn from co(n)fusion as enablers to navigate through multiple modes of course delivery and assessment? How can shared poétic experiences be an enabler of unique departure points toward collective, multiple, and plural global knowledges? Desiring to Learn, Needing to Share

Throughout this chapter I have shared three case studies (stories for a suitcase) in which I experienced co(n)fusing instances of learning, teaching (or co-learning), and assessing/being assessed (or disrupting assessment logics) in art practices within and beyond tertiary studies. In these experiences, I had the chance to research, witness, and experiment with blurred boundaries between art, life, and academia as transitioning sites for learning processes that count on desire to expand the fields of education and art practices. In each example, academic events were transformed into displaced contexts for intimacy and vulnerability. Putting the dilemmas of power relationships at the forefront, the situated performances of witnessed learning activated spaces for sharing togetherness, fraught with plural and intense micro-teaching iterations, as assessment systems were dislocated from their normative operations. In this sense, communities (tertiary students, scholars, artists, lecturers, and locals) mingled at the same time that contents and contexts were re-arranged through the third space of art residencies. These experiences in post-graduate assessments and practice-based research encourage a future of performing arts that opens itself to other areas of learning. This future of learning engages with situated and relational experiences in which learning-teaching-assessing occur through the pleasure of togetherness. Grounded in hosting and displacing, the experiences shared here rely on co(n)fusion as a valued practice that opens space and time for collaborative, communal, convivial, and collective iterations of assessing-learning-teaching. As this chapter opens with Krenak’s questions around falling, I close this text by falling onto yet more questions: Will we (as institutions) learn to trust in the learning within and from the territories we activate, beyond the boundaries of the institutional space? When will we trust in the un-assessed, dis-regularized,

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and trans-accounted? Shall we co(n)fuse power relationships to enable teachers who are open to learn and learners who are open to teach as they both learn learning, teach teaching, learn teaching, and teach learning? Notes 1 Poétics is here written with the graphic sign “ ´ ” as a way to “infuse” the BrazilianPortuguese concept of “poética” which, different from the English term (poetics), stretches its meaning beyond “a treatise on poetry,” “poetry-like,” or “possessing the qualities or charm of poetry,” referring to the relationships with values and strategies mentioned by Brazilian artist and professor Gunther’s (2013) definition of poética. 2 Despite not having a fixed typology, there are some elemental aspects that differentiate a regular creative process from an “in residence” one. These will be my guidelines for art residency: art residency as an arrangement of temporary communities for creation; art residency as experiences within relational displacement of time and space for coexistence; art residency as artistic exercises that leave traces either in the format of tangible or intangible products and/or processes within contexts of shared elaborations. 3 You can find more information and visuals of these (and other) experiences in residency in the virtual territory built at http://janainamoraes.com. 4 Emphasizing the prefix per- within the verb “to perform,” here, stands not for the performance of high achievement and best effectiveness, but rather for the ability to perform—crossing through the given form, shaking and trembling from within.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, Carol. 2019. “Field Guide for Choreography as Research.” Researching (in/ as) Motion: A Resource Collection, Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. https://nivel.teak.fi/adie/field-guide-for-choreography-as-research/. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Duffourmantelle. 2003. Anne Dufourmantelle convida Jacques Derrida a falar Da Hospitalidade/Jacques Derrida [Entrevistado]; Anne Dufourmantelle; translated by Antonio Romane; reviewed by Paulo Ottoni. São Paulo: Escuta Donald, Dwayne. 2010. “On What Terms Can We Speak?” University of Lethbridge. https://vimeo.com/15264558. Fabião, Eleonora. 2018. “Call Me Text, Just Text*” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19 (1): 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2018.1421304. Feitosa, Charles. 2017. “Como Produzir um Acontecimento?/How to produce a happening?” Lecture presented at the VII Seminário de Pesquisa em Artes ­Cênicas Arte, Liminaridade, Política/VII Seminar  in Performing Arts Research - Arts, Liminarities, Politics, Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Santa Catarina, Brazil, September 2017. Guattari, Felix, and Suely Rolnik. 1996. Micropolítica: Cartografias Do Desejo. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes.

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Gunther, Luisa. 2013. “Experiência (Des)Compartilhadas: Arte Contemporânea e Seus Registros.” Brasília, 2013. Thesis (Doctoral in Sociology) – Instituto de Ciências Sociais Departamento de Sociologia da Universidade de Brasília – UnB. Krenak, Ailton. 2019. Ideias Para Adiar o Fim do Mundo. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras. Krenak, Ailton. 2020. Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. Translated by Anthony Doyle. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press. Mãe, Valter Hugo. 2016. “O Verbo Virgem.” O Livro das Ignorãças, edited by Manoel de Barros, 7–10. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Alfaguara. Onfray, Michel. 2019. Teoria da Viagem: Uma poética da Geografia. Tradução De ­Sandra Silva. Revisão Por Carlos Jesus. Lisboa, Portugal: Quetzal Editores. Síveres, Luiz, and Paulo G.R. de Melo. 2012. “A Pedagogia da Hospitalidade a Partir da Filosofia da Alteridade em Levinas in Conjectura.” Filosofia e Educação 17 (3): 34–48.

6 DECOLONIZING TERTIARY DANCE EDUCATION THROUGH INCLUDING STUDENT VOICES IN A CURRICULA CHANGE PROJECT Camilla Reppen, Lovisa Lundgren, and Tone Pernille Østern

Background and Research Focus

In the academic year 2018/2019, students in the Department of Dance Pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts (Uniarts), Sweden, voiced critique that curriculum design and enactment at the department was imbued with structural racism and white privilege. In 2020, a project group was therefore given the task to develop and implement a new curriculum for the Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Dance Pedagogy, scheduled to start in 2023. The authors of this chapter, Lovisa Lundgren, a BA student, and Camilla Reppen and Tone Pernille Østern, both teachers at Uniarts, are part of the project group working with this change project. An ambition to decolonize the curriculum, including the curriculum change process itself, was articulated in the change project group. Efforts to decolonize the change process consisted of deconstructing the power dynamics present at the institution through making the working process as collaborative and transparent as possible, involving as many voices as possible, and centralizing marginalized narratives and perspectives. As a part of this decolonizing effort, student voices needed to be actively involved. To create space for student voices, the authors designed a participatory action research (PAR) project guided by the following research questions:

• How can we create a space for active student engagement in a project aim-

ing at decolonizing curricula in tertiary dance education through the design of a workshop series? • How do student voices expressed through the workshop series challenge the change project? DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-8

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In the following, we describe the Swedish tertiary education cultural context in which the PAR project was carried out, followed by a critical positioning of the authors. After that, theoretical and methodological perspectives are described, followed by two stages of analyses. Finally, we articulate a knowledge contribution mainly expressed as new and more precise questions, for further consideration. Swedish Tertiary Education as Cultural Context

Student influence in Swedish tertiary education is a legislated right. In the Swedish Higher Education Act (SFS 1992, 1434), 4a§, it is stated that: Students shall be entitled to exert influence over the courses and study programs at higher education institutions. Higher education institutions shall endeavor to enable students to play an active role in the continued development of courses and study programs. However, two critical challenges regarding student participation in the curriculum change process were identified. First, student engagement is often conducted through student representation. Student representatives should have the opportunity to be part of both preparatory and decision-making meetings (Amft et al. 2017). In Sweden, student representatives are paid per meeting to participate in committees and working groups in higher education. However, when student representative Lovisa was chosen for our group, we got new directives, declaring that she was only allowed to join half of the project group’s meetings during spring 2021 due to budget constraints. This challenged the right for student representatives to be part of both preparatory and decision-making meetings. Second, following the bill Student Influence and Quality Development in Higher Education (Bill 1999/2000:28) which laid the ground for the Swedish Higher Education Act, influence should not only be conducted through representation but also include invitations to all students to participate in curriculum development. Our conclusion was that our responsibility goes beyond having one student representative attend a few meetings and that we needed to create real opportunities for active student engagement in the project. In the first phase of the project, we invited all students to participate in generating and analyzing data in a landscape mapping of dance pedagogical practices in contemporary times (Østern et al. 2021). However, it became apparent that active student engagement in this mapping was wavering. To counteract the lack of exchange and dialogue with students in the emerging change project, we suggested a workshop series to stimulate active student engagement in the process. This was met with general concerns about how a time-consuming process such as this would slow the change project. And

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when the workshop series was suggested as a PAR project, concerns about ethics connected to student engagement and student co-authorship were raised. Nevertheless, we decided to go on with this project, and we designed and carried out an online series of ten workshops during spring 2021. Formulating the workshop series as a research project—where the student representative was invited in as co-researcher—counteracted her decreased participation in the change project and was also developed to inspire all students to participate. What we have learned throughout this process, both successes and challenges, is articulated in this chapter. A Critical Reflection About the Authors

We—Camilla, Lovisa, and Tone—acknowledge that even though we are working collaboratively as co-authors, there is an uneven power balance between us, with two authors from staff and one as student representative. However, neither Camilla nor Tone were teaching a course where Lovisa was a student during this research project. In addition, we have jointly agreed that Camilla, as project leader and junior researcher, is lead author of this article, whereas student representative Lovisa is the second author. Tone, as a senior researcher, supports methodologically and theoretically as a third author. In this way, we seek to counteract the power imbalance between us. Further, we are three white, female authors with an educational background from, or currently studying in, the department, which means that the diversity amongst the authors is limited. This implies bias in the project, which we try to approach by checking our hidden assumptions, being open to feedback, and by highlighting the importance of broadened recruitment of both staff and students. Theoretical Perspectives

Since there is no common definition or context, we knew it would be important to articulate a definition of decolonization for our specific context and situation (Stein and Andreotti 2016). Exploring colonization and racialization also proved to be useful. Colonization and racialization are dimensions that are both social (shown, for example, in how colonial power is kept intact in social reproduction) and material (for example, the underrepresentation of non-white staff and students in universities). Social and material dimensions together create and stabilize colonial categories that are then used to reinforce unequal power relations. Colonization in higher education takes place through what is called epistemicide—the killing of knowledge systems (Hall and Tandon 2017) and the colonization of curricula. Le Grange defines the curriculum as the stories we tell students about their past, present, and future, and describes how deconstruction and decolonization of curriculum involves

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discarding what has been wrongly written about people’s life experiences, negative labeling, deficit theorizing, and culturally deficient models that have pathologized the colonized (Le Grange 2016, 3, referring to Chilisa 2012). To decolonize the curriculum, then, is to retell the stories of the past and envision the future, Le Grange argues. Additionally, McCarthy-Brown (2017) argues that diverse cultural perspectives are important in homogenous environments to reinforce to students that the dominant culture is of no higher value than others. Our effort to create space for active student engagement was one way of working toward decolonizing the curriculum. We have translated the concept studentengagemang in Swedish to student engagement in English, which means students’ experiences are valued; that their voices are listened to and acted on; and that student agency is appreciated, planned for, and included in educational development. We sought to create space for this with our workshop series. Research on ethics and issues of voice in education research offers theoretical perspectives that allow for critical engagement with our research material. Midgley et al. (2014, 1) investigate “ethical concerns about excluding voices, ethical challenges in representing voices and challenges in voicing ethical concerns in educational research.” Midgley further critically explores the concept of voice (15). According to feminist research, to encourage different people’s voices in pedagogies and research is complex because of different power relations at play. According to Krumer-Nevo (2009), whose work amongst marginalized communities has revealed that people might “say things not because they represent their own subjectivities, but due to the influence of other social pressures” (cited in Midgley et al 2014, 16), students in tertiary education in Sweden cannot, as a group, be understood as a marginalized community, but they are clearly in a power-dependent position in relation to their teachers and the institution, meaning students may not always speak openly about their concerns. As such, it is the institution’s responsibility to create real possibilities for students to actively participate in educational development. Also, the broad context of students includes individuals that can be understood as marginalized. In their research, Seton and Trouton have deconstructed the taken-forgrantedness of institutional knowledge and power in tertiary arts training institutions. They critically remark that in higher arts training institutions, “a certain authority and authenticity is attached to the practice of learning by doing, which is positioned as in opposition to thinking in some conscious, reflective manner” (2014, 105). Further, they claim that in arts training institutions, the meaning-making that is produced between lecturer-practitioners and artist-students through their interactions and conversations together is often misrecognized and underestimated. This leads to a practice in which filling the students’ (and teachers’) schedules with “doing” activities is prioritized

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over creating spaces for critical reflective student engagement, voicing, and influence. Combined with arts pedagogies with a heritage of master/apprentice training models that tend to privilege the voice and power of the teacher, Seton and Trouton argue that a deconstruction of discourses and practices at play might “create ethical, proactive and creatively safe space to invite new conversations about how teaching and learning interactions emerge” (2014, 95). Our dialogue with theoretical perspectives on ethics and issues of voice in education research is also positioned within critical theories like Foucault (1984), which attempt to critically track the construction of lineages of power and knowledge relations. As we do this, we see that the knowledge view that circulates in our institutional context favors doing—getting the change project done—over student engagement, which risks slowing down the project. Similarly, the power view favors the teacher voice over the student voice, securing staff—but not students—the time and space to engage in the change project. Both views sustain the current power/knowledge with the teachers instead of recalibrating to include students as agents of change—an approach to decolonizing the curriculum change process that we try to adopt. Methodological Perspectives

We have designed this project as participatory action research (PAR) (Leavy 2015; Seppälä, Sarantou, and Miettinen 2021). As a PAR project, we are involved in the unfolding of the change project as we simultaneously engage in it as research. PAR means that a challenge is recognized in a community, and that innovations and social actions toward finding solutions and creating new practices and new knowledge are developed through participation, inclusion, and joint decision-making amongst participants, communities, researchers, and other stakeholders (Leavy 2015). The challenge we identified was a failure to engage students in the change project. The community was defined as staff and students in the department, and the innovations and actions were the online workshop series and the added perspectives voiced through the series. The design process of the workshops is at the core of how we carried out this PAR project. To design curricula and teaching is what we do as teachers, and it was in the very design process of the workshops where we could develop our decolonizing attempts to engage student voices. To approach our work, we embraced design thinking. Koh et al. describe design-thinking as “the mental processes that practitioners use as they frame, explore and re-frame ill-structured problems to derive design solutions” (2015, v). Design-thinking is developed by scholars and practitioners to address what are often called “wicked problems.” Koh et al. describe wicked problems as ill-defined problems that cannot be fully resolved in part because they cannot be fully comprehended: “Wicked problems cannot be easily described or defined, and they can be changeable, shifting in nature over time”

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(2015, 2–3). We understand the challenges that are implied in the process of decolonizing curricula at our institution, and, more specifically, how decolonizing change might happen through including student voices, as a wicked problem that we try to address through PAR leaning on design thinking. In what follows, we present our workshop design process and ongoing critical reflective analysis in two stages. The first stage is a presentation of the critical practice of the design process of the workshop series. The second stage consists of critical post-workshop design practice theorization, connecting to the theoretical perspectives of ethics and issues of voice in education research. Even though in this chapter we separate the project into two stages, we wish to underline how intertwined they are. Both stages are vividly alive, dynamic, theoretical, analytical, and critical. The stages are only separated from one another for the sake of analysis and clarity. In what follows, sometimes the student voice is speaking (Lovisa), sometimes the teachers’ (Camilla and Tone), and when not specified, we speak collaboratively. Stage 1: Designing and Carrying Out the Workshops

The question we grappled with in the workshop design process was how can we create a space for active student engagement in a project aiming at decolonizing curricula in tertiary dance education through the design of a workshop series? The way we designed and carried out the series was our attempt at an answer. It was a creative and demanding workshop design process where the workshop practice was emergent as we worked our way from workshop to workshop, through immediate and critical revision, and revision again. Some of the immediate challenges we had to navigate were to: create a workshop format; find a possible time slot in a department where time as resource was scarce; define and invite the target group; be clear on research ethics; and devise the detailed planning for all workshops. Determining the format was a most important part of the design process, as the form(at) makes the content possible. As we began to create this workshop series, it was spring in Stockholm. The sun was returning after a long pandemic winter, we were still off-campus due to COVID-19 restrictions, and it was examination time. Due to these aspects, we designed the workshops as a series of voluntary, 30-minute Zoom sessions held on Tuesdays directly following the last class of the day. The workshops were arranged outside of ordinary class time since we did not have the authority to schedule during class time. Although the workshop series aimed to increase student engagement in the change project, initially, participation was low. The full curriculum, busy lives of students, varying times for finishing school (most students finished at 3 pm and only a few at 5 pm), together with pandemic digital fatigue and the sunny weather were all aspects that challenged student participation. There was a slight increase in participation as the series unfolded; however, we never

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managed to attract large numbers of students, with the mean number of participants per workshop being only 3.3. Our next challenge in the design process was to define and invite the target group. We decided to invite all students and staff at the department, not only those in the existing BA program. We worked a lot on the invitation, submitting it to the university’s ethical committee several times before approval. As we wrote and revised the invitation, the workshop format and aim also became clearer for us. In the end—and in dialogue with the ethics committee—we determined to include a research information letter and letter of consent with the invitation. We wrote an invitation in Swedish and in English, which was distributed through email lists to the whole department as well as through printed posters on information boards. As part of the invitation, we decided on a theme for each workshop. We needed to reveal the whole line of workshop series themes in the invitation to allow students and staff to see the whole as well as the individual parts of the work ahead. The themes needed, among other things, to be relevant to revising the BA program in relation to students’ critique about structural racism. Luckily, we could use insights from earlier parts of the change project to inform us (Østern et al. 2021). In the end, the themes for the workshops were: Educational model/structure; Genres; Course structure; BA thesis; Research, theory, and course literature; Artistic and educational practice; Focus on the anti-racist seminar series; Potential collaborations; Open themes from the students. After we finished the preparatory part of the design process, the detailed planning of each 30-minute workshop could start. After discussions and collaborative planning, we decided to use each theme as a prompt to start each workshop and to allow the workshops to have a set structure, which included:

• A ten-minute introduction about the change project and the workshop by

Camilla or Tone, and then an introduction to the workshop theme and articulation of discussion prompts. • Ten minutes in breakout rooms for students to discuss the theme and its prompts, documenting their reflections with sticky notes on a Google Jamboard. As a student, Lovisa participated in the breakout room, whereas teachers Camilla and Tone waited in the main room. • Ten minutes in the main Zoom room, where the students presented their reflections. Written notes from this sharing were made by Camilla, Lovisa, and Tone. These 30 minutes were intense for all three of us. We experienced a high degree of presence in the Zoom room. We were attuned in a double mode as teachers/students and researchers. We were paying close attention, working to create trust, being open and receptive, and to saying “yes” to all suggestions, criticism, and reflections the students offered. The three of us always met

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before the workshops to discuss the coming event, and we stayed afterward to debrief. Throughout the design process, we were developing a PowerPoint where either Camilla or Tone prepared the workshop’s theme as a prompt. We always sent the prompt around the three of us before finalizing it for the workshop. We had to offer enough content around each prompt, to provoke the students’ own ideas in a very short amount of time, without guiding the students’ reflections in any particular way. The PowerPoint also served as emerging documentation of the workshop series. Camilla or Tone was responsible for immediate documentation after each workshop, adding the number of participants, and a screenshot of the Jamboard sticky notes of student reflections into the PowerPoint that kept growing from workshop to workshop. Immediate and emerging documentation from the ten workshops were thus shared with the larger project group, as the PowerPoint, including our comments, was shared as a PDF after each workshop. Anybody in the project group could comment after each workshop. All of this, we use as research material for this chapter, and the whole process of designing, revising, sharing, and discussing the workshop series, we see as an ongoing practical, theoretical, analytical Stage 1 of the PAR project. Through all aspects of this process, we were working with the research question of how we can create a space for active student engagement in a project aiming at decolonizing curricula in tertiary dance education through the design of a workshop series? We were happy about having designed and carried out the workshop series and had learned a lot as teachers/student and researchers. However, we were only partially successful with creating a space for active student engagement, which we reflect on in Stage 2 of this analysis. Stage 2: Post-Reflection on Design Process

In this analysis stage we work with critical analysis of and reflection on both research questions: How can we create a space for active student engagement in a project aiming at decolonizing curricula in tertiary dance education through the design of a workshop series? How do student voices expressed through the workshop series challenge the change project? The Student Representative: Lovisa’s Voice

Although we have not succeeded with our decolonizing ambitions yet, I believe we have gained some important insights through this process. Reaching Students

As a “student-insider,” I realized that one major contribution I could make in relation to the workshops was to encourage student participation by spreading the word, inviting people in the corridors and through social media channels.

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As a peer, I had better possibilities for reaching out to students compared to my staff colleagues. In my mind, this was of vital importance for engaging most of the students that attended. Consequently, this points to the importance of having representatives from the actual group you are trying to reach. An Inside-the-School Structure

Students expressed various reasons for not attending—lack of time being the most common. Organizing the workshops as a voluntary extra-curricular activity was never our first choice, and the lack of free time points to the importance of finding time for student involvement inside the school structure. To increase participation and prioritize student engagement in a project like this, opportunities should preferably be designed and planned for within the general student curriculum. This presupposes a shift toward student involvement as central, rather than peripheral, to curricular change processes. In this shifted power and knowledge view, student engagement is prioritized, participation is integrated on students’ terms, and student voices carry authority. Challenging Existing Power Structures

Thus far, we have mainly focused on voicing the general group of students. The difficulties of including voices that are not yet well-represented remains important to address. If not a central priority, the current structures of previously mentioned social and material dimensions of colonial categories remain unchallenged. As the project group, student body, and staff are currently predominately white, status-quo risks hindering voicing under-represented perspectives and failing to deal with the racist structures that the change project aims to address. Affinity Groups

One student identifying as a person of color expressed that they did not feel comfortable attending the workshop that focused on integrating learning from an anti-racist seminar series in a space with mostly, or only, white people. This student expressed a wish to give input on this kind of topic in an affinity group with other students identifying as people of color. This points to the importance of recognizing different needs for participation when creating space(s) for student engagement. This student also emphasized the need for broader representation. The Teachers’ Voices: Camilla and Tone

We do not yet have satisfactory answers to the research questions. Our task was to give students “such real opportunities for influence that the commitment

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and interest in influencing and taking part in decisions about the activities is stimulated” (Bill 1999/2000:28, 23). Below we list some challenges we faced in our efforts. Limited Time

The relatively short duration of the workshops was chosen to make participation easy, but 30 minutes was not enough to discuss the themes and prompts we offered on a deeper level. Both students and staff were already over-worked with little time for extracurricular activities. This restricted the impact we were able to make with our efforts and hindered the continuation of our exploration together. Restrictions on time granted for this change process and the workshops can be understood as a way of maintaining status quo in an organization, consciously or unconsciously. Familiar Ways

Facilitating student involvement other than through student representation meant doing something unusual. However, with limited resources, this work needed to be done effectively. Effectiveness might, in many cases, mean familiar; i.e., when systems and knowledge already in place are prioritized. However, familiar ways pose a problem when working toward change. If we want to create space for active student engagement in ways other than through student representation, methods unfamiliar and perhaps also uncomfortable for staff must be taken into consideration, and we might need to learn new ways of communicating. Email invitations, printed invitations, A4 letters on notice boards at school, and short online meetings heavy with information and little time for reflection did not spike sufficient interest. In our ignorance, we hoped that the mere existence of such workshops would trigger curiosity, but, in hindsight, this kind of “effectiveness” seems rather inadequate. A Collaborative Voice

The students’ reflections based on the workshop themes and prompts did challenge the change project in different ways. In the following, we reflect around each workshop prompt from this perspective. Educational Model/Structure

Our prompt for this workshop was introducing A/R/Tography (Irwin 2013) as an approach for the whole BA study program, weaving the positions of artist, researcher, and teacher together. The idea was received positively by the students, who emphasized that it is in line with the changing role of the dance

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teacher of today. However, they expressed an insecurity about the research identity as something different from the core of their practice. Additionally, students requested a focus on teaching pedagogies that could be interwoven with the dance classes to a greater degree than today. As a result, when the structure for a new BA program was delivered to the local educational authorities in autumn 2021, it was put together with courses combining theory and practice. As a second consequence of this, a course in A/R/Tography for teachers in tertiary arts education is, at the time of this writing, being designed at the department to qualify teachers for teaching within an A/R/Tographic study program structure. Genres

From the first phase of the change project, some tension regarding power dynamics and representation was uncovered around the inclusion/exclusion of different dance genres in tertiary dance education. In the existing BA program, students major in either contemporary dance, jazz dance, street dance, classical ballet, or Swedish folk dance. These genres are subject to historical and present tensions in the department concerning white Western colonial power structures and mindsets. Contemporary dance has, for example, been given more consideration in the existing curriculum, with status as norm, figuring as examples in course literature and different course settings. Should certain dance genres be the organizing starting point and offered as majors in the new BA? In that case, which dance genres should be offered? How can we counteract the historical imbalance between dance genres in academia? The prompt we offered was how to approach dance genres in the new BA program. The different ideas that were articulated by students during this workshop challenged us to design four scenarios as basis for decision-making on how to arrange dance practices in the new BA. Course Structure

During the workshop around the course structure for the new program, the students challenged us to remember the importance of dance classes where the students could increase and deepen their dance training and skills. As a result, the dance practice in the new course structure is given a central role in all courses in the new program. Bachelor’s Thesis

The prompt for this workshop was a suggestion to make use of A/R/Tography as a methodology for the BA thesis with a practical and a theoretical

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output. The students were not overwhelmingly positive about this. It turned out that they were more excited about A/R/Tography as a general approach to the BA study program than as the default methodology for a BA thesis. They saw practical consequences, a time-consuming process, and emphasized that, up to now, most students chose to write a purely theoretical BA thesis, and that this should still be possible. We decided to keep A/R/Tography as an approach to the program, but not as compulsory methodology for the BA thesis. Research, Theory, and Course Literature

During this workshop, we suggested an emphasis on practice-based research, close to the students’ own artistic and teaching practice, and compulsory reading combined with a range of self-chosen literature. This was well-received by the students, who believed it could spark new interest in theory, make it relevant to their practice, and suggested that it might attract theoretically interested students to the BA. They also highlighted the importance of representation when it comes to authors and literature and expressed a positive attitude toward the possibility to read more articles (than books), as this is seen as a possibility to obtain up to date knowledge and perspectives from a wide range of authors. Artistic and Educational Practice

We suggested a structure with three different kinds of courses in the new curriculum, focusing on the T (teacher) in A/R/Tography in one, the A (artist) in a second, and the R (researcher) in a third. The students were a little reluctant, warning that these identities could be separated in artificial ways, and said that it was necessary to keep the identities present simultaneously. This is taken into consideration through the A/R/Tography course being designed for teachers, which will encourage teachers to develop a conscious relationship with the triple identity and keep A/R/T continuously present as they teach in the BA program. Focus on the Anti-Racist Seminar Series

As a result of the student critique concerning structural racism in 2018/2019, a seminar series focusing on anti-racism, compulsory for students and staff of the whole university, was initiated and has been ongoing since autumn 2019. While our decolonizing attempts should permeate all parts of the curriculum development, it seemed important to give students opportunities to emphasize what learnings from the seminar series were especially relevant for

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curriculum development. The students challenged us to develop better marketing and communication strategies to broaden recruitment of new students. A sub-project was initiated in spring 2022 to make a new stakeholder analysis, communication plan, and mapping of possible community collaborations with the specific aim of broadening student recruitment. Students also underlined the importance of new staff recruitments with a focus on broadened recruitment, which was written into the material that informs the approval of the new curriculum. Last, but not least, we learned that all students did not feel comfortable attending this workshop. This fact seriously compromised the possibilities to gain insight on important perspectives that could challenge the teacher’s point of view and understanding. Potential Collaborations

One insight from the landscape mapping during the first phase of the project was that collaboration with the outside world is imperative. The prompt “possible collaborations relevant for the new BA” received comments mostly about internal collaborations in the university; some reflections concerned collaborations between teachers—which were experienced as deficient— whereas other reflections concerned potential inter-department collaborations. Most reflections on external collaborations centered on private dance schools that could make knowledge in different dance genres not currently taught at the department available, and other universities that could contribute with other kinds of knowledge and opportunities. The reflections made during this workshop will be a starting point for the sub-project on collaborations and communication vis-à-vis the broadened student recruitment described above. Themes from Students

As we had already identified the challenge of involving students in the change project, we also knew that we did not know what the students were thinking and wanted to share or ask us. This insight became a prompt. The following were brought up during the workshop:

• A request for broadened recruitment to make the staff of the department better represent Swedish society at large.

• A wish to include anatomy as a subject in the curriculum. • A prompt to reconsider the name “Contemporary Dance” and be sure to contextualize the content of this subject.

• An urge to take entrepreneurship, globalization, and digitalization into serious consideration when developing curriculum content.

• A push to make theory on pedagogy a part of dance classes.

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• An idea to make space for more individual guidance and peer-to-peer feedback.

• A need for the department to actively seek new students and review the admission process in terms of broadened recruitment of students.

Contributing Insights from the Change Project: Toward Broader, Structurally Integrated Student Participation

A characteristic for collaborative research methodologies, like PAR, is that they are often designed to prompt new and more nuanced questions, rather than determine clear answers. Focus is on inquiry, different perspectives, understanding, sense-making, articulation, change, and voice (Savin-Baden and Major 2013; Kara 2015). The same is true for this PAR project. In this final part of the chapter, we offer insights and more nuanced questions that we have arrived at through the project. We believe acting based on these insights and questions to be valuable for the future of performing arts education in our context, and possibly beyond. Aiming at creating space for student voices in a tertiary dance education change project, we failed in attracting large numbers of students to the workshop series developed for this purpose. However, the students who did attend the workshops were actively engaged in the discussions and expressed that they were glad they attended, and they did challenge the teachers’ point of views and perspectives. We believe that the students who attended the workshops felt that their voices were welcome and listened to, and that they had agency. We have tried to act on their inputs. Further, we do see that the project generated valuable insights, not least in terms of criticism, suggestions going forward, and new questions that need exploration and action. Reading our research material through the theoretical perspectives of Midgley et al. (2014), we join in experiencing ethical challenges in representing voices in educational research. We see that the lack of resources for properly including student voices brings ethical considerations and learning. The student voicing has been under threat of being treated as an addition to the change project, not as a central value. This is counter-productive to the aim of the project. Students represent the new, as they, to some degree, are unsocialized into existing knowledge structures in dance education, whereas teacher voices represent the existing. Thinking in terms of Foucault’s ideas on power/knowledge technologies visible in descriptive languages of “what can be seen and therefore spoken” (cited in Seton and Trouton 2014, 102), this would make it more plausible that students say what cannot be said; it would be more expected that students think outside the box, and express new ideas that might be unthinkable within the established discursive and practical structures that teachers maintain. It is of critical interest to ask ourselves questions such as, what is it in the university structure that makes it difficult to live up to the regulated standards?

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What is hindering a systemic inclusion of student voices and of diverse and also marginalized student voices? If we are serious about student engagement, involvement must be integrated with the study program and schedule. The creation of a new BA program would be an excellent opportunity to design a structured and integrated space for this kind of strategic and active student engagement. Moreover, how can we ensure that the change project deals with structural racism and white privilege, when it is carried out by predominantly white staff and student input? We see that we failed in creating a space of affinity for students identifying as people of color. The critical questions of concepts of voice raised by Midgley (2014) challenge us in asking: who initiates, who facilitates, who frames a project. A change project cannot be carried out only by those already in power. Throughout this research process, critical and valuable input, and ideas on how to proceed have emerged. This points to the practical value of conducting this type of participatory action research in educational contexts. Without it we would not have developed the critical insight we now can articulate. This is in line with how Seton and Trouton (2014, 97) conclude that: …it may only be through the process of education research that lecturerpractitioners and their students (across the creative and performing arts) are exposed to awareness of the social and communicative contexts in which they make meaning together. As a consequence, the very activity of education research may have significant consequences for teaching-learning interactions in higher education arts institutions. Our suggested way forward includes marginalized voices inside the change project group. If not possible with existing staff, the budget should be prioritized to engage anti-racist experts. Moreover, we suggest follow-up meetings with existing students and alumni; affinity spaces for minority groups to give input; an “inside the structure” design for active student engagement throughout the change project’s final year; and a new study program design that actively uses the input received through the student engagement in the workshop series. Finally, ethical educational research involving students and teachers has intrinsic value for teaching-learning interactions in higher education arts institutions, and organizational learning within and beyond the institutions themselves. We welcome more educational research on student voices in tertiary dance and arts education. References Amft, Andrea, Per Helldahl, Anna Lundh, Anna Sandström, and Johan Bondefeldt. 2017. Studentinflytandet – Kartläggning och analys av studentinflytandets förutsättningar efter kårobligatoriets avskaffande (dnr 111-99-16) (Rapport 2017:4)

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[Student Influence: Mapping and Analysis of the Student Influence’s Conditions After the Abolition of the Compulsory Union (dnr 111-99-16)]. Stockholm, Sweden: The Swedish Higher Education Authority. https://www.uka.se/download/1 8.57b1ff5a15a444399ff136ab/1487841867116/rapport-2017-02-06-studentinflytande-kartlaggning-och-analys.pdf. Bill 1999/2000:28. Studentinflytande och kvalitetsutveckling i högskolan. [Student Influence and Quality Development in Higher Education]. Stockholm, Sweden: The Swedish Government. https://www.regeringen.se/49b72c/contentassets/ e45bbb0e35e2425498caeb65264c6c70/studentinflytande-och-kvalitetsutveckling-i-hogskolan. Chilisa, Bagele. 2012. Indigenous Research Methodologies. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76–100. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Hall, Budd, and Rajesh Tandon. 2017. “Decolonization of Knowledge, Epistemicide, Participatory Research and Higher Education.” Research for All 1 (1): 6–19. https://doi.org/10.18546/RFA.01.1.02. Irwin, Rita. 2013. “Becoming A/R/Tography.” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research 54 (3): 198–215. Kara, Helen. 2015. Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences. A Practical Guide. Bristol and Chicago: Policy Press. Krumer-Nevo, Michal. 2009. “From Voice to Knowledge: Participatory Action Research, Inclusive Debate and Feminism.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22 (3): 279–295. Le Grange, Lesley. 2016. “Decolonizing the University Curriculum.” South African Journal of Higher Education 30 (2): 1–12. Leavy, Patricia. 2015. Methods Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York, NY: Guilford Publications. McCarthy-Brown, Nyama. 2017. Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World: Culturally Relevant Teaching in Theory, Research and Practice. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers. Midgley, Warren. 2014. “A Faint Echo: Using Fictionalisation to Speak the Unspeakable.” In Echoes: Ethics and Issues of Voice in Education Research, edited by Warren Midgley, Andy Davies, Mark E. Oliver, and Patrick Alan Danaher, 15–23. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers. Midgley, Warren, Mark. E. Oliver, Andy Davies, and Patrick Alan Danaher, eds. 2014. Echoes: Ethics and Issues of Voice in Education Research. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers. Østern, Tone Pernille, Camilla Reppen, Katarina Lion, Katarina Lundmark, and ­Elizabeth Sjösted Edelholm. 2021. “Future Designs of Tertiary Dance Education: A Major Higher Education Project in a Swedish Context Aiming at Decolonizing Change.” Journal for Research in Arts and Sports Education, Special Issue: Decolonizing Perspectives on Arts Education 5 (4): 62–78. Savin-Baden, Maggi, and Clair Howell Major. 2013. Qualitative Research. The Essential Guide to Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Seton, Mark, and Lycia Trouton. 2014. “Deconstructing the Taken-for-Grantedness of Institutional Knowledge and Power in Arts Education Restoring the Voice of the Creative Student.” Echoes: Ethics and Issues of Voice in Education Research, edited by Warren Midgley, Andy Davies, Mark. E. Oliver, and Patrick Alan Danahe, 95–109. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers.

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Seppälä, Tiina, Melanie Sarantou, and Satu Miettinen, eds. 2021. Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research. New York, NY: Routledge. Stein, Sharon, and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. 2016. “Decolonization and Higher Education.” In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, edited by M. Peters, 1–6. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_479-1. The Swedish Higher Education Act (SFS 1992:1434). Ministry of Education and Research, Sweden. https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/ svensk-forfattningssamling/hogskolelag-19921434_sfs-1992-1434.

7 THE CREATIVE SPACES AT HBCUs Avis HatcherPuzzo, Soni Martin, Denise Murchison Payton, and Amanda Virelles

Kickin’ It Old Skool: Overview

Remember No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Bush administration’s education initiative to close the achievement gap for socioeconomically disadvantaged children? From 2002 to 2015, the goal of NCLB was to provide more educational opportunities for students in poverty and students of color (Ward 2015). Ironically, 20 years later, this initiative has resulted in thousands of Black students, especially those in the southern United States, being substantially and academically “left behind.” But why mention this in a chapter about an HBCU and the arts? NCLB is the legacy of Millennial and Gen Z students, particularly African American students in college today. It has shaped their exposure to arts in academic settings. During NCLB, funding for arts prioritization was not on par with reading and mathematics; the arts were not given comparable curricular time, standards, testing, or accountability (Heilig, Cole, and Aguilar 2010). NCLB reduced students’ access to arts education while it prioritized an emphasis on mathematics and reading. As a result, current college students are likely to arrive on campus with limited experiences with the arts in school settings, including those who attend an HBCU. In the fall of 2009, with the new hope and change of the Obama administration, southern states were hit with economic and social adversities, and ultimately became unwelcoming of anything deemed too northern, translation elite liberal (Williams 2017). With a Black president, “Black Excellence,” and the rise of hustle culture, Black millennials were excited to “be the change,” and the arts were harnessed for this message, paving the way for equality. “The Obama White House opened its doors to Black artists such as Queen Latifah, DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-9

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Prince, and Stevie Wonder. It’s hardly uncommon for African American musicians to be invited to play for the president, but this was different. The Obamas gave black America its center and its north star” (Schilling 2017). During the Obama administration, critical advancements toward educational equity were accomplished. An article from the Obama White House archives entitled, “Progress of the African-American Community During the Obama Administration” states:

• Since the President took office, over one million more black and Hispanic students enrolled in college.

• Among African Americans and Hispanic students 25 and older, high school

completion is higher than ever before. Among African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian students 25 and older, Bachelor’s degree attainment is higher than ever before. As of 2015, 88 percent of the African-American population 25 and older had at least a high school degree and 23 percent had at least a Bachelor’s degree. • The US Department of Education (ED) is responsible for funding more than $4 billion for HBCUs each year. (Obama White House Archives 2016, n.p.) After immeasurable progress and Black pride of those eight years, the Trump era abruptly brought the old southern white ideology back to the forefront, creating complex issues for those of us in the performing arts, at an HBCU, in the southern part of the country. The transition from the Obama years to the Trump regime painted the southern United States with a broad ideological brush, one that portrayed the American working class as discontented laborers who are primarily “male, Caucasian, conservative, racist, [and] sexist” (Smarsh 2018). This false portrayal of working-class Americans behooves narratives around white supremacy by failing to acknowledge pockets of diversity and resistance (Smarsh 2018). Black southerners got caught in this generalization, and the southern Black community became isolated. Arts initiatives previously harnessed for equality were left with no support (monetarily or socially) from northern White elites who habitually promote, fund, and populate the arts in higher education. In the south, STEM and Business programs, especially at HBCUs, drew the attention of southern conservatives as a traditionally viable avenue for educational improvement. In 2019, Trump approved a bipartisan bill to provide $250 million annually to HBCUs and minority-serving institutions to primarily advance STEM programs (Binkley 2019). While this was a positive development for STEM programs, in this landscape, arts programming in higher education was left wanting. Fifteen minutes from Fort Bragg in rural North Carolina, Fayetteville State University (FSU) is an HBCU with nationally ranked Nursing and Business schools. Founded in 1867 as the Howard School for African Americans, in 1887, it became a state-sponsored facility for training African American

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teachers. Like our HBCU peers, FSU serves many first-generation students who require financial assistance and are not only interested in a college education but the HBCU experience. Students are encouraged to major in STEM or Business programs to obtain a reliable job after graduation. These young people often have overwhelming economic obligations, including taking care of family members who are elderly or military veterans, and incurring large amounts of student debt. An example of this approach toward lower-income students is expressed by political consultant, James Carville, in the 2016 documentary Starving the Beast: “What we’re trying to do is make you more efficient, more like a business, and we do away with courses that don’t produce what we need as a country… you can go through life perfectly well, …you can be a welder…” The FSU Performing and Fine Arts Department is small compared to STEM with the assumption is that being in the “creative industry” is a temporary indulgence. We see it as our mission to advance the arts as part of students’ HBCU experiences. The above-noted factors led us to discuss our experiences teaching music, visual arts, and dance. Collectively, we all work from the pedagogical principles of:

• Addressing student knowledge inconsistencies, academically and artistically, to move learners forward toward graduation and their artistic goals.

• Providing support, resources, and opportunities for students to develop and nurture their craft in a safe learning environment.

• Teaching the importance of being a self-starting entrepreneurial artist in a global market.

While these pedagogical principles hold value across higher education, they are particularly important to our work in an HBCU. The National Center for Education Statistics (n.d.) explains that HBCUs are higher education institutions that were founded before 1964 with the intention of educating Black Americans. Many HBCUs emerged in “an environment of legal segregation and, by providing access to higher education, they contributed substantially to the progress Black Americans made in improving their status” (National Center for Education Statistics n.d.). As of 2020, there were 101 HBCUs, 52 of which are public institutions such as FSU. An HBCU in the southeastern bible belt represents a level of prestige and intellectual mobility for the entire Black community surrounding the university. Presumed to be an automatic ticket out of rural poverty, attending or being employed by an HBCU means being part of a cultural legacy, connecting with and experiencing Black ethos, history, and resilience through education. HBCUs are critical access points to postsecondary education and serve an important function in promoting educational attainment, particularly for Black students (Williams and Davis 2019). Despite the outstanding achievements

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of HBCUs, they remain woefully underfunded and in need of resources and opportunities (Harris 2021). Let’s Start at the Very Beginning: Vocal/Choral Instruction Chronicled by Denise Murchison Payton

My first experience teaching music was in the public schools of North Carolina, general music and chorus for grades four through six. These students truly loved music and singing but were disadvantaged by attending a lowincome school with a high percentage of students receiving free and reducedprice breakfast and lunch. Although they did not have the advantage of private lessons, they had genuine musical talent. I remained there for two years. However, becoming a new mother, driving 69 miles one way each day to teach, soon made it impossible to continue. Working closer to home, I taught junior high school at a Title I school.1 In 1990, this was one of the county’s toughest areas. Teaching was difficult since the students had raw talent, but no prior musical knowledge. I worked hard, teaching them to read basic theory and choral music. Teaching them to learn by rote, the students received superior ratings at the Large Choral Festival and successfully auditioned for the Honors and the All-State Choruses. I taught there for 18 years and then received an offer to move to higher education at an HBCU. My successes, personal and professional, are great but hard-earned, and I was honored to take the helm and create beautiful music with the choir at FSU. I knew I would need to change my teaching approach, after all, college students are adults. However, teaching vocal music at this HBCU was still difficult. No matter what area or level you teach, patience is a must. Further, the outside obligations that many FSU students carry in their daily lives often conflict with the level of productivity and drive that professors think these young people should possess. As a result of previous history and/or present circumstances, a young adult student may still be missing basic skills they need to be successful. Professors sometimes misconstrue this deficit as a lack of effort or determination and may remove or withhold opportunities. ’Til I Reach the Higher Ground

I began instructing the HBCU students with high expectations, but reality quickly set in and my hopes were dashed. It was as if I was back to teaching middle school. How could I make quality musicians out of students with 12 years of schooling—who probably sang all four years of high school—but were taught by rote and did not have the skills required for a career in music?

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They had difficulty understanding the theory they learned in class and transferring that theory to the choral page. Listeners had no idea what I experienced to get the sound these students produced and simply learn the notes. I taught Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn while creating an appreciation for African American musicians who had paved the way for us. I taught all that by rote, playing every note repeatedly and “chunking” it into smaller sections until all were certain of what they were singing. Many choir students wanted a bachelor’s degree without furthering their education. This was the mindset of most, but with 40 years of experience as a music educator, I used my own life stories to stress the importance of remaining culturally relevant even after graduation. I did not have the means for private lessons or the benefit of different opportunities, so my background affected many of my choices. However, I was tenacious and hungry for knowledge, which drove my decisions. Relating to some of my personal struggles, students realized that despite poverty and lack, I made it, and if I could, so could they. Success is intimidating, and most students have no real support for wanting to be in the arts. This causes a sense of unworthiness or unreasonable expectations. At an HBCU, students see professors that look like them, but I wonder how many professors see the students? There are a few professors of color in the Performing and Fine Arts Department at FSU. Due to structural inequality, teachers sometimes hold low expectations for the accomplishments of these students. Research shows evidence of the structural disparities and racism faced by African American students seeking educational success ­(Kunjufu 2009). To address these challenges, instructors need to have a thorough theoretical foundation in andragogy, culturally relevant teaching, and even multiple intelligences—frameworks for improving student learning. Andragogy specifically focuses on adult learning. In a learning environment that promotes andragogy, teachers facilitate experiences co-created with students to promote autonomy and self-actualization, use experience-based and problem-solving learning to help students understand how to fill knowledge gaps, use realworld scenarios to engage learning, and prioritize developing cognitive complexity and lifetime learning as course goals (Beeson 2018). Culturally relevant pedagogy has been shown to promote academic success, develop and maintain student competence, and support critical and broad consciousness in youth (Houchen 2012). Recognizing that intelligence can manifest in a range of ways, multiple intelligence theory posits that that a person can be “smart” in many ways and recognizes intelligences central to arts practices such as musical, bodily-kinesthetic, and visual-spatial intelligence2 (Gardner 2011). Incorporating these frameworks is vital when instructing students of diverse backgrounds. Developing these new teaching skills may pressure universities and departments to design curricula and instructional practices to keep up with the latest trend (Crosling et al. 2009).

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Gravity Is Working Against Me

In today’s higher education, a shared understanding of content is important to ensure the credibility of university learning and teaching (Devlin and ­Samarawickrema 2010). High expectations are now paramount when integrating active learning strategies in classes. Social change is inevitable, and with this change, the differences students bring to the classroom are celebrated and utilized to increase the learning of all students (McLeod et al. 2012). A successful educational culture necessitates focusing on values and supporting quality teaching and learning outcomes (Southwell et al. 2010). Adults, including college students, learn music to understand themselves and realize a sense of identity and pride that becomes apparent in a social setting. As choral educators striving for a standard of excellence, most have been taught a culturally standardized choral tone and literature. Serving as role models by actively participating in our communities, affiliating with professional organizations, and utilizing every available forum to applaud the teaching profession, we offer this country its greatest commodity: education. This Little Light of Mine: Piano Instruction Chronicled by Amanda Virelles

In August 2008, on my first day in an HBCU classroom at Lane College in Tennessee, I realized everything I had learned about teaching music would not apply. I was trained to instruct students who, at the college level, should already have all the necessary tools to be proficient and competitive musicians. Yet, there I was, standing in front of students whose only encounter with music training was the occasional choir practice in middle school or the church praise band. None of them knew how to read music, play the piano, or had any significant knowledge of music history or theory. After teaching there for two years, I moved on to another HBCU, Fayetteville State University. In many ways, my experience at FSU was like my first HBCU experience, where the students’ previous engagement with academic music principles was very limited. Yet, to successfully fulfill program requirements and/or prepare themselves for graduate schools, students needed to be proficient in the performance of this music. In what follows, I describe how my own teaching methods evolved in relation to my students’ backgrounds and how I have prepared them for graduation through the years. Clair De Lune

I received my K–12 musical education growing up in Cuba, and my higher education in Moscow, Russia. Both the Cuban and Russian music education systems would never allow students with physical disabilities or mental health

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challenges to pursue serious training, because students, even at an early age, are expected to compete at a very high level. At age seven, I entered the music school of my city after passing a rigorous selection process, where I was evaluated on music abilities and inspected for physical problems such as hand malformations, spinal issues, and others. This is a common admissions practice for music and dance schools in most Eastern European countries, intended to ensure that the student will be successful in rigorous training that requires long hours of practicing. For pianists, this implies sitting for extended periods, so back problems, for example, would not allow this. At seven years old, if a student cannot match pitch when prompted to do so in the exam, the student would not pass and would be sent home with a rejection letter. The process is not seen by parents, teachers, or students as discriminatory, but instead as a discerning tool that guarantees students entering the program with advantages that make them ready for competition. Coming from this background, I had to adjust my instruction while working at FSU. In addition to its rural environment, FSU is a military town near Fort Bragg and Pope Army Airfield. Thus, FSU has a significant student population who are military veterans, which brings a high probability of engaging students with physical disabilities and/or mental health challenges, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study of music is often sought after as a tool among active or discharged military personnel to manage and minimize the effects of mental and physical difficulties. To teach piano learners who are physically disabled or dealing with a mental health challenge, I needed to change how I approach teaching piano techniques. Soldiers and veterans achieve their academic/music goals by enrolling in a special program that helps them maintain a focused mind and respects their individual needs as learners. I educated myself on hand-eye coordination therapy techniques to improve students’ sight-reading abilities and researched the impact of music and trauma to incorporate into these lessons. In doing so, the emphasis in my teaching switched from the outcome (i.e., perfecting a piece of music) to the process (i.e., emphasizing what students need to progress in a personally meaningful way). In other college music programs, the students come to weekly lessons, where the previous lesson is practiced, and progress is made, even insisted on. Success is defined by students’ abilities to eliminate previous mistakes and perfect the techniques that allow them to progress to more challenging skills. However, with some of my students, I realized that defining success as continued progress, rather than musical or technical accomplishment, was also an acceptable approach. What’s Going On?

One problem with academic music instruction in America is that it is based on European models, which focus on producing technicians of the instrument

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but do not address the particularities of cultural, musical development, methodologies, or traditions specific to minorities or underrepresented groups. As Ross (2020, n.p.) observes, “the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the primary language. Vast tracts of the world’s music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system, and African American traditions have played in its interstices.” One of the things I appreciate about my music education in Cuba is that while learning the European criteria to develop my musicianship and technique, the curriculum was also inclusive and well-rounded, including the development of cultural identity; issues of cultural heritage; and learning cultural rhythms, instruments, traditions, and composers of the diaspora. In my work as a music educator, I similarly seek to create a cultural learning environment coupled with music techniques to give students as complete a learning experience as I can. Western music traditions are at the core of music history courses in music programs around the country, including in HBCUs. How will the study of an istanpitta (a musical genre of Middle Ages and Renaissance), for example, benefit a student’s performance at their local church service on Sunday? How do we make this connection? I lean into constructivist practices and culturally relevant pedagogy to make these connections. Constructivism is a student-centered approach that suggests humans build knowledge and meaning based on their experiences and reflection (Bada 2015). Constructivist educators work to understand students’ preexisting understanding of a subject and then create experiences for students to build on their previous understanding. In a constructivist framework, students are active learners who reflect on what they know, how they came to know it, and how their understanding of a subject changes over time. Combined with a culturally relevant approach that affirms students’ identities and promotes their sociocultural consciousness, I help students connect their talents and experiences to a range of music traditions, including those from the Western academic music canon. I engage students in what I call “back learning,” where I ask them to tell me what they already know about a subject and we find connections to the material we are working with. For example, music literacy concepts translate into, if you can play this, you can also read it. The students are comfortable “playing by ear,” so they first figure out how the music should sound on their own by listening to the music over and over. Then as the students learn more about music theory, they start connecting what they hear to the writing and reading of notes on a score, increasing their sight-reading abilities and facilitating the learning of complex compositions. Educating students to see themselves and their contributions to music performance is critical to changing who has access to and is represented in the professional field. When students graduate from HBCU music programs, problems of inclusion “persist because opportunities for students of color

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and minorities are scarce… the barriers they have to face to get to places of recognition are much greater. In all major American orchestras, only 1.8% of the musicians are Black” (Cutting 2020, 22). Exclusion, harassment, microaggressions, and an absence of cross-cultural sensitivity, impede educational pathways, regular interaction with the art and its artists, networking opportunities, informal mentorship, and access to industry information and performance opportunities. “In orchestras, there is a documented history of conscious exclusion, harassment, and discrimination that includes segregated unions; hostile groups of musicians, staff, and board leaders; and bifurcated access to gatekeepers and mentors. This history, like all history, has a presentday impact: a legacy embedded in the routine processes of life that we may not even see. Therefore, the roles within our music profession are not accessible to all” (Flagg 2020, 31). This world of music is waiting for our HBCU music graduates, and it remains very difficult for pianists. My obligation as a music instructor at an HBCU is to inform my students of this landscape and prepare them to become working musicians or music teachers. I consider it my duty to make them aware of their responsibilities to preserve, value, and promote their musical heritage through immersion rather than outreach. Then we can see and experience change. You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: Visual Arts Chronicled by Soni Martin

After my first year of teaching visual art at Fayetteville State University, I had no interest in returning to a teaching position at a predominantly white institution (PWI). I wanted my career to be at this HBCU for several reasons: I would be able to participate in building a new art program; my experiences with the students were rewarding; and I enjoyed having colleagues in a multidisciplinary department. I had no idea of the challenges and epiphanies that were ahead. Early in my appointment, I remember the complex joy of being emersed in an aesthetic I had not experienced in White culture: the Black aesthetic expressed in works of art, or the way it is expressed in the beauty of the individual or as a cultural group. Teaching at an HBCU has given me, a White faculty member, valuable insights into seeing the world from multiple perspectives and even learning many things about myself. As a new art professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Art at an HBCU, I was encouraged to “learn the culture.” It took some time, but as an educator at an HBCU, I began to understand how important it was to get to know and acknowledge our students for their whole selves, including their racial identities. I have come to understand that to say “I don’t see race”

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is another layer of colorblind racism. To teach in a meaningful way, I must practice what Ferlazza (2020) recommends: go through race and not around it. Engaging students on a personal level and being open to the ways students choose to identify themselves is just as important as the subjects in a lecture class or the skills taught in a studio class. Fight the Power

Teaching at an HBCU, I have had the good fortune of experiencing the richness of a diverse culture and have come to understand important social and conceptual impediments to balance the social scales of equality in mainstream culture. I am acutely aware of how white privilege, including my own assumptions and behaviors, contributes to racial injustices, and I recognize a particularly insidious type of white privilege involves liberals, particularly those in power, who think they are not racists, and, thus, they perpetuate a helplessness and educational harm to those they play the savior to. Not only am I aware of the power I have as a faculty member, but I am aware of my power as part of the White majority. For example, simple words or phrases that may appear harmless to White faculty can easily be racially coded, resulting in detrimental microaggressions and impacting the well-being and learning of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students (Ferlazza 2020). An example of racial coding occurred when I selected some of my students to participate in an exhibition I was curating at our local arts council. My objective was simply to select artists who had the strongest works of art for the theme of the exhibit. I asked each artist to send a photograph of themselves with a short artist statement to display next to their work. When the exhibit was hung in the gallery, the director of the arts center asked me, to my surprise, if I knew I had so many African Americans in the exhibition. My response was, “I just selected the best artists for the exhibit.” Had the situation been different, it seems highly unlikely that this arts center director would have asked me “Did you know you had so many White artists in the exhibit?” Instead of celebrating an opportunity for the arts organization to be more inclusive, the arts director was carelessly silencing diversity by racial coding. The lack of cultural representation in galleries, in particular geographic regions, and in art survey textbooks continues to contribute to structural racism. In many art survey textbooks, the focus is still on the ancient Mediterranean area and implies the Caves of Lascaux in France are the oldest cave paintings (Getlein 2022). My students could easily leave the class thinking the earliest painting by humankind took place in France because of the Eurocentric focus that perpetuates the caves as an iconic image in texts, while information on the earliest paintings that took place in Africa and Australia are footnotes in comparison. In all the art courses I teach that have a text, I must point out information that perpetuates non-diverse canons of information.

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For first-year freshmen and transfer students, the omission of multicultural facts and the emphasis on Eurocentric bias in art history has negatively impacted our students’ overall thinking about the possibilities of artmaking, content, and various styles. In my classes, my only recourse is to supplement texts with additional presentation materials to address omissions and provide students the opportunity to critique structural racism; as well as understand the ways inclusivism contributes to the history of art and artmaking. Man in the Mirror

The students in the art program at this southern HBCU are remarkably patient with each other. As an example, I once asked a White female student in a clay modeling class to get closer to the model and observe the details in his face that were not in her sculpture. She was surprisingly resistant to get closer to the model and finally remarked, “I’m afraid of Black people!” in a class full of African American students. Despite the extreme rudeness of this racial insult, the students continued to work quietly. No one showed visible signs of offense or even looked up from their work. However, I sensed they were also highly alert to how I would handle this volatile situation. When an unexpected comment such as the above is expressed by a student, I am reminded that I do what educators at PWIs do not have to do as routine and common practice. As a White faculty member at an HBCU, it is vital to regularly practice tools for self-reflection and meaningful dialogue to address social inequities and confront racism. Yet, despite this practice there are still times when I find myself speechless. When a male art student shared with me how shocked he was when he and his friends were pulled over by the police and detained for no reason, it was difficult to find the right words to share with a student who has just experienced racial profiling in “real” time. My responsibilities as an arts educator at an HBCU include more than textbook concepts or studio practice. It is also my responsibility to: (1) teach visual arts while raising students’ consciousness about the impact of exclusionism in texts; (2) include images of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in all my classes to foster self-reflection and inspiration for future careers; (3) honor racial identity by acknowledgment; (4) find opportunities to exhibit students’ work whenever possible with the specific intent for the public to experience inclusivity in content and style; and lastly, (5) be aware of the way I use language throughout the day. Teaching fine arts at this HBCU has not only altered my social and aesthetic consciousness, but I have come to know how teaching the arts and humanities at any university has the power to impact future generations in a positive way when openness and sometimes difficult dialogues take place. In the studio setting, informal conversations take place and students share what is personally important; diversity in the classroom thrives due to students being

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their authentic selves. Teaching the arts is the perfect environment to alter the sensibilities of not only the students but also the professors. In summary, I realized that conceptual or data-driven information about a culture, or a group, is not learning the culture, but a vapid and self-serving way to believe one is being inclusive and not racially biased. Genuine insight into a group or a culture is what takes place in my classes: students and faculty interacting daily in authentic, genuine, and meaningful ways. A Different World (Aretha Version): Dance Chronicled by Avis HatcherPuzzo

With both New England academic postmodern dance and “125th Street” Black dance culture exposure, I grew up in Connecticut and trained in dance at the local suburban studio, while regularly visiting my grandmother in Harlem to attend dance classes in the city. After graduating from a small Ivy League dance/theater program, and while dancing professionally, I found jobs teaching African and hip hop dance in urban public schools while teaching jazz and Horton technique in elite ballet and private high schools. Working in both impoverished and privileged spaces, usually in the same day, I was soon hired by the performing arts high school in Hartford, where the division of the dance worlds through race and class was striking. This high school “is designed to prepare gifted and talented students to pursue postsecondary studies and professional careers” through a “highly structured and academically rigorous commitment to serious study” in pursuit of “artistic excellence under the guidance of practicing arts professionals and educators” (Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Half Day Program 2023). The program was diverse but competitive, and dancers needed to be proficient in the entire curriculum. However, the slender framed, upper-class, technically trained dancers were preferred, secured, and catered to by ballet and contemporary dance instructors, while the streetwise, rhythmically savvy, thicker thighed, ethnic dancers were always assigned to my classes. I did not mind; I was reaching students through dance. The African dance class was popular with students of color who were comfortable with the movements and music and eager to know this history and culture. Feeling alienated in their ballet classes, they connected with the work, so I mentored them throughout their dance journeys. In contrast, some of the upper-class, Eurocentrically trained dancers were openly apathetic to African and African-based dance. A ballet student once told the entire class, she did not “see the point in learning your quaint cultural movements.” However, in the Horton technique class, the playing field leveled. Physically challenging for everybody, the dancers supported and encouraged each other through this vocabulary, respecting each other’s artistry. After years of teaching and

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developing young performers, I felt completely prepared to teach dance at Fayetteville State University, a southern HBCU. However, dance at an HBCU is a different world in the south. I Look Good (Chalie Boy Version)

My first semester at FSU, I was assigned a course in the Physical Education department entitled Dance. Packed with curious movers of various levels and styles, I introduced a different genre of dance every few weeks. Hesitant in the ballet and modern sections, one amused, but polite, dancer declared, “Ma’am, are you really here to teach us this White people stuff?!” From that moment, I have been reminded every day that diversity, Black, inclusion, and culture have a completely different meaning for southern HBCU dancers, who are not compelled to assimilate their understanding and experience into Eurocentric paradigms of dance. Steeped in a history of African-­diaspora dance practices, HBCU dance students in this region are predominantly independent learners, self-taught, or trained in competition studios, public school dance programs, or church praise dance troupes. These college students are not particularly interested in studying Eurocentric dance techniques in depth since these styles do not reflect their dance histories, body types, narratives, or communities today. Nor do they believe that proficiency in these forms will get them anywhere as performers. Ballet, although lovely, is viewed as “too White” (i.e., does not speak to the Black experience), “privileged” (i.e., emphasis on White femininity as innocent and fragile), “too stiff” (i.e., no torso or pelvis engagement, the center is bound), “cerebral” (i.e., unfeeling and disconnected from the audience), and ultimately not enough “wow” factor for the effort. J-setting, Steppin’, praise dance, hip hop, video dance, voguing, and heels, all stemming from Black vernacular dances, is considered what dance is at this HBCU. In response to student priorities, in 2011, I created a Dance minor that emphasizes Black dance techniques and principles with Eurocentric dance classes to supplement their dance training or recreation. Contrast this with the best dance programs in higher education, primarily elite PWIs, the arbiters of codified Eurocentric dance. They deem HBCU, competition performance-oriented dance, as commercial, un-artistic, overly sexual, too musically or rhythmically locked, and …cultural: “Oh, so you’re a commercial dancer” (Pearson 2020, n.p.). But to southern HBCU dancers today, “Okay, Boomer!” Hold On to Me (Travis Greene Version)

Realizing this close-knit community is very particular about their likes and dislikes regarding dance, I appreciate them trusting me to be their teacher.

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Demonstrating phrases in class to cross-armed, skeptical looks, I step back to hear, “would you show us that again please, ma’am?” Leaning on my history, I teach FSU dancers to be performing and teaching artists with Horton technique as their foundation. The Auxiliary (dancers who perform with the marching band), famous on any HBCU campus for their sultry and athletic moves (Ebright 2019), see Horton technique as powerful, challenging, and “unapologetically Black.” They associate Horton technique with Alvin Ailey, who grew up poor in the Black church in a small town in Texas. Dance was his ticket out of poverty and learning Lester Horton’s modern technique was his tool to create his own works for his people. Horton technique today is performed by the Ailey company and taught at the Ailey school by Black instructors to primarily Black dancers. Like ballet dancers, Ailey company members and students have a distinct physique, presence, and gait, meaning when they walk into a room, heads turn, and other dancers can tell an “Ailey dancer.” They embody the space with their legacy, and this is the “unapologetic Blackness” that FSU dancers connect to. Ailey’s legacy is part of the African-diaspora aesthetics that students respect. Older faculty and community members tell stories of when they first saw Ailey’s iconic dance, Revelations—a Black dance company performing to gospel music! Ailey’s achievements still resonate in this southern bible belt town. Dancers perform in concerts but also create multidisciplinary presentations with spoken word, songs, skits, and film, using their own choreography coming to understand that dance can be a life choice. I Got Hot Sauce in My Bag, Swag

Southern. Black. Dance. It is important to note that dancers at FSU are ambassadors of concert dance on campus and in the community. There are no adult technique classes, dance companies, or performance venues for concert dance outside the university. Competition, ballet, and hip hop studios for children dominate this region. However, as both a celebration of Black culture and a call to action (Antonia 2016), FSU dance alums are changing this landscape and have ventured out into the world of dance:3

• Krystal, a self-taught, athletic dancer and cheerleader, embraced modern

dance technique and graduated as a Physical Education major and Dance minor. She presently teaches in a suburban middle school as the school’s first PE and dance instructor of color. • Peter, a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, self-taught, excelled in Horton, and on weekends traveled to Philadelphia for Vogue and Ballroom shows. He graduated with a Communications major and a Dance minor and teaches voguing and ballroom techniques as part of a community outreach program to create a haven for Black LGBTQIA+ members.

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• Ebony, a self-taught praise dancer, Business major and Dance minor, ex-

celled in Horton and contemporary dance. She is known in the community for her praise dance choreography. After graduation, she developed and taught the dance curriculum for the city’s first K–8 arts magnet school, instructing ballet, contemporary, and Horton techniques. • Timothy, an older, non-traditional military student, came to FSU as a lateral entry candidate in dance. After two years in the program, he was hired as the dance faculty at the city’s arts-focused high school. After years of teaching dance, he opened his own dance studio and created a dance company for local young artists who use dance as a healing outlet, creating videos with spoken words and songs. • Ife, from a family of African dancers, enrolled in the FSU dance program after two years in a PWI dance program. She graduated from FSU with a Business major and Dance minor and founded her own company of plussize/Black femme dancers who perform regionally. Accepted into the inaugural class of the Duke University MFA dance program, she studies Black women, body positivity, and safe spaces for Black dance. She is presently adjunct dance faculty at both Duke University and FSU. • Deon, an early high school student, continued at FSU for college, majoring in Theater with a Dance minor. He honed his dance technique and dramatic character development through acting techniques and physicality. Excelling in Horton and contemporary, he performed with a regional dance company while working in professional theater productions around the state. After graduation, he was cast in Only Child Aerial Theater’s devised production of Asylum, performed in North Carolina and New York City. Soon after, he was cast in the national tour of Beautiful: The Carole King Story. Presently, Deon is dancing in the ensemble and understudying the role of Ike Turner in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway. Someway Bi

The purpose of the arts in higher education is to build high-quality artists as performers or instructors. The common themes that connect our work as arts educators at this southern HBCU are as follows: We believe as professors that it is imperative to prepare our students for the world they will graduate into, given the abilities and circumstances with which they enter the university. As such, we are their professional guides and coaches in their progress as students and budding artists. Therefore, we interact with the students as artists while instructing, so learners work in partnership with professional artists, not just lecturing academics. At this STEM-oriented university, performing and fine arts students understand how professional artists present themselves and navigate an environment where the arts are not cultivated. Moreover, students learn how classroom techniques are utilized in performance. We design an

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atmosphere for students to be open, feel safe to learn, and grow as artists of color on a global scale. Ultimately, we show students an artist’s life and process because we understand the uniqueness of being a young person of color and their reasons for attending an HBCU. Notes 1 In the United States, Title I is a federal education program that distributes funds to schools with a high percentage of low-income students. 2 The eight multiple intelligences conceptualized by Gardner include musical, bodily-­ kinesthetic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and natural. 3 Student accomplishments are shared with permission.

References Antonia. 2016. “The Power of Beyoncé’s ‘Rachetedness’ in Formation.” Unruly. https://un-ruly.com/power-beyonces-ratchetedness-formation/. Bada, Steve Olusegun. 2015. “Constructivism Learning Theory: A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.” Journal of Research & Method in Education 5 (6): 66–70. Beeson, Eric. 2018. “Andragogy.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, edited by Bruce B. Frey, 92–94. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Binkley, Collin. 2019. “Trump Signs Bill Restoring Funding for Black Colleges.” AP News, December 19. https://apnews.com/article/bills-donald-trump-politicsc4834e48841d97c5a93312b1bf75302a. Crosling, Glenda, Margaret Heagney, and Liz Thomas. 2009. “Improving Student Retention in Higher Education.” Australian Universities Review 51 (2): 9–18. Cutting, Linda Katherine. 2020. “Classical Music Had a Race Problem 20 Years Ago. It Still Does.” Cognoscenti, July 2020. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/ 2020/07/22/classical-music-racism-linda-katherine-cutting. Devlin, Marcia, and Gayani Samarawickrema. 2010. “The Criteria of Effective Teaching in a Changing Higher Education Context.” Higher Education Research & ­Development 29 (2): 111–124. Ebright, Wanda K.W. 2019. Dance on the Historically Black College Campus: The Familiar and the Foreign. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillian. Ferlazza, Larry. 2020. “Educators Must Disrupt ‘Colorblind Ideologies.’” Education Week, February 4, 2020. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinioneducators-must-disrupt-colorblind-ideologies/2020/02. Flagg, Aaron. 2020. “Anti-Black Discrimination in American Orchestras.” Symphony Summer: 30-37. https://americanorchestras.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ Anti-Black-Discrimination-in-American-Orchestras.pdf. Gardner, Howard E. 2011. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York, NY: Basic Books. Getlein, Mark. 2022. Living with Art, 12th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Half Day Program. 2023. “Mission and Purpose.” Accessed April 12, 2023. https://ghaahd.crecschools.org/about/mission_ and_purpose.

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Harris, Adam. 2021. The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. Heilig, Julian Vasquez, Heather Cole, and Angélica Aguilar. 2010. “From Dewey to No Child Left Behind: The Evolution and Devolution of Public Arts Education.” Arts Education Policy Review 111 (4): 136–145. Houchen, Diedre. 2012. “ ‘Stakes Is High’: Culturally Relevant Practitioner Inquiry with African American Students Struggling to Pass Secondary Reading Exit Exams.” Urban Education 48: 92–115. Kunjufu, Jawanza. 2009. “How to Improve Academic Achievement in African American Males.” Teachers of Color Magazine. http://www.teachersofcolor.com/2009/11/ how-to-improve-academic-achievement-in-african-american-males/. McLeod, K. W., T. Waites, D. Pittard, and K. Pickens. 2012. “Virtual Learning Influences on Education: Technology Reforming the Learning Experience.” Journal of Technology Integration in the Classroom 4 (3): 61–69. National Center for Education Statistics. n.d. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” Accessed November 4, 2022. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp? id=667. Obama White House Archives. 2016. “Progress of the African-American Community During the Obama Administration.” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2016/10/14/progress-african-american-community-duringobama-administration. Pearson, Andrew. 2020. “It’s Time to Shatter Exclusive Labels on Concert vs. Commercial Dance.” Dance Plug, July 6. https://www.danceplug.com/article/its-timeto-shatter-exclusive-labels-on-concert-vs-commercial-dance. Ross, Alex. 2020. “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music.” New Yorker, September 14. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/ black-scholars-confront-white-supremacy-in-classical-music. Schilling, Dave. 2017. “Cooler Than All of Us: How the Obamas Upheld African American Pop Culture.” The Guardian, January 17, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/obama-black-pop-culture-art-beyonce-michelle. Smarsh, Sarah. 2018. “Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About ‘Trump Country.’” New York Times, July 19. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/opinion/trump-corporations-white-working-class.html. Southwell, Deborah, Deanne Gannaway, Janice Orrell, Denise Chalmers, and Catherine Abraham. 2010. “Strategies for Effective Dissemination of the Outcomes of Teaching and Learning Projects.” Journal of Higher Education Policy & Management 32 (1): 55–67. Ward, Steven C. 2015. “No Child Left Behind Goes to College: The Impact of Public School ‘Reform’ on Colleges and Universities.” American Association of University Professors, September-October. https://www.aaup.org/article/no-childleft-behind-goes-college. Williams, Joan C. 2017. “LSE III Professor Joan C. Williams - Why Did Trump Win? Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.” International Inequalities Institute Youtube lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV0-P_0Bgeo&t=634s. Williams, Krystal L., and BreAnna Davis. 2019. “Public and Private Investments and Divestments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” American Council on Education, January 22. https://www.acenet.edu/News-Room/Pages/ACE-BriefIllustrates-HBCU-Funding-Inequities.aspx.

8 CALL OF THE BUTTERFLY The Tao of GenuineGenerosity Robert Farid Karimi

I blame Nigerian actor Soibifaa Dokubo as the inspiration for this essay. I went to Lagos to teach a class called Intro to Theater Production, where participants built “from what you already know from theatre, and deepen your relationship with character, text, emotional and personal truth, scene study, the body as storyteller, lighting design, sound design, and space design as it relates to performing and creating a night of performances for the gala.” The first day set the tone: Nigerian summer’s day, air conditioning out; students overcame transportation transfer, bus muggings, and malaria to get to the workshop. Ramadan just began; I chose to fast to be clear minded in this new situation, and I started the class with some games and activities––fun!––to create ensemble. There was a flow, joy! Friction started between younger and more elder actors. Elder actors demanded respect. I, in the middle of the fray, spoke to the eldest of the elders, Soibifaa Dokubo at the end of the first class. Mr. Dokubo, who has a lengthy resumé,1 does not need to be taking any workshops. I said this to him in our discussion filled with tension and laughter. He was angry at the disrespect, but I told him that this class would be an ensemble-based process, so we were not doing things the same as in other theaters, and he could participate or not participate. There he stopped me with a smile and said, “No. I’ll stay. I want to see your Theater of Generosity. See how it works.” Theater of Generosity. No one had ever described my process as that, but it felt good like iftar after a long sun-filled day in Nigeria. Dokubo kept repeating it, and the intention became mantra: Theater of Generosity. What would that be? A place where everyone is sappy and syrupy, like 1980s Smurfs, and all of Shakespeare is translated into Smurf language? Yuck.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-10

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Yet, I wanted to play with the feeling Dokubo gave me when he named my process for this essay. What is Theater of Generosity? Is that the best name for my desired play/performance-making space? How could that flow into an entire university? How could that change academia, the profession of theater and performance itself, or just everyday people? To the Genuine and Beyond

I understand that I am not the first to declare Generosity as a foundation of a performance practice. There is a history of practitioners who focus on the liberatory possibility of theater and performance—from Agosto Boal to Liz Lerman to Peter Zazzali. My call for Generosity is not an attempt to be the Authority. I eschew the tradition of “the Authority,” to impose one style or philosophy or to claim an orthodoxy to codified, formulaic structures in attempts to create the Authentic. It is as if to be a part of a radical liberatory performance practice, all one needs is to quote some Boal, Freire, add in a little hooks and Spolin. In this way, any gesture of this structure becomes orthodoxy and thus un-liberates the participants into a blah blah blah of ­“ATM-ing”—spitting-out receipts to prove what the Master Teacher has deposited. This structure is counterintuitive to creating an experience as a space for play, or as I call it, a PlayFullSpace—a space where participants feel free yet rooted enough to take on the pain or joy that comes with risk-taking or seeking answers beyond their current understanding for their own or community’s mutual nourishment. While a PlayFullSpace needs the ingredient of generosity to exist, I needed something to fully bring it to life—the word Genuine. Genuine sits outside of The Authentic. The Authentic is authored, contrived, devised, and with steps that limit freedom, demands a perceived perfection derived from orthodoxy established by a hierarchical figure. My framing of GenuineGenerosity seeks to foreground the concept of genuine, which opens us to the possibility of a relation that can be messy, dynamic, difficult, derived from our differences, collisions. The Genuine is not easy to feel, create, or design. To help me find the genuine, discuss it, create it, I start with the philosophical concept of zero—being nothing and everything—as an entry point to understanding. The arrival to the zero-relation, the zero-being is a constant in creating the genuine moment of relationship in performance or any space where one wants to build profound connection. To move toward this zero, the practitioner must tap into their generosity, be open and empathetic to themselves and others, and honor the wisdom of others to engender a playful spirit that respects the agonism and the dynamic validity of the PlayFullSpace where risk, danger, failure, inspiration, and joy all exist at the same time.

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The genuine emanates from the root of the word in Arabic, Jinn—the third being, the magic—pointing toward a performance base where performers, designers, operators, all the system of people who make the performance, and audience seek transcendent relation to each other. Thus, Theater of GenuineGenerosity (TOGG), at its root, establishes a space for people to seek kinship. Our differences. Messy, difficult. Genuine. Magic. This will elicit all range of emotions—not just elucidation or a high—something complex and indivisible. I created TOGG for this moment, to conceptualize how to create an acting/performance style of no style. TOGG derives part of its spirit from Bruce Lee’s (1975) the Tao of Jeet Kune Do and from activist Grace Lee Boggs, who said: “Art can help us to envision the new cultural images we need to grow our souls” (Boggs, Kurashige, and Glover 2012, 38). Seeds of TOGG’s essence stem from Chaos magician Phil Hine (1992, 9), who believes that “what is fundamental to magic is the actual doing of it––that like sex, no amount of theorising and intellectualisation can substitute for the actual experience[…] What symbol systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and that the webs of belief which surround them are means to an end, rather than ends in themselves.” The actual doing—of acting or performing—creates that Magic, and is what matters most. The system, the texts, the styles, while important, should not be what we prioritize. To create a space that values Magic and freedom, precise acts of generosity and emotional criticality should be our intention. I wonder: What would happen if a whole theater profession was based on TOGG? With calls to diversify theater and performance, #theaterissowhite, #oscarsowhite, the baby boomer base of most institutional theaters dwindling (Stern 2011), and the high cost of tertiary education, how would TOGG effect the influence of pedagogy and the profession? I wonder how do we get to the square root of what matters: impact the culture, as defined by cultural theorist Jeff Chang (2014, 4): Culture is the realm of images, ideas, sounds, and stories. It is our shared space. Is the narrative we are immersed in every day. It is where people find community, and express their deepest held values[…] My main fascination that drives this essay, dear reader, could how we teach acting or performing be the spark to effect cultural change in theater and beyond? From the Foot to the Whole Body

In 2020, I received the assignment to teach Acting 1 in my university program. I never dreamt of teaching Introduction to Acting; it felt like the place theater departments acculturate students into the “Biz-ness.” Upon reflection,

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my university theater training felt like the destruction of the butterfly in Pablo Neruda’s (2015) poem, “To the Foot from Its Child.” Neruda explores how our innate childhood desires to be imaginative, playful, and liberated often become falsely ensconced within the restrictive realities of daily adulting. He sets up the premise that the child’s foot, a representation of the whole body, dreams of playful possibility beyond its physical limitation. It imagines the world as a butterfly or an apple, but then is confined to the hard, pre-shaped, utilitarian shoe through which society teaches the foot to interpret reality. This “Cruel Reality Shoe” pedagogy dehumanizes the foot and ultimately destroys its hope to fly or be something delicious and original. From my experience, I felt like we were being sized for our shoes—where we became “serious” about the Profession, acculturated to the restrictive realities and expectations of “the Biz.” In my first college acting class, we deep dived into Shurtleff’s (1978) Audition, monologues, trust and other theater games, and were constantly told how to fit into Hollywood, Broadway. The Path. The Churn. The Method. Furtive or innocent, each professor sewed my shoe sole and positioned my eyelets. It did not matter; I loved it! My teenage excitement was in direct opposition of Neruda’s view of the shoe life—at the time, I did not feel constricted, I felt free! I was away from my parents—theater felt like the ultimate symbol of freedom, my rebellion, because it was opposite of their immigrant reality. I loved my shoe, and I wanted to be Nike, Adidas, or whatever got me the part, or took me to my teachers’ Hollywood-Broadway utopia. Then something happened; I joined a show created by UCLA Public Health where we researched AIDS, STDs, love, and sex for a show about issues that mattered to students. I saw how performance could be a bridge for community dialogue. I then encountered performance artists in Los Angeles who audaciously told stories; Lecoq-trained Chicago performance artists who spoke about a blue-collar vision of performance, embedded practice, and emotion; and Chicanx theater artists in San Antonio who were not tied to an industry and constantly made magic. This shoe got a hole in the toe because these artists and experiences opened me up to the idea I had a choice, vision, and that performing, broadly experienced, was where I could embody freedom. These folks offered frameworks for imagining how I could teach performance to future generations. I had the tools within me and the stories to tell, to value my butterfly, my family, and the communities I traversed. Acting 1 as Social Engagement

Tasked to teach Acting 1, I set out to create a PlayFullSpace that allowed for a fluid nonbinary journey and did not force students to be stuck in cruel shoes.2 I spoke to practitioners, I mined my own experience, and I scoured books on acting training like Bartow’s (2006) Training of the American Actor.

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Emblematic of the other texts I read, Bartow (2006, xviii) reminds us that modern acting training began because Broadway producers needed a way “to create a company of actors, [they] needed a process for obtaining uniform results, a way of creating a common artistic language.” This created an attitude that confines actors into prescribed roles within a capitalistic construct. Overtime, this training model became the root of what is considered proper technique. Going through Bartow’s book, theater still shines only on its saints—in the name of the Stanislavski, the Adler, Hagen, Strasburg, the Viewpoints. Amen. As with visual art, there is a deification of the solo Artist, the great Teacher, the European Philosopher/Philosophy/Artist to which we owe our lineage: “These techniques, with the possible exception of Viewpoints training, were regionally appropriated from European sources and subjected to a process of Americanization” (2006, xi). This is old news. Theater is still entrenched in American exceptionalism through borrowing Europe’s way of reducing a history of global perspectives into a myopic singular gaze: “Singly and together these techniques have become the ways American actors are universally trained” (2006, xi). Bartow felt like leader of the old shoe school; I did not and do not want to become another collegial cordwainer. I decided to make the acting class a social engagement performance project. In the spirit of the artist collective, My Barbarians’ Post-Living-Ante-Action Theater (n.d.), I would enact ideas from TOGG to use the techniques of acting—real and imagined by the artist—to engage students to think about embodied practice, discover critical emotional literacy, and consider how they build a cohort community. I have always felt any subject matter I teach is a vehicle to exchange wisdom about larger global issues. This is central to my artistic practice and I thought—why not an acting class as a platform to serve the same purpose? Bruce Blocks Bartow’s Punch

Here is where Jeet Kune Do, a martial art methodology developed by Lee and passed on after his untimely death, assisted me in shaping the class. In the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Lee (1975, 12) lives perpendicular to Bartow’s notion of technique: Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit within all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes always and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its end. Formlessness! Yes! Not being bound—Neruda and Lee speak my butterfly language. It is not that Lee advocates for throwing away technique, he warns: “Do not deny the classical approach simply as a reaction, for you will have

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created another pattern and trapped yourself there” (Lee 1975, 25). That binary is a trap; as Lee (1975, 21) articulates, a student stuck in one school loses their self in relation to their other humans—be it the audience, or their collaborators: Once conditioned in a partialized method, once isolated an enclosing pattern, the practitioner faces opponent through a screen of resistance—he is “performing” his stylized blocks and listening to his own screaming and not seeing what the opponent is really doing. Lee’s precepts provide a foundation to design the PlayFullSpace, a double helix of construction and deconstruction that attempts to undo any shoe-­ ification of the student. Jeet Kune Do offers a philosophy for the kinetic motion of being an actor, the interconnectedness of the art with something beyond the stage, and how the actor needs to be in relation to the world inside and outside of themselves. In this way, technique and theater’s ideal of engaging humans to delve into the human experience can be honored. In performance training, we can teach someone to respect both, for as Lee (1975, 10) reminds us, “The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, souls and senses, but the opening of all human capacity—thought, feeling, will—to the life rhythm of the world of nature.” Lee’s Building Blocks to TOGG

Lee speaks about training that focuses on simply learning the punch, kick, block, and feint rather on which technique. This caused me to ask: what are the basic building blocks of a performer? I looked at other professors in my program; I took pieces of their classes so students would understand their vocabulary. I scribbled on my notepad: storytelling, performance/poetry, improv, Meisner, neutral mask, scene work, monologue, with my work on zeromask, characters, clowning, rasquachisme, and collaborative theater. My goal was to create a space where rather than acculturating students, they could play against or with these ideas to better understand themselves as actors/ performers. This reminded me of the same process I used to create a Theater program for middle and high school students in Chicago, where the units were based on the themes of the students’ year. The curriculum was about learning skills of expression, empathy, generosity, collaborative work, performative analysis of text, character, and engagement that students could use no matter what discipline they get into, and if they wanted to, have the backbone to become good actors.3 For example, sixth grade focused on learning the rules of the school, so students performed an adapted version of Cornerstone Theater’s Everyman in the Mall. Ninth graders used Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to create

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their own mythology plays. Tenth grade students developed performance installations where they embodied Day of the Dead altars, which connected to the larger curriculum that centered cultural customs. The techniques were bridges to the abstract ideas to explore with the students; they were not about replicating how I learned acting. Yes, they had to learn how to haiku, intention, character, worldbuilding, and rules of improvisation, but these were ways to explore their own emotional contexts and relationships to each other and their worlds. All skills scaffolded; it was about providing students experiences they could bond over, a feeling of community, and developing an empathetic culture through curriculum design. How Do We Create a Genuine Generous Culture?

Chang’s vision of culture keeps gnawing at me. What culture are we seeking to create in the classroom, the university, the profession? In a conversation we have over how to teach during the pandemic, Professor Harry Waters, Jr. (2020), long-time actor, professor of theater at Macalester College says: (I come from) a performing arts background molded through the 1970’s period in New York, now called the Black Arts Movement. We––I speak very broadly and proudly––were making theater, plays, readings, stagings in formal theater spaces as well as found sites. We were learning to be actors/artists/writers/directors by learning to be human beings with each other––saving, feeding, loving, laughing, shaming, celebrating all the while. Community Theater was not a conscious thinking; it was the way the world worked best. Everyone learned from each other and the elders. How do we carry this spirit—one that honors fluidity, freedom, and honors all forms of expression as valid possibilities for telling universal stories—into the culture of performance? Into the university as a whole? Waters, Jr. offered a simple idea: start the class with what you are good at—games and play—and have them tell a story. A Daydreamemory

Third week in Nigeria; I attempt to teach interactive performance to the group. I talk about engagement and a system of evaluation I created to offer a framework to investigate what engages us—SEED: Striking, Engaging, Entertaining, and Delicious. Each word a bridge to discuss sensorial meaning for the artist and receiver, a cheat sheet for the first step of Lerman’s Critical Response (Lerman and Borstel 2022). I developed SEED to create a common vocabulary within a cross-cultural intergenerational community. I ask the group if we

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can go outside and create a SEED public performance that engages audiences to participate with us. Someone comes up with the idea of engaging a food stand and to sing and celebrate the person working. A performance of GenuineGenerosity indeed. We all agree and walk over to the food/drink street stand near the school. We arrive, singing, happy; no one at the stand knows what is going on. A soldier comes in with gun pointing at us. He is serious. The students explain that he thinks we are staging a revolt on the street. Things are tense. Soibifaa switches the mood, and says (not in English), “We are celebrating our friend’s birthday. We are so happy; please join us for a drink.” Everyone starts ­singing—I do not know what is going on, but I improvise. One student becomes the birthday person! We then celebrate the soldier, dance, sing, and Soibifaa buys him an alcoholic drink (I know, it is Ramadan!). The soldier leaves, and we zoom away, laughing a song to celebrate our escape! The Five Aquatic Pillars of TOGG

The daydream reminds me there is still something missing. Am I creating a false utopia too? Comedian Steve Martin’s voice echoes: “Cruel TOGG Shoes!” I assemble all my notes, chew Waters, Jr.’s idea in my head, and sketch down five pillars (because I am half-Muslim) for TOGG as an exercise: 1 TOGG celebrates the performance of possibility. 2 TOGG is relational and calls for resilience and support from the ensemble to discover the genuine relationships to nourish each other. 3 TOGG is a quest for genuine kin, acknowledgment of kin, and a way for us to imagine this relation. 4 TOGG acknowledges that art making, especially performance, is a way of accessing critical feeling and centers Joy, Competition, Compassion, and Mindfulness. 5 TOGG honors the amateur and Bruce Lee’s “Using no way as a way; ­having no limitation as limitations” (1975, 27) as the path for performance/art making. Scholars Jill Dolan, Peter Zazzali, and José Muñoz provide guiding lights for the pillars. The match is first lit in my head by Zazzali. Inspired by Dolan’s essay written after September 11th, Zazzali focuses on the New Zealand school of drama as a model for training actors centering Maori protocols and a “rigorous regard for the collective” (Zazzali 2020, 31). Zazzali sees this as hope during a dystopic time like the current pandemic: “Actor training engenders hope, especially in precarious times like the present” (25). This hope comes from Dolan’s definition of utopia as “a boundless ‘no-place’ where the social

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scourges that currently plague us[…]might be ameliorated, cured, redressed, solved, never to haunt us again” (2010, 37). In Dolan’s construction, I see hope framed as a “no-place” where someone can imagine educating others to embody the zero place––a place of possibility in relation to Lee’s praxis “Using no way as a way; having no limitation as limitations” (Lee 1975, 27). Hope additionally exists in relation to Dolan’s framing through finding compassion and connection to each other within the void “that stands right in the middle between this and that. The void is all-inclusive, having no ­opposite—there is nothing which it excludes or opposes. It is living void because all forms comes out of it and whoever realizes the void is filled with life and power in the love of all being beings” (Lee 1975, 7). This love and zero-place can be the location of dream-making and possibility. As Dolan (2010, 39) writes, “Theatre can move us toward understanding the possibility of something better, can train our imaginations, inspire our dreams and fuel our desires in ways that might lead to incremental cultural change.” This forms the basis of the first tenet of TOGG: Accept that performance can inspire to enact the future we want. Imagine a future through the performance through connecting through love and hope—honoring the zero (the symbol of possibility) inside you and others. Muñoz (2009, 25) establishes the acknowledgement of fluidity as both “utopian and queer.” This recognition is also an acknowledgment of our connection intergenerationally that holds us during times of joy and crisis that leads to our resilience. Muñoz writes, “Queer utopia is a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with potentiality. The queerness of queer futurity, like the blackness of a black radical tradition, is a relational and collective modality of endurance and support” (2009, 91). The act of performance gives people the tools to imagine their own futurity, kinship. Engaging in TOGG works to create a practice of this modality of resilience and support, the second pillar of TOGG. As someone who is Iranian-Guatemalan-Italian-Mayan, my life as a performer provided me tools to understand this through the act of embodied performance, engaging with others, and understanding the source of human emotion and intentionality. I understand this is a stance. And to extend this idea of kinship and relation, Harjo (2019) inspires my framing of TOGG’s third pillar by providing a “polyvalent” for me/us to refashion how I/we think about the performance of genuine relationship and its role in imagining our futures. Harjo frames indigenous futurity in relation to her own Mvskoke heritage, community knowledge. Harjo (2019, 28) creates and then remixes the term: “kin-spacetime envelope,” explaining how she renegotiates the term’s use within “an Indigenous knowledge system. A shift toward Mvskoke practices of kinship and knowing the world yields an imaginary that connects with many forms of kin, sites, and temporalities.” For Harjo, and in relation to TOGG, this act of

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storytelling, performing, being in relation with elders, and other community members is not separate; it connects to our joy. As Harjo (2019, 28) writes: a kin-space-time envelope that reminds me to be joyful in my interactions with kin. Kin-space-time envelopes provide advisement for how to be in the world. An Indigenous kin-space-time envelope considers ancestral practices that we draw upon to renovate, reinvigorate, and sustain our bodies, psyches, livelihoods, and communities. With TOGG, the participants create kinship through performance, but this is not anthropological, a separation where the performer helicopters into a site and tells a story about it. This is about creating genuine relationships based on another tenet of the kin-time-space-envelope: “A kin-space-time envelope can be a memory, but not solely in the sense of recalling a scene or a vignette; it also provides instruction for how to be in the world, or it invokes a sense of responsibility in the person recalling the memory” (Harjo 2019, 28). The performer in creating and seeking the genuine, cannot forget their relation to those around them past, present, and future. Performance enacts the kinspace-time-envelope—be it a play, a story, a joke. In this way the collective artists can create a culture that acknowledges our kin, our possibility of being kin, and the agonistic nature and discomfort of performing together as an ensemble (because we are kin) as we seek to find a playful way to embody the world that we sensorial witness and wish to live in. The idea of creating a culture based on Joy, Competition, Compassion, and Mindfulness comes from Golden State Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr (Freiberg n.d.). While writing this essay, the Warriors have won the championship for the fourth time. His players talk about a culture of family, generosity, and joy (Ballard n.d.). Kerr’s four tenets: Joy, Competition, Compassion, and Mindfulness serve as a basis for TOGG’s fourth pillar. Instead of Competition, I use the word Play. I ask my students: Are they playing to play, playing to win, or playing to survive while engaged in a scene, monologue, or performance gesture? The idea is to see their actions with others in relation to themselves. At times, they only engage in one; other times it changes. It does not have to be about always playing to win, it can be a way to strive for the same thing and be in relation with one another. Playing to play, we tap into playfulness, create a quality of fun. This acknowledgement of the alternation of play honors the players. Play and Kerr’s other three tenets create a PlayFullSpace for people to always want to come to work, engage at their fullest, and want the best for everyone within the ensemble. For these pillars to be realized, a culture that honors the amateur, a person who does an action out of love of it, in all of us is required—the fifth pillar. The amateur can be a better performer than the professional because they do it out of joy and love. Prioritizing action out of our love, joy, foregrounds the

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intentionality of participants’ nourishment. The amateur’s hunger can be satiated by declaring the path to artistic or personal development can be many. Here, Lee’s (1975, 27) “no way as a way” serves as a beacon to light the amateur’s way and gives the participant a mantra of possibility to find genuine relationships, seek kin, and center Kerr’s four tenets. Madness/Dreaming

I feel like some storefront preacher who weaves all kinds of principles and philosophies into a huge tapestry of theories that border upon madness. I fear my own voice skipping like a record. It lulls to me sleep; I dream: Giant patented leather office shoes fly in like Spidermen on Broadway from the top of the theater. They battle large multicolor butterflies. I scream to stop the fight. I scream dream nonsense: “Acting is fake. Performing is genuine. I want to be a president performing, not an acting president.” People living, and those who passed, walk into my dreamscreenview. Cheech and Chong start teaching a crowd how to improvise. Their techniques from their days in Vancouver. Rhodessa Jones joins them, and Divine, from John Waters’ movies, takes over. “Let me show you how it’s done,” reliving a monologue from Hair Spray. A screen plays: Marina Abramovic and James Franco conversate about acting and performance. Marina: “What if rehearsal was an experiment? What if you didn’t rehearse. Everything was a re-performance! Is it not theater?” (The Museum of Modern Art 2010). She laughs! Director Ellen Sebastian Chang pops up as an emoji, her words, from a previous text she sent me, flash like ticker tape in front of us all: “Hmmmm is the Theater of Generosity a counterpoint to Artaud Theater of Cruelty or a continuum of Boal Theater of the Oppressed? Is there acting without personal desire? What is generosity? Is there subtext in acts of generosity?” (Sebastian Chang 2022). My emoji responds: “It’s an extension of Jeet Kune Do. Boal is mixed in because of Freire. And games … but it’s more about style of no style … to tap into the spirit of the amateur. Generosity was the label the person placed on what I was doing … I am thinking more about how to create a class where theater is the exploration of the genuine (be it emotion, desire, relation, or magic), and that includes generosity and joy … as more of a counterpoint of Theater of the Authentic.” Ellen Sebastian Chang’s emoji responds: “In simple language a return to the creativity most humans are inherently born with. Buddha nature. What Kirstin Linklater focused on in freeing the natural voice. Or Viola Spolin’s brilliant section in Theater Games for the Lone Actor her section on The Five Obstacles …”

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Viola Spolin on a bicycle recites the Five Obstacles: “Five obstacles to direct experience: One, the approval/disapproval syndrome; Two, self-pity; Three, success/failure; Four, attitude; Five, fear” (Spolin, Sills, and Sills 2001). My dearly departed friends scholar Dr. Beverly J. Robinson and performance artist Laurie Carlos laugh at me. Laurie shouts over their laughter: “You always complicate things, Karimi! It’s so simple. Just make the cake.” Another spirit: performance artist James Luna with a suitcase in his hand from a performance I assisted him with in Iowa, just nods, “I involve the audience. People give you control of their imagination. I can have them outraged one moment and crying the next. That’s the power the audience gives you. It’s knowing that and knowing how to use it effectively. I guess the statement is that I’m not up here to entertain, though I can be damn entertaining. I’m here to teach you” (Fernandez-Sacco 2019). TOGG in Action

The class now designed; I take Waters, Jr.’s idea and start class with playing games and a story: students must tell an emotional memory story from their early childhood. I give them three tools to read them: breathe, value your words, and take your time. We warm up in a silly/serious way (instead of cat/ cow yoga—I call it meow/moo), play games in between to get them to play together as a community, and use a Karimi remixed version of Lerman’s Critical Response so they can share what engaged them and how they were affected by the way people told stories. Fast forward: I give them their “final.” Their challenge: to satirize what they learned at the end the class. They are to use a collaborative performance method in which we catalogue everything that’s been learned over the semester as a group, and then in their individual ensembles, they create the performance. It’s always interesting what they choose to make fun of. They always make fun of me, of course. I have been portrayed from an absent-minded, nutty professor to the angry alpha Cobra Kai drill sergeant, yet that is not the most engaging. The most SEED thing they do is what they choose from the subject matter. They always make fun of the zero mask because it is the most difficult thing for them, and it is preposterous and silly at the beginning, and they always find a way to put that in there. The warm-ups, which they love and hate, also make their way into the mix. One group made fun of SEED and absurdified it, calling Sensational Evil Elongated Dinosaurs and created a SEED scene based on all of them becoming these dinosaurs. I threatened to make a t-shirt afterwards, and we all laughed. This was what resonated to me—their laughter, their joy. I did not even need to read my evaluations; they honored the experience by showing how fun it was, and their generous spirits felt genuine that day.

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Seema Sueko Responds//I Dream//Again

I ask Director/Consensus Organizer Seema Sueko for help to think about how to create a culture of genuine generosity. She sends me links and says, instead of Intro to Acting class, she would rather create a “Daily Arts Exercise” to begin students’ journey. Sueko (2022) explains: Recognizing that students are balancing a number of challenges and opportunities in college and that the research demonstrates that everyday creativity is a pathway to flourishing, I think a course which encourages a daily creative or arts practice would benefit students academically, emotionally, mental health-wise, as well as build interest in the arts. The class could include daily arts prompts that engage the students in 20-60 minutes of creativity. The prompts can range from playwriting, to acting, to choreography, to directing, to design, to voice and dialect work, to composing, to any element of the arts. Just as we have normalized daily physical exercise, my wish for the students who take the Daily Arts Exercise class is that they cultivate a daily creativity practice that they carry with them throughout their lifetime. Yes! A creativity practice! I make two perpendicular L’s with my fingers to frame my students currently performing. I squint my eyes to imagine Sueko’s vision blending with all my other ideas swirl into a pedagogical sundae, a conceptual mosh pit. The Acting 1 class becomes an incubator for innovation; people start thinking about the various ways they can create projects—interdisciplinary art making where performances take place in galleries, buses, proscenium theaters, and even grocery stores. Students take over the design of a new season for the university where they bring these projects to life to the larger university community and also remix the classics by adding their own physical and personal responses—everything from poems to small videos that they film in the communities that they live in or intersect with a daily basis. A group of students go to a theater conference and ask “If we honor one of Lee’s central tenets of Jeet Kune Do, ‘Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo’, would companies be so rigid? Would they use the word rigor all the time?” Water is not rigorous. Fluid, malleable. A theater company more open to more voices? Somewhere. Maybe Nigeria. Someone will do a radio show, advise a businessperson how to dream up a new idea using kinesthetic perception, and everyone that has these classes will be connected in a large global network. Their connection: the kinship of valuing each other’s stories, each other’s whole self, each other’s amateur love of building worlds to engage audiences. Harjo’s philosophies change how students see their four years, and they take classes outside of the arts to relate their ancestral path—to honor their ancestors

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while they build futures based on learning about the stories of their past, the indigenous roots of our global histories and intersections, and build to make the world more just and balanced—like water. Maybe the zero will become the new symbol of performance/art departments. A mascot! Universities will make theater mandatory because Theater of GenuineGenerosity changes how they see theater’s role in academia. Universities will notice the students who take theater are emotionally healthier, have fun, learn to love their body, and have a stronger connection to family and ancestral stories. Theater students are asked to lead across campus this discussion of emotional literacy and the Theater of GenuineGenerosity becomes a household name, a meme because so many students have made fun of it. A culture of kinship at the university is fostered and fun is centered so much that retention levels at universities that have this type of theater program go to almost 100%, students have better work/life balance, and rates of depression and self-­inflicted injuries go down. A new type of way of working professionally emanates through the entire profession, and a new generation wants experiences—­the students are ready to respond to them and create projects that are more engaging, making the process of creating performance fun. The act of making performance is just enjoyable—the joy of the amateur infects the profession. Whole communities want to get involved. This energy sparks new ways of civic engagement—where people dance, sing, make art socially, and thus, build projects, talk about civic issues, and the premises of “be like water” and kinship become how people build cities and make political and institutional change, where everyone builds a resilience because they can face things, has a rootedness to the stories of their ancestry, and builds plans for the future to build strong kinship’s globally. I wake up, and all my students look at me as if I am crazy, and again, we just all laugh because we realize that one of their satires has come true. Conclusion

I have re-read the essay; I have used quotes as an Authority to make it appear that there is a Truth. Espousing Lee, Chang, Zazzali, Muñoz like some biblical or qur’anic believer. I quote Spolin, I reference Lerman and Boal, and I throw in some hooks. I realize I am hypocrite. Or maybe the agonism inside of me is the reality of the culture I want to bring into the classroom, into the field and industry of performance. A rooted uncomfortability that edges us into dialogue, wisdom exchange, joy, nourishment, arguments, songs, new innovations. This was never about theater or performance. It is about the Tao of GenuineGenerosity. A style of no style to create a culture of playfulness, kinship, empathy, compassion as well as risk-taking to seek how to live in a world of possibility.

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TOGG is not a methodology, perhaps more a feign, a jab, like Lee teaches, to keep folks honest. A way to re-frame how we evaluate to ensure we create non-authoritarian climates and PlayFullSpaces of potentials for butterflies to soar. Maybe it is the best way I know how to simulate a genuine relationship between a reader and an author. Tell my story, and let it lie there. Perhaps, that’s the only truth. No constrictive shoe or butterfly utopias, just one idea to spark change. Build your/our world together. It’s time to act, no matter what type of performance we create or experience we design. Let’s fly! **** “If people say Jeet Kune Do is different from ‘this’ or from ‘that,’ then let the name of Jeet Kune Do be wiped out, for that is what it is, just a name. Please don’t fuss over it” (Lee 1975, 208). Notes 1 For a more extensive look at Dokubo’s work, check out the article “Soibifaa ­Dokubo … Life of a stage and screen merchant” (Agency Report 2021). 2 A reference to performer Steve Martin, of course: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=K8fuBiOwNmk. 3 One sixth grader did become an actor: the Lakers’ Anthony Davis performed in Space Jam 2.

References Agency Report. 2021. “Soibifaa Dokubo … Life of a stage and screen merchant.” ­NaijaTimes, May 18. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6490783/. Ballard, Chris. n.d. “Steve Kerr’s Absence Overshadowed by His Presence.” Los Angeles, CA: Sports Illustrated (Time, Inc.). Accessed June 8, 2022. https://www.si.com/ nba/2017/05/16/steve-kerr-nba-playoffs-golden-state-warriors-injury-leadership. Bartow, Arthur. 2006. Training of the American Actor. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Boggs, Grace Lee, Scott Kurashige, and Danny Glover. 2012. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chang, Jeff. 2014. Who We Be: The Colorization of America. New York, NY: St. ­Martin’s Press. Dolan, Jill. 2010. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Fernandez-Sacco, Ellen. 2019. “You Go, I Stay: James Luna.” X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly 22 (2): 97–109. Freiberg, Kevin and Jackie. n.d. “4 Things NBA Champion Steve Kerr Can Teach CEOs About Team Chemistry.” Forbes. Accessed June 8, 2022. https://www. forbes.com/sites/kevinandjackiefreiberg/2018/06/21/4-things-nba-­championsteve-kerr-can-teach-ceos-about-team-chemistry/.

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Harjo, Laura. 2019. Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Hine, Phil. 1992. Oven-Ready Chaos. London, UK: Chaos International. Lee, Bruce. 1975. Tao of Jeet Kune Do: Expanded Edition. Oklahoma City, OK: Black Belt Books. Lerman, Liz, and John Borstel. 2022. Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process® in Theory and Action. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Cruising Utopia. New York, NY: New York University Press. Neruda, Pablo. 2015. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Post-Living Ante-Action Theater.” n.d. Creative Capital. Accessed October 20, 2022. https://creative-capital.org/projects/post-living-ante-action-theater/. Sebastian Chang, Ellen. 2022. Personal Communication, August. Spolin, Viola, Paul Sills, and Carol Sills. 2001. Theater Games for the Lone Actor. ­Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stern, Mark J. 2011. Age and Arts Participation: A Case Against Demographic Destiny. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Sueko, Seema. 2022. Personal Communication, June 8. The Museum of Modern Art, dir. 2010. Performance vs. Acting: Marina Abramović, Klaus Biesenbach and James Franco at MoMA. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=BYSE5ZUsrRg. Waters, Harry. Jr. 2020. Personal Communication, August. Zazzali, Peter. 2020. “Utopia in Actor Training: The Possibilities of an Intercultural Curriculum.” Performance Research 25(8): 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13528165.2020.1930777.

SECTION II

Responsibilities to the Fields

9 INTRODUCTION Karen Schupp

Across disciplines, higher education exists not only as part of an educational continuum, but also in relation to professional practices. Performing arts programs in higher education are connected to professional fields through faculty members’ work off campus, hosting guest artists, internships, and successful alums. This section, Responsibilities to the Fields, addresses myriad ways that higher education could both strengthen connections between academe and professional practices and blur the boundaries between these two realms through re-imagining standard practices and assumptions. By delving into emergent practices and research endeavors that question such boundaries, as well as the borders between campus and community and edges between disciplines, the chapters provide blueprints for more ethical, sustainable, and symbiotic performing arts communities both on campus and beyond. From this place of deep accountability, authors rethink how to prepare students to proactively shape unique career trajectories; question the sustainability and linkage of current academic and professional practices; center students’ and artists’ identities; and interrogate longstanding hierarchies. “The Distance of Education” by Akinleye opens the section and contextualizes an innovative distance-education curriculum where individuals are simultaneously performing arts professionals and students earning degrees. The chapter demonstrates how embodied and creative knowledges embedded in the performing arts have much to offer general pedagogical approaches to digital education spaces. In “Performing Hartford: A Community Turns its Head,” Pappas illustrates how programs can practice assets-based community engagement while also appraising the systemic challenges to creating an equal exchange between colleges and independent artists. “Integrating Disciplines—Disciplining Integration: Opera Curriculum through a Transdisciplinary Counter-Critical DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-12

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Pedagogy” by Skelton proposes a radical revision of opera education through a transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy, one that seeks to disrupt the current siloing of disciplines within opera training to promote students’ increased agency, well-being, and artistry. Bernstein considers how design and production curriculum can shift pedagogies and paradigms from a “the show must go on” mentality toward sustainable practices, particularly as performing arts landscapes becomes more ambiguous and interdisciplinary, in “Sustainable Futures in Performance Practice, Production, and Distribution Ecologies.” In “Fighting for Equity With(in) Parasitical Resistance,” Rajko examines the experiences of four women working at the intersections of dance, computing, and engineering (DCE) through a paradigm for relational ethics called parasitical resistance. Using this framework, Rajko describes how DCE academics subvert institutional policies to critique institutional practices while also meeting institutional expectations as they negotiate cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces. Swoboda, in “A Tertiary Music Performance Education Through a Lens of Entrepreneurship” draws on personal and student reflections and conceptual frameworks of entrepreneurship in relation to present day music careers to articulate the critical and ethical imperative for centering entrepreneurship in US music tertiary education. Finally, Schupp, Preeshl, and Scott use data collected from a mixed-method survey to elucidate the daily experiences, concerns, and hopes of adjunct (part-time) faculty, many of whom are active as professionals outside of academe, in “‘Undervalued, Underpaid, Underappreciated’: The Lived Experiences of Adjunct Faculty in the Performing Arts.” While reading this section, the following questions may be used to guide reflection:

• What connections and disconnections exist between the studio and stage, the classroom and community?

• How do “standard practices” limit or effect possibilities for innovative, relevant, and equitable experiences in the performing arts?

• What are the responsibilities of performing artists in academia? What are

the responsibilities of performing artists to academia? What are the responsibilities of academia to performing artists?

10 THE DISTANCE OF EDUCATION Adesola Akinleye

*Note, generalizations in this chapter are informed by the Western context within which I was teaching. In this chapter, I reflect on the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Arts (MA) tertiary distance education performing arts courses that I co-wrote and taught from 2008 to 2021 at Middlesex University (prior to the online experience of the COVID pandemic in 2020/21). These online-based courses were the BA Professional Practice (BAPP arts), which I co-wrote and later directed, and its three offshoot courses in MA Professional Practice (MAPP Dance Technique Pedagogy,1 MAPP Dance, and MAPP Somatic Studies), which I co-directed with Helen Kindred. In this chapter, I refer to these Professional Practice programs of BAPP (arts) and the MAPPs as a case study for looking at how online distance learning can offer artists strategies not just for their present study, but for a life-long learning approach to their performing arts careers. This is an embodied approach to education that suggests learning is ultimately produced through the doing of practice in situ.2 The BAPP and MAPPs drew on distance education through the use of the Internet to create a performing arts pedagogical framing informed by network theory and connectivism (Downes 2005; Siemens 2006). This was to harness the Internet for us (as a course community) to be present in the everyday life of the artists that were the student body. The distance education nature of the BAPP program allowed students to study in early career settings (such as in touring companies or on cruise ships) and focus on elements of their practice that their initial training had morphed into (such as a musical theatre trained person now working as a jazz recording artist or a ballet trained person now working as an aerial dancer). The MAPPs allowed people in existing DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-13

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performing arts careers to formalize the learning they had gained from their professional activity. Consequently, the MAPPs also supported specialization in forms that the Western university system did not usually cater to (such as Kandyan Dance). The strangeness of studying performing arts through an online course sometimes clashed with the main body of the university. Yet, the use of online mediums to educate was not to replace the physicality of being together that is familiar to a traditional university or conservatory setting. Rather, through the Internet, we aimed to be closer to students in their real-life professional settings, supporting them in carrying out self-directed research and practice-based reflexive projects. BAPP, and later the MAPPs, originated out of a correspondence, distance education, modular format where students were mailed a paper handbook for each course element. At Middlesex University, these correspondence courses, primarily aimed at business students, were run out of the former Institute of Work Based Learning (iWBL). Coming from a work-based learning philosophy, iWBL courses allowed students to apply for a percentage of their credits by claiming prior professional experience in their field of practice (Durrant, Rhodes, and Young 2009). This petition for recognition of prior learning (RPL) took the form of students writing essays contextualizing their previous experiences as learning, through self-reflection and citation of relevant literature. In 2009, Alan Durrant and I co-wrote an adaptation of this general BAPP to focus on the performing arts.3 The course rewrite also made a shift from the correspondence, mailed paper handbook method to an Internetbased network using blogs, Skype calls, and a Web-based homepage. This was an attempt to be responsive to the needs of the student body in terms of global change and new technologies (also see Bryant, Akinleye, and Durrant 2013; Nottingham and Akinleye 2014). We wanted to unfold the linear narrative of performing arts education of a study>perfect>work model to recognize the students’ need to navigate a life-long multiplicity of learning, reflecting, making, and practicing, that is, a performing arts craft. Study Contextualized by the World Around

…How many [students] acquire special skills by means of automatic drill so that their power of judgement and capacity to act intelligently in new situations was limited?… How many found what they did learn so foreign to the situation of life outside the school as to give them no power of control over the latter? (Dewey 1938, 27) …Or if he survived the system of training imposed upon him by the school machine, he found himself ill-prepared for the work confronting him… (Eliot 1913, iv)

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The above quotes are from two influential privileged male educationists from the early 20th century: philosopher and educationalist Dewey, and American academic and president of Harvard Eliot. They too lived in a time of technological and global change vastly affecting the lives of their (Western) students.4 Reflecting on BAPP and MAPP 100 years later, in the early 21st century era also punctuated by pandemic, war, and new technology, their observations resonate again. I see their comments to be more than just about the micro of what content is taught. Rather, they focus on the macro importance of an education system’s ability to respond to the experience of the moment its students are contextualized by. The theoretical notion of responding to the moment is also made vital by my physical experience of the performing arts. Responding to the moment: I can feel the unevenness of the stage beneath my foot, and sense that the inhale of breath of the next note I sing will pour my weight beyond my toes. I inhale and succumb to the moment of the falling sensation of my body. Toni wraps their arm around my waist at the same time catching me and lifting me, so I sing out the note, elevated above the cast in a lift. A triplet of orchestrated notes frames Toni placing me back down on the stage. As my knees cushion the resolute stage floor, Toni catches the next line of the song. I spin out of my descent and grasp Toni’s hand as the lyric is passed back to me. (Akinleye, reflective journal) Apart from teaching an understanding of what it means to be responsive somatically, I also see the performing arts as vital for questioning (and imagining), holding up a mirror to society, and responding to the experiences of now. It was the professional setting of 21st century performing arts as a global network made prevalent by new technology that the programs of BAPP (arts) and MAPPs were responding to. We felt the very nature of Web 2.0 benefited the kind of responsiveness and context building that Dewey and Elliot point to and a professional performance necessitates. A Personal History of BAPP and MAPP

I came to be in the position to re-write BAPP through my own experience studying for an MA with Middlesex University’s iWBL in 2007. In 2005, I had returned to London, UK after several years working in Canada as an artist-in-residence in schools. This included working with school districts to identify areas of the core curriculum that could be enhanced through artsbased delivery. In my new environment of London, I wanted to continue this work. I was able to get a job as a School Sports Co-Ordinator (SSCo), a role where I was in charge of a cluster of schools, training teachers through teamteaching performing arts alongside them. Although I was leading teachers’

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professional development across several schools, I was not paid more than basic minimum wage because I had no academic accreditations. I had gone into pre-professional training at 16 and to work professionally at 19. Although I had taught as an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Stony Brook, USA and University of Manitoba, Canada, I did not have any paper qualification higher than the equivalent of a high school diploma. It was the wage inequity of my post as an SSCo that led me to look for a way to accomplish academic acknowledgment, a solution to which I found in the iWBL’s offer of being able to claim professional experience as part of my credits toward a BA or MA. Coming from a background of business entrepreneur professional development, iWBL recognized prior experience as learning. That is the model of the business entrepreneur starting out in the mailroom and working up through the company, at directorship level or CEO they, like me, could quite easily still have no paper qualification despite a raft of practical experience professionally. The iWBL distance education study took the scenario of an entrenched professional into account, assuming students would be working in their field while they studied. Study was divided into modules supported by paper handbooks that were mailed to students and limited one-to-one tutorials with a tutor across a semester. This correspondence-type model allowed students to remain in the learning environment of their own profession. As mentioned above through the iWBL, one could write academic papers to “claim” one’s prior experience—these outlined professional learning and gave that learning context through linking it to academic scholarship.5 The iWBL student’s ability to theoretically articulate something learned through practical experience reflected the grade they received. This meant the iWBL was not assessing the direct (practice specific) content of the student’s learning. Rather they were supporting and then assessing the student’s ability to contextualize their learning in the wider field. This involved demonstrating the ability to reflect on, recognize, articulate, and contextualize their knowledge (skills the program suggested were key to students continuing to engage with life-long learning after graduation from the program). The iWBL student, situated in the workplace, began with this process of the recognition of their prior learning in the first module. Then, in the second and third modules, they moved on to designing and reflecting on a research project relevant to their workplace. Although this model was based on the business entrepreneur scenario, performing artists, such as myself, shared the same professional life-course of practical doing as the means to building a portfolio of knowledge rather than paper qualifications attesting to knowledge. When I discovered the iWBL correspondence courses, I was thrilled to find a pedagogical structure that allowed me to claim my professional experiences as learning. After I completed an MA qualification in the iWBL program, I was asked to join a branch of the teaching team of iWBL in the School of Arts and

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Education. This branch was run by artist jewelry-maker Alan Durrant. He had noticed how many students applying to the general BAPP were from the performing arts. BAPP was very attractive to early career performance arts students who could be in the field auditioning or working and at the same time topping up their practical performance training to a BA.6 Durrant felt I could bring insights in terms of my experience working in the field. For instance, an issue he wanted to address was that the work-based nature of the program demanded that students have a sense of initiative. But unlike the experienced entrepreneur-type businessperson usually typical to iWBL, the performing arts students were reluctant to do anything that was not directly asked of or told to them; “…as a dance student you do not question, you simply do it…”7 This attitude also seemed to be a sticking point for students who achieved a professional contract. It appeared students associated learning with the site of the studio/practice room, and they found it difficult to recognize the professional field as a site of continued learning. They generally felt they must arrive in the professional field complete having learned how to dance or sing or act by doing what their teachers had told them to do; and now in the professional field, they would apply their completed, learned skills to whatever the director told them to do. But of course, when joining a cruise ship tour or singing an audition song, nobody was telling them what to do. As Eliot points, they found themselves “ill-prepared for the work confronting” them in the professional field (1913, iv). And as Dewey states, the importance of “the organic connection between education and personal experience” (1938, 25) had not been developed in their previous performing arts training. Students in the new BAPP (arts) located and wrote about their learning through explaining the difficulties and stresses they had undergone. These challenges were marked by them encountering situations where there was no one to tell them what to do: what to eat when on a tour bus all day, how to get home after an unsuccessful audition miles away from home, having to learn a new part when there was a sudden injury, having to workout the value of money in a new port, having to manage a Dance Captain that was argumentative, or having to fit into an existing costume nobody was going to alter. I had been quite isolated in my professional practice trying to do it by myself by looking for auditions… (Student blog post reflection, 2011)8 BAPP was asking students to notice these professional field experiences. When students realized we were seeing these experiences as potential learning, and that working out how to maintain themselves and their artistry was considered research by BAPP, they had a transformative and emancipatory experience. Indeed, to pass the course, they had to understand this concept of work-based learning/life-long learning. Students could defer modules (take a

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break from BAPP for up to three semesters and come back), so students that could not make the jump to seeing experience as life-long learning often took breaks rather than fail the course. Thus, it took some students a number of years to complete the 18-month course! Understandably the extended length of time some students took was undesirable for the university. Even for those completing in the expected amount of time, the learning curve seemed to be made steeper by the very “do what you are told” ethos instilled in the students through their prior learning experiences. To these students, the BAPP process seemed to involve the lonely scouring of the paper handbooks looking for the parts that told them what to do. Across the development of BAPP (arts)9 we aimed to specifically address these issues of empowerment and self-motivation that many early career performing arts students had seemed to have learned to divorce from the notion of study (Bryant, Akinleye, and Durrant 2013). Methodology: Connectivism and the Performing Arts in Conversation

The changes we made to BAPP to focus more on performing arts students were highly influenced by connectivism through the different lenses of Downes (2005) and Siemens (2006). The theory of connectivism suggests learning is derived from the connections made between points of information, creating a web of knowledge just as the Internet connects information in a World Wide Web. Both Downes and Siemens point to an interconnected ontology. We felt the positioning of learning as interconnectedness, which connectivism illustrates through the network/nodule framework of the Internet, was also present in the age-old experiential knowledges derived from elements coming together in the framework of a performance. Interconnected network that is performance: as I step into the performance space my moment of breath responds to the sound of the drum or my breath and the space around me becomes the moment of the drum. I lift my arm, humming the beat ‘tay, lay, lay,’ ground partners the tap of my heel, ‘tay, lay, lay.’ I spin round and within the web of the nowness of the rhythm, I am lifting my foot to flap ‘tat-tat;’ when Jayleen appears in front of me counterpointing my ‘tat-tat’ with a drop shuffle, exchanging smiles that recognise the togetherness of the moment. It is never the same, each rehearsal reveals a new connection, a different layer of being with each other; learning to be in response, learning the layers of the interconnection of the moment of performance. And when we perform this piece, those nodes come together to form a web of experiences we draw on to create the layered, shifting knowledge of making art together with audience. (Akinleye, reflective journal)

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We live as an integrated experience—we see, know, and function in connections. Life, like knowing, is not an isolated activity—it is a rich interconnected part of who we are. (Siemens 2006, 4) Downes and Siemens suggest (although from different branches of connectivism) that the activity of learning has changed because our interaction with learning has been changed by the interconnectedness of the Internet. Knowledge is no longer statically held to ransom in institutes of privilege, but flows around the network of the Internet, responding and being changed by people’s use of information. I am not suggesting this is a better relationship with knowledge, just that it is important as educators to notice that relationships with knowledge and information have changed. Of course, in the performing arts, we too are aware of the idea knowledge is not static (Sheets-Johnstone 2009). We move with knowledge generated through responsiveness (Lerman 2011), we are aware that arts knowledges prepare us for meaningful connection with world around (Schupp 2020), and we sense knowledge is changed and revealed through the meaning that emerges with interaction (Manning and Massumi 2014). Thus, reflecting on how the Internet is used, Siemens (2006, 31) could also be summarizing learning drawn from processes of the performing arts when he writes:

• Learning is a network formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

• Knowledge rests in networks. • Learning and knowing are constant, on-going processes (not end states or products).

• Ability to see connections and recognize patterns and make sense between fields, ideas, and concepts is the core skill for individuals today.

However, although we in the performing arts are familiar with interconnection and knowledge networks, the concept of networks’ rhizomatic ontology is revealed to more individuals in the 21st century through Web 2.0 than through being a part of the performing arts. The reality was our BAPP (arts) students were more likely to conceive of the interconnection of performance through the example of the Internet than through theorizing their limited performance experiences. We saw the use of the Internet as a vehicle for engaging the BAPP (arts) students in two ways: simultaneously allowing the course to be more present in the students’ everyday life through Web 2.0 and engaging students with a framework (the Internet) that mirrored the structure of multiplicity, flow, and exchange that is the performing arts creative process. Therefore, it was from experiences in performance that we fortified the new BAPP (arts) program with an ontology of an interconnected, networked reality.

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Methods: Lenses, Blogs, and Openness

The task for the BAPP (arts) new curriculum was to address how we would center the idea of the networked/interconnected professional that experiences in the field of performing arts and connectivism pointed to. It was clear the Internet could be an exciting vehicle to embed the meaningfulness of an ontology of exchange and an epistemology of knowledge that is changed by interaction with it. But it was also clear students had experienced previous performing arts training that saw knowledge as statically contained in the teacher at the front of the studio and this had failed them. …on Mondays we had audition technique class…Some weeks we would have an audition taken only by watch and learn technique, or by words alone. Sometimes you were allowed to ask questions, others not…We also had to come dressed for an audition, with our hair and make-up done… Once you were eliminated by the teacher you had to sit and watch and learn from the remaining people. So that was me each and every Monday afternoon. I didn’t mind at first because it’s true you can learn a lot from watching but week after week I found myself watching the same people over and over. It seemed strange that despite a different brief each week it was mainly the same people who were suitable. Sometimes people would become quite disheartened… (Student blog post reflection, 2009) Siemens (2006) identifies five types of knowledge, of which the teacher conducting from the front of the class is only one. These categories of knowledge seem to directly translate to the performing arts field and underline how performing arts can focus too intently on only one form of knowledge acquisition. In Table 10.1, I map how we used Siemens’s five knowledge types, with how we interpreted them as performing arts education, and then how this manifested in the BAPP (arts) and MAPP curriculum design.

Lenses

Across Siemens’ types of knowledge, the PP programs focused most on the last three: Knowing TO BE, Knowing WHERE, and Knowing TO TRANSFORM. These types of knowing brought deeper meaning and values to students’ already well-established sense of Knowing ABOUT and Knowing TO DO gathered from their previous training. In addressing TO BE, WHERE, and TO TRANSFORM, we used three lenses, introduced to students as approaches for considering one’s professional practice. The first lens was reflection and reflexivity, looking at their existing skills for reflecting on and in action (Mumford and Honey 1986). The second lens

TABLE 10.1  Siemens’s five knowledge types within the BAPP (arts) and MAPP curricula. Knowledge type

Siemens explanations/ Knowing knowledge (2006, 10)

Translation to performing arts

BAPP & MAPP (PP programs)

Knowing ABOUT

News events, basics of a field, introductory concepts in a discipline.

Students are primarily introduced to this type in their training prior to starting the PP.

Knowing TO DO

Drive a car, solve a math problem, code a program, conduct research, manage a project.

Explicitly taught/learnt through technique classes and presentations in “schools.” Explicitly taught/learnt through technique classes and presentations in “schools.”

Knowing TO BE

To embody knowledge with humanity (doing blended with consistency and daily existence), to be a doctor or psychologist (mannerism, professionalism), to be an ethical person, to be compassionate, to relate, to feel. To find knowledge when needed, Web search, library, database, an organization, and increasingly, knowing who to approach for assistance.

Often left to be primarily learned/taught in the practical experience of professional employment.

To tweak, to adjust, to recombine, to align with reality, to innovate, to exist at levels deeper than readily noticeable, to think. The “why of knowing” resides in this domain.

Vital skills usually learnt through trial and error during professional employment.

Knowing WHERE

The PP programs structured the learning environments as a web across the students’ lived experiences suggesting Knowing everyWHERE across the doing of their lives (from joining group notifications for when auditions happen, to studying the work of directors they wanted to work with, to asking for help from co-workers with administrative systems backstage, or in the coffee shop). The PP programs positioned Knowing TO TRANSFORM as part of the on-going process of having a professional practice. We wanted to support students in discovering their own techniques for seeing learning and knowing as on-going movements of growth. The programs offered the example of new technology to demonstrate on-going processes of realignments. Alongside this, we built ethical reflection into the course as a tool for engaging with change and decision making.

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Knowing TO TRANSFORM

Assumed learning usually gathered during professional employment.

Students are primarily introduced to this in their training prior to starting the PP. PP built on Knowing TO DO by asking students to use reflective tools to consider the value of their doing. The PP programs situated Knowing TO BE in the practical of the students’ practice through asking students to reflect on their everyday experiences as sites of learning (from working in coffee shops to auditions to starting work on a cruise ship).

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was the connectivist notion of networked learning. We encouraged students to see how networks (in the performing arts) are developed through working alongside and in collaboration with other professionals (Downes 2005). It also brought students to a recognition of the importance of emotion and personal support networks in terms of their professional activity. The third lens was looking at new technologies and their ethical contexts including through reflecting on positioning of Self in wider social media contexts. This involved starting a blog on a platform outside the university firewall. In doing this, students considered their positioning of themselves, and how they had positioned themselves online in the past. This lens of technology and ethics raised theoretical questions for the students about truth, representation, and inclusion through the practical nature of the internet becoming a kind of extended resume/curriculum vitae. Using the lenses to look at their professional practice and training thus far seemed to give many students a sense of owning their becoming and belonging in the field rather than seeing themselves as representing what their technique teachers wanted in order to enter the field. It led to students recognizing the importance of their own personal and cultural distinctions in the essence of their professional practice. We positioned these lenses (reflection and reflexivity, networks of support and information, and new technologies and their ethical contexts) as being key tools for a professional artist’s ability to continually direct their own growth and flow of knowledge, to be a life-long learner through the activity of their artistic practice. We wanted to wean students off seeing learning as a process of being accepted and told what to do by a “higher authority.” Blogs

In the initial BAPP (arts) redesign, we drew specifically on blogs as a method of being in conversation with students while they were in the field. Blogs allowed us to be reflecting, listening, and challenging students in asynchronous conversations, acknowledging different time zones and schedules. Blogs also afforded us proximity to the students’ practice by using Web 2.0 to go to where they were, rather than the students leaving their artistic environment to come to us in the university schoolroom. Students started blogs as part of the first activity of the course in Module One and these were kept up across the period of their whole study. Initially, in 2009, we hoped that the very act of beginning their program of study by setting up a blog meant that students had a practical task, to learn how to do something new (making the blog) through which they could witness their own learning strategies and approaches. During the 12.5 years I was with the program, more and more students arrived familiar with making a blog, but the activity still seemed to work for students as an exercise in observing their application of their learning strategies.

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Once set up, a blog became a front door to each member of the learning community. We saw the student’s blog as a portal for inviting others into their artistic interests and learning processes. At times a blog became a holding space for a student’s own reflective tracking of their processes through the course. As tutors on the program, we had our own blogs on which we wrote posts informed by reading the issues and reflections on the blog posts across the learning cohorts. We saw Web 2.0 as allowing us to have a community of learners all individually in the field but linked in a network through blogs. Students across the world could form relationships with each other. We wanted to trust the emergent nature of knowledge by using the blogs to network the BAPP learning and teaching community. The use of blogs caused students to stop seeing learning as a singular one directional knowledge flow from teacher to student. The networked nature of the blogs meant that the loudest voice might not be a faculty member. More than once, a charismatic student garnished many more engagements (views and comments) than a faculty post. But this was the heart of the open professional learning environment we saw Web 2.0 offering us. We trusted our faculty presence within the community demonstrated that content was useful (such as the content of a charismatic student), but context was also key to learning. We trusted that even if students had gorged themselves with content (information), they would come back to the context our posts offered through our faculty experience and guidance.10 We felt context was a key element of education that traditional Western systems undervalue (Deloria and Wildcat 2001). We wanted students to witness their own and others’ multiple realizations of learning a professional artist engages with and to develop strategies for contextualizing and valuing the professional setting information they encountered. Siemens (2006) underlines a multiplicity when suggesting four realizations of learning: Transmission, Emergence, Acquisition, and Accretion. Transmission—learning as courses: The “learner is brought into a system, and through lectures and course is exposed to structured knowledge” (Siemens 2006, 34). We saw this form of learning as one the students were overly familiar with and which was not particularly reflective of the kind of learning realities they would meet in the professional performing arts field. However, the blogs offered a system of transmission, that was an alternative to a traditional system of all in-person lectures and classes to transmit information. Emergence—learning as cognition and reflection: “The learner acquires and creates (or at minimum internalizes) knowledge” (Siemens 2006, 34). Siemens suggests this requires competence and critical thinking. In the case of the BAPP (arts) program, the introduction and application of the three lenses (reflection and reflexivity, networks of support and information, and new technologies and their ethical contexts) were designed to encourage the students in developing reflective awareness of their emergent learning in the field. The blogs were where they could discuss this emergent learning with others.

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Acquisition—learning as continual/embedded process: Learning is “exploratory and inquiry-based” (Siemens 2006, 35). The new BAPP (arts) format focused on supporting students in developing and noticing how they used “research” strategies in their existing practices—how they had started a blog, were finding auditions, went about learning a new song, or worked out what to eat on the tour bus. This design aimed to underline that the learner was in control of defining needed knowledge through processes that were linked to personal artistic motivations and interests. Accretion—learning as self-directed: As learning becomes “a function of the environment, the learner forages for knowledge when and where it is needed” (Siemens 2006, 35). We suggested to the student the sites of their everyday life were learning sites—the principle of work-based learning. We used the blogs as a playground for students to process, share, and discuss this form of learning, seeing each blog post as an opportunity for the student to step back and reflectively witness their practice. [The course] allowed me to start becoming more aware of my own practise. I learnt to be self-aware and self-critical through blogging and keeping a reflective journal, which enabled me to explore what I find important in my practise and where and how I want my career to develop… I used my reflection on my practise to see what I wanted out of my future, …this led into an interest in [my inquiry topic of] artistic activism. (Student blog post reflection, 2017) Although as a university course BAPP (arts) was by nature a closed system, we moved activity as much as possible outside the university (fire) walls to open sites (such as Blogspot and WordPress). We went on to include students in creating special interest groups (SIGs) with each other on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter from 2014/15, as well as group Skype calls from 2015/16 onward. We followed the students’ lead on the platforms we engaged which changed from cohort to cohort, allowing the BAPP to shift and respond as different Internet platforms became part of the public psyche. Our dream scenario was that the blog community conversation would extend from current BAPP students to BAPP applicants, to BAPP graduates, and to other professionals present in the fields of our students. We wanted the university to exist in the discourse, in the exchange rather than existing as a physical building. Openness: The Internet, Open Access, and the Performing Arts

Often students came to the program with a training that had left them hyperaware of the notion of competition and a sense of close protection of any information they had. This was at odds with the connectivism knowledge

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network pedagogy with which we shaped BAPP (arts) that recognized that for information to flow it must be shared. Also, as opposed to their training, out in the professional field (on a cruise ship learning a part, in rehearsal for a pantomime or Nutcracker, or looking for auditions), students were finding they relied on openness, word-of-mouth, the generosity of other cast members, or the collaboration of crew. They were reporting back to us a working culture of openness and sharing to create the best show possible. We wanted to model this in the pedagogical framework of the new BAPP. It resonated with our knowledge of educational open access frameworks. Wiley, Bliss, and McEwen (2014) suggest openness is the only means for engaging with education. This method of open access that the Internet has enhanced in general has long been a primary method of informal learning across the performing arts, particularly performing arts associated with the African diaspora (DeFrantz 2004; Wells 2020). Wiley (2014, n.p.) articulates the experience I have had being a part of a tap, or Hip Hop, or capoeira, or drum circle that are “… freely shared and come with permission to engage with Wiley’s 5Rs: ‘to retain, reuse, redistribute, revise, and remix.’ ” Sandy steps into the cipher/circle propelled by the drop of the beat in the song. The movement of Sandy’s chest and hands are so familiar to me—that’s Sandy’s kind of kick of the beat, upper body hitting it, feet circling and head looking up, down, side, side. I instinctively clap my hands as Sandy’s hip hits another beat in the song and I feel my own hip twitch in empathy. Femi steps in the circle drawn in by the beat of Sandy’s chest and the high hat, cowbell calls of the break in the music. For a moment Sandy and Femi are like one movement as Femi’s chest picks up the beat of Sandy’s chest but then, Femi, open eyed as if surprised by their own body, allows the movement to travel down to the hips and then catches the same rhythm in the knee. We, the people, in the circle can read Femi’s play on Sandy’s movement: a cheeky retention and adaptation of the step and at the same time a respectful acknowledgment of Sandy’s signature that folds into Femi’s new step. The beat suspended in Femi’s bouncing knees reappears with a kind of jump, that the whole circle anticipates, jumping together. We are now a kind of remix of the liquid vibrations that marked Sandy’s solo. And across the act of being a part of the circle my own body is responding in a kind of empathetic revision of the movement and sound before me. I learn the steps and the rhythms through this exchanging. (Akinleye, reflective journal) Thus, coming from the performing arts, I am familiar with Wiley’s 5Rs. Wiley could be describing the learning space of Sandy, Femi, and the circle; whereas Wiley’s 5Rs are theorizing Open Education and Open Education Resources (OERs) made prevalent by the democratizing dissemination of the

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Internet. It could be argued that the concept of Open Access on the Internet was already experienced as a concept in the performing arts: in my Hip Hop circle for instance. As performing artists, the concept of exchange, networks, and ideas growing from one interpretation to another, the revision of, restaging of, remixing of, is the creative process. Thus, again, the concept of how the Internet works as a space where this kind of exchange can happen was not a new concept to the performing arts. The leap that the new BAPP (arts) attempted to take was to recognize the traditional in-person artistic exchange circle (for instance a Hip Hop cipher) and highlight its presence in the vehicle of Web 2.0. We were shaping the program to see how concepts of the creative process and artistic reflection spoke to and informed the new digital space of Web 2.0. We were seeing an exceptional circle (distribution network) on the Internet. We wanted to use distance education using Web 2.0 as a framework for understanding the familiar exchange, respect, and revision that are the existing learning processes in informal professional performing arts settings. We hoped the new BAPP (arts) would validate this kind of heterotopia with a doorway in through open access type format (Foucault 2001). We hoped BAPP (arts) students would become confident in being contributing members of networks beyond the BAPP (arts) learning network. The Distance of Education

Students arrived in the BAPP (arts) program (and their professional fields) with problems finding their own meaning, humanity, and growth beyond the identity they had acquired in the studio space/rehearsal hall of their training. We hoped the BAPP (arts) would support them in being present in their own life-long practices. This meant BAPP (arts), and MAPPs, programs shifted control: students could not expect to arrive in the courses with the faculty telling them what their practice should be. Plainly, it was not possible or desirable to teach BAPP (arts) or MAPPs through directing students. Much of the skill of teaching the courses was developing abilities to hold spaces for students to explore, and to respond swiftly to the student-led directions each semester would take. At first, some students described this shift of power structure as a lack of form and direction to the programs. However, we drew on anarchist pedagogy, collective action, and DIY U theories to contextualize our approach (Kamenetz 2010; Haworth 2012; Fretwell 2020). The same students who reported a lack of direction in the first module often identified a sense of ownership of their own learning as the height of their experience by the third module. The anarchist free-school movement describes the importance of “an oasis from authoritarian control…as a means of passing on the knowledge to be free” (Spring 1975, 55). Using the Internet to follow the students’ learning in the physical environment of their everyday professional practice activity, we were creating a

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transient place of learning between the student and the environment of their professional field. That learning happened in the physical presence of the student rather than in the physical presence of the teacher seemed to be the hardest concept for the main university to understand. Non-iWBL departments assumed we were merely administrators collecting tasks from distant students for assessment. Thus, they had no concept of the complexity, energy, and time it took to maintain the network of learners as it shifted and responded to the moment of students’ practices. We felt emerging professionals needed the university to be present in their practice—on the cruise ship with them, in the wings during rehearsal, alongside them on the tour bus, or beside them in their extra cleaning job or coffee shop employment. We saw how one can be distant when physically brushing against other people in the studio. Then made to feel close to someone through the ring of a Skype call from thousands of miles away. We felt the university needed to be in the places of our students’ practices, in a form that was interactable. Not as the memory of a singing teacher haunting the stage wings of the performance, or the dance teacher’s criticism of a student’s body hovering over their sandwiches on the tour bus, but to be answerable and in dialogue with the student in the vitality of the situation of their artistic practice. Therefore, we saw new technology as challenging what distance in distance education meant: the notion of distance education might be more about how mentally close a student feels to the educational experience rather than how physically close they are. A number of artist-scholars11 taught on the BAPP (arts) and MAPPs or were part of different iterations of re-validating the programs across the 12.5 years I was a part of the programs. We saw the arts, the Internet, and education as mirroring each other in their need to be responsive, contingently in process, collaborative, and open. We saw BAPP (arts) and MAPPs as starting to explore the offer of a pedagogical response to the moment of the 21st century. My experience with BAPP (arts) and MAPPs left me feeling, that for performing arts education, the future must include harnessing new technology to support students in developing a relationship with their practices in situ; to have a relationship with the changing nature of what it means to be present in each other’s lives given Web 2.0. Performing arts education is thus even more clearly challenged to meet the encounter of technology creatively. For the individual the result [of education] is acquired power to produce, to imagine, and to enjoy;—and this is the end of all true education. (Eliot 1913, 57) In this chapter, I am suggesting performing arts education is well positioned to be one of the wayfinders for the responsiveness of education in the current changing 21st century landscape. This includes how performing arts

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tertiary education meaningfully engages with new technologies that are already prevalent in the professional and private lives of our student performers and their audiences. The embodied nature of practice in the performing arts underlines that learning happens within the student becoming the embodied knowledge of their craft. The Internet allows those of us teaching performing arts to be present in the student’s life in myriad transactional ways, not just at the front of the class in the isolation of the practice hall. BAPP and MAPPs were attempting to facilitate the space within the student for their education. The distance of education was not the geographic measure between student and teacher but the embodied and emotional distance between student and their living practice. To close, Dewey expresses my feelings well: I do not wish to close, however, without recording my firm belief that the fundamental issue is not of new versus old education nor of progressive against traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education. (Dewey 1938, 91) This chapter is dedicated with gratitude to Hillary Ball and Linda Robinson who, through their stewardship of London Youth Dance Theatre, gave a 13-yearold me the sense I had a practice long before I had a strong command of any codified technique. Notes 1 MAPP was initiated by Alan Durrant and Lesley Main as single program: Dance Technique Pedagogy on which I advised. It was later adapted for revalidation and expanded to three programs by Helen Kindred and myself when the Institute for Work Based Learning at Middlesex University was absorbed into wider university and these BAPP and MAPP programs moved to the Performing Arts Department (now the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries). 2 That is, doing is thinking. Theory is not suspended in separation from action, which the embodied knowledges developed in the performing arts illustrate. This is following Dewey’s thesis in his work The Quest for Certainty that “ideas are statements not of what is or what has been but of acts to be performed…ideas are worthless except as they pass into action which” give them meaning through the context of the world in which we live (Dewey and Boydston 2008, 111). 3 BA Professional Practice (BAPP), as I am tracing its genealogy here, had various name iterations at different points across the period of 2008 to 2021. These slight name variations reflected different administrative strategies from within the University, as the program was moved from being housed in iWBL, iWBL in School of Arts and Education and the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries. For ease in this chapter, I am referring to the BA program prior the initial rewrite in 2009 as “BAPP” and then the program after the initial rewrite and onward as “BAPP (arts).” 4 Including Spanish flu pandemic, World Wars I and II, radio broadcasting, and common household use of electrical appliances.

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5 For instance, I used my experience working as a resident artist in a school to claim learning about differentiated instruction, something I had learned as a visiting artist delivering arts projects to classes of children who had ad hoc experience with the performing arts. Thus, I could claim learning about differentiated instruction and also cite scholarly texts about the concept of differentiated learning. 6 They could claim their professional training as prior learning, meaning they arrived in the BAPP program with two-thirds of a BA through their professional training and the BAPP allowed them to complete the one-third of remaining credits needed to achieve a BA(Hon). 7 Quote from data gathered in 2012 for an article about the development of BAPP (Bryant et al. 2013). 8 Quotes are used with students’ permission. Quotes collected under Middlesex University Ethics Board but are also from public blogs, thus a matter of public record. 9 Iterations of the BAPP development to BAPP (arts) included the work of Alan Durrant (originally), Peter Bryant and Bakr Zade (from 2012–15), Rosemary McGuiness (2013–15), Paula Nottingham (from 2013–17), and Helen Kindred (from 2016 to present 2022). 10 My blogs became an archive (http://adesolaa.blogspot.com and https://adesolamapp.blogspot.com), documenting discussion and exchange from 2009 to 2021. 11 Alan Durant, Peter Bryant, Rosemary McGuinness, Paula Nottingham, Lesley Main (MAPP DTP). Then, more recently, BAPP (arts) and three MAPPs have been developed by Helen Kindred who co-wrote with me for their validation (2016/17) when they moved from iWBL into the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries (formally the Schools of Performing Arts).

References Bryant, Peter, Adesola Akinleye, and Alan Durrant 2013. “Educating the Early Career Arts Professional Using a Hybrid Model of Work Based Learning.” Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning 3 (1): 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1108/ 20423891311294957. DeFrantz, Thomas. 2004. Dancing Revelations. Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press. Deloria, Vine Jr., and Daniel R. Wildcat. 2001. Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. New York, NY: MacMillan and Company. Dewey, John, and Jo Ann Boydston. 2008. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Downes, Stephen. 2005. “An Introduction to Connective Knowledge.” https://www. downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034. Durrant, Alan, Garth Rhodes, and David Young. 2009. Getting Started With University-Level Work Based Learning. Hendon, UK: Middlesex University Press. Eliot, Charles W. 1913. The Tendency to the Concrete and Practical in Modern Education. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company. Foucault, M. 2001. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, UK: Routledge. Fretwell, Nathan. 2020. “Anarchist Education and the Paradox of Pedagogical Authority.” Education Philosophy and Theory 52 (1): 55–65. Haworth, Robert H. 2012. Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

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Kamenetz, Anya. 2010. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Lerman, Liz. 2011. Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mumford, Alan, and Peter Honey. 1986. Manual of Learning Styles. Berkshire, UK: Peter Honey Publications. Nottingham, Paula, and Adesola Akinleye. 2014. “Professional Artefacts: Embodying Ideas in Work-Based Learning.” Journal for Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning 4 (1): 98–108. https://doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-09-2012-0036. Schupp, Karen. 2020. Dance Education and Responsible Citizenship: Promoting Civic Engagement Through Effective Dance Pedagogies. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2009. The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Siemens, George. 2006. Knowing Knowledge. Self-published: George Siemens. Spring, Joel H. 1975. A Primer of Libertarian Education. Montreal, Canada: Black Rose Books. Wells, Charmian. 2020. “‘Harlem Knows’: Eleo Pomare’s Choreographic Theory of Vitality and Diaspora Citation in Blues for the Jungle.” Dance Research Journal 52 (3): 4–21. Wiley, David. 2014. “The Access Compromise and the 5th R.” Improving learning, Opencontent.org, March 5, 2014. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221 Wiley, David, T.J. Bliss, and Mary McEwen. 2014. “Open Educational Resources: A Review of the Literature.” In Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, edited by J. Michael Spector, M. David Merrill, Jan Elen, and M.J. Bishop, 781–90. New York, NY: Springer.

11 PERFORMING HARTFORD A Community Turns Its Head Rebecca K. Pappas

It is Saturday night and you are sitting in the auditorium watching the dance department performance that you have arranged and directed. Arien, an artist you’ve invited to campus, is performing. Arien faces the downstage left corner and their foot extends slowly toward the diagonal. They whip into a turn initiated by their windmilling leg and their body follows, righting themselves into an erect posture with circular arms. The movement vocabulary is long and extended, reaching out into space. They are improvising, finding center and power in a world that has been bombarding them and throwing them off kilter. Arien is a beautiful dancer, charming, talented, and known for being provocative and confrontational. Again and again, you have been encouraged to take risks in your role as a faculty member inviting artists to campus. You are told to “think big” and “outside the box.” That said, you are not always sure what “big” looks like—for you it means systematically working to support artists in the small, chronically underfunded city where campus is located. Arien paces powerfully across the stage, crossing to the piano where a musician is playing. They stick their face into a live feed camera and appear larger than life against the lighting racks on the upstage wall. You hear Arien’s voice through the speakers, “you like to surveil Black people, huh? You like to watch us, well fuck you. Fuck you.” Your whole body goes tense and you look to your left. The college president is in the audience, the dean of students is sitting nearby. What do you do next?1 ****

DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-14

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Seeing Our City

In her (as yet) unpublished master’s thesis Orienting Ourselves to See: Mapping Nested Dance Ecologies as Curatorial Practice in New England, Hartford, Connecticut, choreographer and curator Deborah A. Goffe begins by taking a movement direction from the choreographer Deborah Hay and suggesting that we “turn our fucking heads” (Hay cited in Goffe 2018, 8). By turning our heads, we can re- and newly see the world. We can revisit and re-understand how we have defined artistic presentation including terms like “quality” and received notions of artistic trajectory. Goffe writes “notions of quality are contingent on a set of shared values that must be learned in order to be upheld. Existing presumptions about quality exist only insomuch as we agree (consciously or otherwise) to rehearse a prescribed way of seeing or perceiving” (2018, 5). These received ways of seeing have led to orthodoxy, reinforcing gendered, sexed, ableist, and racist biases (Calienes cited in Goffe 2018, 4). What is and is not an artistic career is also worth a turn of the head. As someone who went to college for dance in the late 1990s, I was taught that a career would mean successfully auditioning for a major dance company and performing in the work of a nationally known choreographer in one of the nation’s largest cities (preferably New York) before striking out on my own. Yet despite considerable successes, no one who I went to college with has had that particular career. In fact, as the dance company model has become increasingly obsolete, only a small minority of performers follow this trajectory. It is pivotal that educators re-see the life of an artist. Goffe (2018) points out that in smaller cities like Hartford, without established pathways for success, artists build careers by placing themselves within nests of care and local ecosystems that support and sustain their work. Goffe is part of my nest and I have known her since she and her close friend Abena Koomson-Davis began Drink to This!—a coffeehouse and performance series for teenage and twenty-something artists. Its first home was on the Trinity College campus where I now work. I appeared in dances choreographed by friends and met other young artists living in the area. It was a glimpse of how artistic work unfolds within cohorts and communities. When I had the opportunity to return to Hartford via a job at Trinity it felt like kismet. I envisioned my position, whose stated focus was “performing arts and community,” as an opportunity to support Hartford artists and to bring students to know, see, and engage with the cultural life of our city. The Performing Hartford initiative grew from these seeds. In spring 2020, when the world moved online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls emerged for those with access to resources to support artists who were out of work, facing canceled gigs and lost income. After the May 2020 uprisings, conversations around the intersection of payment, racial justice, and equity took on increased urgency. A newly formed collective of

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dancers, dancemakers, and presenters initiated a call to action aimed at institutions and other gatekeepers, acknowledging that many of us are simultaneously artists and presenters, as well as occupying gray space between. In June 2020, “Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance,” was released, containing a wealth of detailed suggestions for equitable relationships between artists and institutions. Hundreds of artists, arts workers, and presenters showed up to a Zoom/ YouTube conversation about how to reform a field that has been built upon assumptions of scarcity. The group outlined principles for action including: resource sharing, power sharing, and decolonizing of wealth; honesty, transparency, and accountability; and attention to the mutual needs of artists and presenting institutions (Creating New Futures 2020).

Performing Hartford: Digital Series

It was within this environment that I began to (re)imagine my courses for the Fall 2020 semester. My chair, Michael Preston, spurred my thinking with a simple question. “Couldn’t we use this as an opportunity to get money into the hands of artists in Hartford?” It was this provocation that led to the creation of Performing Hartford, a half-credit community learning course where students visited, on a weekly basis, with artists based in the city of Hartford or the Hartford region. It was a class and a digital performing arts series, and has since grown into an umbrella encompassing Hartford-centered arts initiatives in the Theater and Dance department. It is a way to give my students a window into these nests of care. In the following pages, I detail the class and its philosophical groundings, unpack the ways the initiative continues to grow, and analyze some of the challenges I’ve faced doing this work at my institution. It goes without saying that the pandemic has led to unprecedented loss and a contraction of opportunities across myriad arenas including the performing arts. Yet, it has also afforded extraordinary change and allowed for the emergence of projects that would not have otherwise occurred. Activist brown suggests that intentional adaptation, “staying purposeful in the face of constant change,” is a way of manifesting a more just world (2017, 69). Performing Hartford grew from collective reimagining about the roles of institutions in the arts, as well as the sudden rejiggering that occurred when digital technologies that had once seemed inaccessible became common place. Barriers to entry eased and radical intimacy was possible across time, space, and distance. In Performing Hartford, as well as the other community learning courses that I teach, I aim to take an asset-based approach. Asset-based community development focuses on the strength and assets of a community as a basis for social change rather than its needs or deficits. Often these resources may not

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hold monetary value or may be unseen or under-valued in a mainstream economic context (Garoutte 2017). Hartford’s artists and artistic community are one of its most valuable resources. At Trinity, there has historically been an insidious narrative of Hartford as lack. While it is true that Hartford, a city of approximately 120,000 (US Census 2020), faces poverty, drug-related violence, and divestment, there is also wild diversity, cultural vibrancy, and a long history of world-class arts education. There are legacy cultural institutions, ample public gathering spaces, and interested arts agencies trying to shift their investments and provide more direct support for artists and their work. Trinity professor, historian, and cultural critic Baldwin (2021) outlines our binary history of engagement, with the college alternately turning outward to promote and fund neighborhood “improvement,” then inward, closing its gates. In both of these scenarios, the subjectivity and needs of our neighbors were not the central concern (Baldwin 2021, Chapter 2). Performing Hartford was co-sponsored by The Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER), an umbrella organization for community learning at Trinity College. Their model emphasizes mutual benefit, seeking out places where the learning needs of our students and the interests of the community align. Community engagement in the arts is often a tricky balance as my students are not necessarily prepared to create art with and for community members. Simultaneously, volunteering to manage parking for ten hours, as we’d done at a large local art event in fall 2019, did not provide the learning opportunities I was seeking on their behalf. Part of Performing Hartford’s success is that it hit upon mutual benefit, finding alignment between the needs of my students, the community partner, the participating artists, and the campus at large. Sageseeker Productions, the community partner for the Performing Hartford project, is an arts presenting organization founded by Jasmin Agosto, a Trinity alumna. Sageseeker stages collective art events that celebrate artists who identify as Black women, women of color, non-binary, and queer people of color. I did not know Jasmin before Summer 2020 and had to reach out to her multiple times via email and Instagram before she agreed to schedule a meeting. I approached Jasmin with a vision for the course but was prepared to listen, reimagine, and even cancel the program depending on her feedback. While she did not respond to me until a mutual acquaintance encouraged her, I believe that my roots in Hartford as well as my attendance at the same performing arts high school as Jasmin (many years prior) helped build my credibility. I encourage faculty members doing work in their community to move with humility, to learn the local landscape, and attend events regularly before they try to organize their own. Those of us in university arts departments often function as de facto gatekeepers, opening the doors for artists representing our aesthetic and

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disciplinary interests and keeping others outside the enclosure. These decisions can replicate received notions of “quality” and reinscribe inequitable notions of access as delineated above. By inviting Jasmin to program the series I redistributed this role, entrusting it to someone with their own set of values as well as a knowledge of and relationships with local artists that I did not have. Community arts specialist Cleveland (2011) outlines pitfalls and strategies that have been successful for community-oriented arts work. He says, “Successful practitioners say over and over that their most important resources are relationships. Effective community-based work is about partnership” (2011, 9). In Hartford, where there is distrust between the city and the college, collaborating with someone who has deep community ties has been paramount. Jasmin programmed the course, selecting and inviting local musicians, playwrights, choreographers, poets, and visual artists to be part of the series.2 After she made initial contact, I would follow up with an email introducing myself and explaining the structure and aims of the class. I tried to be clear that this was not a commission and that they should think sustainably, offering whatever information or work seemed fair for the modest fee and 60-minute time frame. The digital space created an unusual ease and equality between the students and the artists. Our Zoom boxes were of equal size and everyone was comfortably at home. The barrier to entry was low and we could engage on our own terms. Performing Hartford was a half credit class that met once a week in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. During 2020–21, our campus had abbreviated semesters and the course was arranged into ten meetings:

• One introductory class including the idea of “Turning your head” and asking students to consider what they imagined “an artist” to be.

• One class working through ideas in Goffe’s thesis including rhizomatic growth and the Undercommons, which became foundational throughout the semester.3 • Six artist visits spread throughout the semester. • One class introducing and brainstorming around final projects and revisiting the question of what an artist is. • One class sharing final projects.

While the class met on Zoom, we shared the broadcast of the artists’ visits via Facebook live, publicizing them in advance on CHER’s Facebook page and Instagram accounts. In this way, we could amplify the voices and presence of Hartford-area artists. While each session had 8–20 people watching it synchronously, we often had hundreds and sometimes thousands of views in the weeks following the presentations. This proved to be mutually beneficial for Hartford artists and our small Theater and Dance department, which is striving to increase visibility.

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Rather than an ethos of “professionalism,” there was an emphasis on care and vulnerability as many artists told us about how they earn money, what inspires them, and how their work has evolved over time. Daisy Infantas, who recently danced in Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, drives to Fairfield (the state’s richest county) to babysit and walk dogs. Mixashawn Rozie, a musician and a Trinity alumnus, wove together music and storytelling, emphasizing the indigenous legacies of the region, and telling us about a dolphin who made its way into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Jasmin began her lecture with childhood pictures, explaining how her church upbringing and experiences at Trinity working on the Trinity International Hip Hop festival had led her to become a curator and producer. In creating the class, Jasmin and I tried to embody course values including moving slowly and with care, being modest and transparent in our aims, listening, and meeting people where they were. I shared the complete budget for the course with Jasmin and she immediately suggested a redistribution of resources, paying herself less so that the artists could be paid more—making our structure more horizontal and less vertical. brown (2017) suggests fractals as a model for social change, arguing that what we do on a small scale radiates outward, replicating itself at larger and larger proportions. Over the course of the semester, I saw overlapping nests of care emerge—between the students, amongst the students and the artists, between the artists who participated, and with the larger community of the college, including many staff and faculty who watched the programming online. For students, the course was a chance to understand themselves as part of the city and to consider the realities of life as a professional artist. Goffe (2018) points out that for artists working in smaller cities like Hartford, careers unfold in surprising and various forms because there are not necessarily road maps to follow. She discusses how Hartford artists have consistently been positioned in contrast to or in competition with artists in nearby cities like Boston and New York (Goffe 2018). For many of my students it was new to imagine that artists are among us, participating fluidly in local, regional, national, and international conversations. The more openly we can discuss the wide range of artistic lives with our students, the more informed they will be as future creators and audiences. Coming Home and On-Site

In Fall 2021, Trinity returned (almost) exclusively to in-person classes. While my department hoped to continue the work of engaging Hartford artists initiated in Performing Hartford, the college was no longer supporting online classes. In addition, there were continually changing restrictions, which made it challenging to invite artists to campus, to hold public-facing events, or to take students out into the city. The digital form of this course had been part of

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its alchemy—we could invite community “into” our space without the barriers of parking, vaccine cards, or tickets. Jasmin and I began to imagine events that would welcome neighbors onto campus. We pivoted the Performing Hartford initiative, letting it evolve into a performing arts series rather than a standalone course. In Fall 2021, Trinity hired Jasmin to curate Coming Home, a performance during Homecoming weekend meant to celebrate alums of color and to welcome Hartford artists and audiences to campus. This event was symbolic as it was the first public event in our theater spaces since the pandemic began. Jasmin opened with an invocation that welcomed us back into the theater and connected to the spirit of the college from the past and into the future. The performance featured Mixashawn Rozie, mentioned above, and Kerry Kincy, a dance alumna who told me how she had often felt shut out from the department. Coming Home was a way to pivot homecoming weekend, using it to envision what Trinity could be, rather that reinscribing historical narratives. Inviting curators from your community, students, and alumni to lead on-campus arts programming is a way to share power, interrupting received scripts about who we are, what art we value, what alumni we value, and who sets the agenda and the tone for arts on campus. Hartford is a city whose population is roughly 44% Latinx, 37% Black, and 30% white (these overlapping numbers are accounted for by people who identify in more than one of these categories) (US Census 2020). The Performing Hartford initiative centers artists of color and their experiences as a way of supporting the mission of Sageseeker Productions, centralizing the voices of our neighbors, and “re-seeing” the cultural resources of the city. Trinity College is approximately 60% white students from the US, 20% students of color from the US, and 20% international students (Trinity Factbook 2020). Despite this, campus culture sometimes emphasizes Trinity’s roots as a bastion of white, male, upper-class privilege rather than reflecting who we are now. It is imperative that programming and curriculum push against this narrative, celebrating perspectives that more closely align with those of our students, inviting us to re-see our own community. In designing On-Site, our Spring 2022 dance concert, I considered how to blur, bring into relation, and collapse perceived boundaries including: campus/city; student/professional; novice/expert. I also imagined how our “faculty dance concert” could become a Performing Hartford event that supported and promoted artists from the region. This was the first faculty dance concert I directed at Trinity College, and I was encouraged to use it as an opportunity to “show the campus what I do.” After discussions with Jasmin and the chair of Theater and Dance, I structured the concert as a triptych, with three Hartford choreographers creating a piece for student performers and showcasing their own professional research.

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On-Site was created via an intensive January course, Dance Performance Studio, that welcomed both experienced and novice dancers to rehearse for 30 hours a week over the three weeks. This rehearsal period led directly into the concert, which took place the second week of the spring semester. I was one of the three participating choreographers, and I invited Arien Wilkerson, a Hartford native based in Philadelphia, and Ginette Christie, a krump dancer from a northern suburb of Hartford, to participate in the concert. I was attracted to Arien because of the experimental projects they are making around site and history in Hartford. I was impressed with a talk and field trip they had done with my first-year students in the fall semester and was intrigued when they told me how eager they were to make a work for student dancers, something they had not yet been invited to do. I knew that Arien would stretch the students and create something beautiful and provocative. Ginette has taught Hip Hop at Trinity intermittently and is a talented and highly physical performer. She had begun choreographing and showing her work around the city and I was intrigued to see what she might create for a proscenium stage. I also knew her piece would be demanding, energetic, and attractive to potential student participants. Hip Hop has a strong history in Hartford and on campus, where the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival is a cornerstone of our artistic life.4 The Dance Performance Studio was one of the most joyful and engaged teaching experiences of my career. Each day began with a technique class led by the three artists in rotation. After a lunch break, we returned for rehearsal slots, with each of 13 students performing in two of the three dances. Simultaneously, myself, Arien, and Ginette were working to build professional pieces that would be included in the concert. The studios were full, and students were jubilant and energetic; supporting each other in class; initiating independent practices; showing up early to warm up; and taking seriously the arts of rehearsal and performance. Many of these students were new to dancing in a class environment and this project asked them to dive into the deep end, building an ensemble with one another, and a connection with Ginette and Arien. In student evaluations, they discussed how they learned to take risks, respect themselves, care for their community, and be inspired. Like the digital Performing Hartford course, Dance Performance Studio offered a window into the “real lives” of artists, modeling habits of community and care. On-Site was completely sold out and well attended by Trinity folx as well as many Hartford residents who do not regularly attend events on campus. I heard from peers and neighbors how exciting it was to see a broad diversity of artists and students dancing so fully and with so much joy. Many students told me this was one of the best experiences of their college career. I continue to be proud of the complexity and the rigor of the concert we produced and the depth and authenticity of the dancing. The concert felt like a celebration of our community, and I want to keep this close because in the months following

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the concert, the difficulties have threatened to eclipse the beauty. It is my hope to hold them both together. Policing the Perimeter

At Trinity, racism is set within a framework that positions Trinity students as white, safe, and internal, and Hartford residents as non-white, dangerous, and external. Baldwin (2021) writes how Trinity’s policing of Hartford ignores student crimes that occur on campus in order to focus on imagined or overblown criminal activity perpetrated by neighbors. This dichotomy of safe versus dangerous is used to justify a discounting and dehumanizing of Hartford residents. Goffe, drawing from Harney and Moten (2013), discusses enclosures as false boundaries erected around aggregated resources. The role of the colonizer is to defend the resources, keeping others away and painting their own aggression as self-defense. Those outside the enclosure must comply and self-correct in order to be allowed within. To be within the enclosure is to accept an indebtedness that cannot (and is not meant) to be repaid (Harney and Moten cited in Goffe 2018). Our campus is surrounded by an iron fence, which serves as a material and metaphorical boundary. During their time on campus Ginette and Arien both experienced harassment and policing in various forms. For Ginette, it centered in part on her ID. She was scheduled to teach at Trinity in the coming term and was entitled to an ID that would let her independently access the buildings where we were rehearsing. When Ginette, who had possessed an ID in the past, walked into the library to get a new one, the workers gave her a hard time, insisting they could not find her in the system. I had to call back and speak to them, reminding them she is a Trinity faculty and should be afforded concomitant respect. Once her profile from a previous term was located (she had last taught in Spring 2020) they insisted she had to pay to get a new ID, funds she was not easily able to produce. Despite our best efforts, she repeatedly found herself locked out of buildings in the January snow, calling and texting to be let in. This problem was compounded by her unreliable phone and cell service. In “My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK,” a heartbreaking essay, Laymon (2014) writes about the continual harassment he and his students received from campus safety, Poughkeepsie police, faculty peers, and students during his time at Vassar College. He describes the paradox of his ID, which afforded him resources and access but also cost him more than he could bear. On the Instagram account “@blackattrin,” begun in Spring 2020, Trinity students echo Laymon’s sentiments, describing the many ways they have been harassed and made to feel unwelcome on campus. An anonymous student wrote, “My white friends always talk about how the locals are scary because they commit crime/do drugs. But I watch these same people steal,

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damage property and inhale insane amounts of cocaine every weekend. So who should I really be scared of? The locals or the people down the hall?” (@blackattrin 2020). The term “local” is even used by certain Trinity students as a slur directed at Hartford residents, staff, and students of color. For Arien, a large, male-appearing, Black bodied person, the on-campus surveillance was continual. One night while waiting in a dark cold parking lot for a rideshare to pick them up from campus, they were repeatedly buzzed by campus safety. Officers drove past, shining their light on Arien without engaging them, a shadowy threat. When Arien related this incident to me the next morning we were both aware how often experiences like these turn violent and sometimes deadly. On some level I knew, but did not account enough, for the ways that inviting Ginette and Arien to campus was to subject them to policing of their bodies and personhood. An ongoing reminder that they were within but not of Trinity and its imagined community. While we had chosen artists from the area because of my commitment to showcasing the work of Hartford artists, another institutional advantage was their “localness” meant that we did not provide housing and food. Ginette lives in a town about a 20-minute drive from campus. Before classes started, her car window was smashed and she did not feel comfortable driving to campus. While she might have taken a bus in other circumstances, this was not practical due to COVID-19. Additionally, she was working through a serious injury during the entire rehearsal period leading her to frequently be late and absent as she tried to get treatment with limited transportation and funds. Arien had intended to stay with friends walking distance from campus, but after that house was exposed to COVID-19, they arranged to stay with family, also in a suburb about 20 minutes away. Both artists began taking rideshare services, easily spending $20–60 per day, a huge sum when the total project only paid $2,000 per artist. Like many faculty, I am under pressure to keep project costs low and the idea of spending $4,000 to commission two works already felt beyond what my department was accustomed to, despite the fact that this is a pittance for new works of art. Had we been providing the artists housing, some of these problems might have been avoided. In my work with Arien and Ginette, the asymmetrical resources between them and Trinity was always underneath the conversation. At an institution with an endowment of approximately 780 million dollars, we were struggling to get them $20 for an ID or reimbursements for rideshares. Cleveland points out that significant power imbalances can be a destabilizing force for those seeking to do community-based work: “Another complicating factor has been the imbalance of power and influence that is often present when large organizations from outside the community attempt a collaborative project with smaller local entities” (2011, 8).

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The costs of the rideshares were exacerbated as neither artist had yet received a contract, much less payment for their work. At Trinity, it typically takes two to three weeks (and sometimes more than a month) to process payments once they are submitted. Like many college entities, the arts center is understaffed and overworked and they were not able to get contracts to the artists until mid-January when they’d already been rehearsing for two weeks. Arien and Ginette were spending hundreds of dollars of their own money for rideshares, and I looked for ways to support them, first by advancing them money from my own pocket and then by purchasing Uber gift certificates that they could use to get to and from campus. I am grateful that the chair of Theater and Dance saw clearly and immediately that this was an issue of equity and access that needed to be addressed. He committed to paying me back for these expenditures even if the college did not accept them as “legitimate.” When I submitted those expenses for reimbursement, I did indeed receive pushback, having to explain repeatedly why they were necessary even when they had been approved by my chair. I never received reimbursement for the money I advanced from my pocket. In “Creating New Futures,” the authors are unambiguous about the need for transparent and timely contracts and payments (Creating New Futures 2020). In higher education, there is a scarcity mentality about time as well as money. The long timelines and careless bureaucracies of institutions are seen in stark relief when they encounter working artists who don’t have a steady salary or money to fall back on. At the end of this project, in March 2022, Arien was awaiting the final $250 that Trinity owed them for a speaking engagement associated with the performance. When they did not receive this money promptly, they began repeatedly texting and calling me and emailing staff members at the college including in the community learning and accounts payable teams as well as in the dean’s office. While we were all taken aback by these emails, which did not “follow procedure,” Arien’s messages emphasized that for them this money was not incidental but pivotal to their work as an artist. I did not take seriously enough the devastating and dehumanizing effects of waiting on payments, and in the future, I hope to work with the accounts payable and community learning teams to find ways to pay artists immediately for their work. In both literal and figurative ways, the artists were being asked to wait outside. Amidst these challenges regarding access, transportation, payment, and safety, staff members began to approach me to complain about the artists, especially Arien. Goffe (2018, 23) writes, The terms by which one gains entry to the promised commons is defined by those who govern the enclosure. Those who fail to meet these criteria remain in the surround—at once unseen, regarded as deficient, and feared

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as a threat to the institution’s stature and solidity. As is true of respectability politics, this destabilizing pressure to self-correct and self-manage ensures irreconcilable relationships to systems of governance that generate the terms by which compliance is measured. In this case, the term by which compliance was measured was “professionalism.” There was an underlying narrative forming that Arien was disrespectful, needed to be watched, smelled like drugs, and was unprofessional. The day before the show opened, we held “Bodies as Archive,” a public-facing Zoom session, and Arien smoked pot openly on-screen. As a fellow discussant, I was taken off guard—suddenly I was the policing element. Did I want to say anything? Arien was at home in their house I decided, it was not my business what substances they were consuming. There were no rules in place about this as far as I knew. Within the hour, I received a long, scolding email about the incident. While the author of the email had not watched the discussion they were upset and wanted to register a complaint. I was ordered to speak with Arien, to “control my artist.” The night before, during a dress rehearsal, one staff member was visibly upset because they told me, “Arien had yelled at a student.” After the panel discussion I talked to Arien about both things, feeling that I owed it to the staff to represent their concerns. “Rebecca,” they told me, “pot is legal and I have HIV and a prescription, I’m at home smoking pot.” Arien explained to me that the night before they were in the midst of performing when a student stagehand asked them “what am I supposed to do?” in regards to a microphone cable and an amplifier that needed to be struck from the stage. “Figure it out!” Arien had said tersely. It was an appropriate response to a person who interrupted a performance to ask a question. I believe Arien knew, in a way that I did not, that it was their Blackness and their powerful body that led this student and staff member to react with fearful panic. I regret that I asked Arien to be more gentle and kind with the staff. In hindsight, I appreciate their honesty when they responded, “That’s racist Rebecca. I have a problem with the Black man being asked to be more gentle with the white girl backstage.” I was repeatedly pressured to be the voice of the institution, telling Arien to meet “professional expectations,” that were not named or spelled out anywhere as policy. I did not see, in those moments, how I was enforcing and reinstating enclosures that I intended to break down. Amidst all of this, Arien and Ginette were performing beautiful work, thoughtfully collaborating with our students, and bringing new audiences into our theaters. This all came to a head during the final On-Site show when guests of Arien’s were initially kept out of the theater because they did not have proof of vaccination. Arien felt sure they were treated this way because of their association with

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Arien. When they called me in tears minutes before the show, I tried to solve what I saw as the problem, “just ask them to get the card Arien, no problem.” “Rebecca, you’re not hearing me,” they said. “I’m so tired of being watched and policed. Why didn’t someone just come to me? I am right here in the lobby. Instead, they called you to talk to me. It is dehumanizing.” Here it was, the demoralization of a million microaggressions, reproachful emails, sidelong looks. The humiliation of not being spoken to or approached like a full human being. **** And now you are back in the theater. Arien is on stage dancing and in their undulating movements you can see the onslaught of these last six weeks. They have called out a staff member by name, “you like to surveil Black people, huh? You like to watch us?” Here are some things that I did in that moment. After Arien was done performing, I left the theater. I was looking for Arien, but instead saw the staff member whom Arien had named. I explained what had happened, I listened as this coworker tried to work through their own feelings—this person could not or would not understand what part they had played in Arien’s experience. I listened while they insisted that they treat everyone the same and do not see the color of people in the art center. They said repeatedly that it was simply about “being professional,” “being fair.” While we were talking, Arien entered the office and interjected: “Educate yourself! This is institutional racism! It’s Black History Month, learn something n-word!” There I was standing in a small windowless office while an artist I’d invited to campus yelled at a coworker for minutes on end. Arien’s accumulated frustration and hurt was plain—at all the ways the institution had left them out, at all the indignities they had experienced growing up in a city and working on a campus that claimed they were welcome and then acted otherwise. This altercation and Arien’s experience on campus have led to a series of hard conversations and an ongoing discussion about how to redefine and name the mission of our art center and department to make them truly welcoming. I am appreciative that those with power have taken Arien’s experiences seriously, but I believe that change will be incremental. University systems were designed to keep people out, not welcome them in. In Emergent Strategies, brown (2017, 135) writes on Transformative Justice: “Acknowledge the reality of […] harm. Look for alternative ways to address/interrupt harm […] Rely on organic, creative strategies that are community created and sustained. Transform the root cause of violence, not only the individual experience”. I share these individual stories to emphasize that these enclosures were collectively built and must be communally solved. I work alongside righteous colleagues and students who are working to transform our campus and our world and in them I see hope for change.

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Future Forward

I’ve been asked to end this chapter with some recommendations to other faculty trying to undertake this work, so here are some of my thoughts as I limp away from this experience:

• Assess your campus’ relationship with its community. Do the work to un-

derstand the histories of site and artistic production where you live and design programming that attempts to be relevant to your community and your students. • Use an asset-based approach, orient to see and build upon the resources and strengths that already exist in your community and on your campus. • Look for partnerships and find ways to move in solidarity with others. We are often asked, in academia, to attend to individual needs and ambitions. Try to locate yourself within community and look for ways you can operate from a place of collectivity. • Attempt to decenter your own artistic and aesthetic preferences. As you make programming decisions for your department, reconsider metrics of “quality.” Center your community, your students’ histories and interests, the way arts can be an agent for understanding and change on your campus. What practices and stories need visibility and celebration? • If you are new to anti-racist discussions, educate yourself about histories of oppression in your country as well as in your community and on your campus. Attempt to consider ahead of time how issues of race and white supremacy will be unearthed in your programming and look for allies on and off campus who can help you address questions that arise. • Take the time to be clear, prompt, and detailed about contracts, expectations, needs, and payment. Make sure these are understood and agreed upon completely by all parties. • Consider your boundaries. Are you willing to be on call if artists’ encounter challenges and unsafe incidents on campus? Do you have others who can help and support you in this so you are not burned out? • Focus on care, move slowly and modestly, and remember that these relationships and programs are long term. Center sustainability and staying in right relationship to others. • Breathe. Notes 1 This chapter has been prepared in consultation with community partners Jasmin Agosto, Ginette Christie, Deborah Goffe, and Arien Wilkerson. They have all read the chapter and consented to the use of their name and information. 2 Performing Hartford artists in 2020–21 included: Jasmin Agosto, Jolet Creary, Deborah Goffe, Daisy Infantas, Lady Abstract, Cin Martinez, Mixashawn Rozie, Tonille Watkis, Zulynette.

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3 In the introduction to “Orienting Ourselves to See…,” Goffe uses Deuze and Guattari’s work A Thousand Plateaus as a way to understand rhizomatic structures, root systems that grow horizontally and invisibly underground. She suggests these rhizomatic structures can be a model for how artists networks and careers grow and intertwine (Goffe 2018, 17–20). She also draws from Harney and Moten’s (2013) The Undercommons, arguing that artist’s networks are an Undercommons created in response to the false enclosures of artistic systems and institutions. 4 The Trinity International Hip Hop Festival is a seminal event that welcomes Hartford neighbors onto campus. Founded by student organizers in 2006, it celebrates both Hip Hop in Hartford and the global reach of Hip Hop culture and artistic practice including dance, music, visual art, and scholarship. It is student organized, run, and created collaboratively with dozens of community partners. It is a true model of community centered arts programming.

References @blackattrin. Instagram. 2020. Baldwin, Devarian. 2021. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. New York, NY: Bold Type Books. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategies. Chico, CA: AK Press. Cleveland, William. 2011. “Arts-Based Community Development: Mapping the Terrain.” In A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change, edited by Animating Democracy. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts. “Creating New Futures: Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance.” 2020. https://creatingnewfutures.tumblr.com/. Garoutte, Lisa. 2017. “Transforming Student Ideas about Community Using AssetBased Community Development Techniques.” In Promoting Social Justice through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, edited by Delores D. Liston and Regina Rahimi, 143–161. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt2005zc2. Goffe, Deborah. 2018. “Orienting Ourselves to See: Mapping Nested Dance Ecosystems as Curatorial Practice in New England.” Master’s thesis, Wesleyan University. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Laymon, Kiese. 2014. “My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything Okay.” Gawker, November 29. https://www.gawker.com/my-vassar-college-faculty-idmakes-everything-ok-1664133077. Trinity Factbook. 2020. https://www.trincoll.edu/asic/wp-content/uploads/ sites/125/2020/11/Demographics.pdf. US Census. 2020. “QuickFacts Hartford city, Connecticut.” https://www.census. gov/quickfacts/hartfordcityconnecticut.

12 INTEGRATING DISCIPLINES— DISCIPLINING INTEGRATION Opera Curriculum through a Transdisciplinary Counter-Critical Pedagogy Kevin Skelton

The title of this chapter points to a paradox. Even though one could say that the ideological core of Western opera is built upon integrating the arts, current training programs rarely prioritize disciplinary integration in their ­curricula. As a result, many performers lack the necessary skills to thrive in today’s diverse performing arts landscape. In contemporary professional work, performers are increasingly required to exhibit a wide variety of technical and collaborative capacities; often, they are expected to do this while simultaneously exhibiting their unique talents as creative artists. As I have navigated the aesthetic expectations and structural restrictions of today’s performing arts industry, my personal journey as a transdisciplinary performer is indicative of a wider problem in formal opera education: if essential skills in openness, responsiveness, adaptability, collaboration, improvisation, decision-making, and integration are taught at all they are rarely a priority. To directly address this conundrum, I propose a drastic overhaul of opera training through a dynamic and transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy. This approach to education aims to challenge the status quo of operatic practice and pedagogy, prioritize the acquisition and maintenance of agency, and nurture individuals’ well-being and artistry through a holistic and integrative approach. Integrating Disciplines—Historical Contexts

The practice of “integrating disciplines” is indicative of the status quo in operatic pedagogy and practice whereby training and creative processes are dominated by a siloed approach. Such approaches to training and creating persist even though operatic work is generally expected to develop an aesthetic that fuses its multiple elements, to create a unified performance that is greater than DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-15

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the sum of its varied artistic parts. Within such contexts, the actual process of integrating disciplines, particularly as it relates to performers, only tends to occur as an afterthought or, in some worst-case scenarios, does not occur at all. The integrating disciplines approach has a long tradition, even if this is perplexing given opera’s origins within the broader history of the performing arts in Europe. Musicologists generally identify the late 16th century as the period of opera’s “invention” and attribute this to the discussions and activities of the Camerata Fiorentina, a group of artists and intellectuals who first met in 1573, under the patronage of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi (Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca 2019, 310). Their musings about the lost art of ancient Greek Tragedy led to the production of Dafne in 1598, Western Europe’s first operatic “work” (a literal translation of the Italian word opera). The widely accepted notion of opera’s invention has evolved into a creationist mythology that largely ignores the well-established and documented performing traditions of the intermezzi, undocumented performing and improvisatory practices such as commedia dell’arte, and the (often highly costumed and choreographed) religious services of the Renaissance. Nevertheless, and despite all these likely influences, speculations about ancient Greek performing traditions—­what I refer to in this chapter as the “opera myth”—have been the primary springboard for various attempts at operatic (re-)invention and reformation throughout European opera’s 400-year history. For example, the opera myth is intimately linked to Wagner’s Utopian artistic vision in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (Wagner [1849] 1892) as well as more recent conceptualizations of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) by numerous artists and scholars (Büning 2005; M. W. Smith 2007). Regardless of when or in which context it is present, at the core of the archetypal opera myth is a quest to unlock the mysterious power to move and touch people through a profound integration of diverse artistic disciplines. From the perspective of the opera myth, I posit that Western opera has always aspired ideologically to transdisciplinarity in its practice and pedagogy. But has it succeeded? While it is common to focus on qualitative, objective, and/or aesthetic results in opera criticism and scholarship (Levinson 1984; Tanner 1998; Salzman and Desi 2010; Thom 2011), such approaches tend to avoid investigating the processes of opera making and performing when critiquing transdisciplinarity. To facilitate exploration of this vital perspective, I have developed the Performing Arts Disciplinary Continuum. It is important to note that, when I employ the various disciplinary terms, I am focusing specifically on the training, performing, and creative practices in various performing arts traditions. Indeed, when using the term “transdisciplinary,” I am less interested in its assumed goal (understanding today’s world via “the unity of knowledge”) than I am in the processes that can investigate “that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline” (Nicolescu 2002, 44). Put more simply, it is important to understand discipline as both a noun and a verb.

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The Performing Arts Disciplinary Continuum is a simple construct: unidisciplinary ←→ multidisciplinary ←→ interdisciplinary ←→ transdisciplinary ←––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– continuum –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––→

In operatic contexts where integrating disciplines is the primary modus operandi, different disciplines co-exist on stage, but individual performers mostly remain within the comfort zones of their respective specializations (uni- and multidisciplinary). On the other end of the continuum are initiatives that challenge artists to work within the frameworks of other disciplines (interdisciplinary), but also to explore the uncharted areas between, across, and beyond them (transdisciplinary). The primary purpose of the continuum is to identify more clearly the reality of professional practices in opera, where there is no pure archetypal “operaïng”1 at any fixed point on the continuum. A mostly transdisciplinary approach will occasionally require performers to rely on disciplinary-specific training to meet vocal, musical, theatrical, or physical demands. Similarly, the performing practices of individuals in a mostly multidisciplinary approach will always be influenced, altered, or challenged to some degree through the interaction with (or avoidance of) other elements and individuals in the production (even if this is just a heavy wig, cumbersome costume, or steering clear of the show’s temperamental star). If it results in successful creative processes as well as artistic outcomes, then transdisciplinarity also offers possibilities for realizing the opera myth. However, such realization is rarely a solitary grand event. Rather, it emerges as an accumulation of fleeting, powerful, and memorable transdisciplinary moments felt interdependently with co-existing uni-, multi-, and interdisciplinary processes. Disciplining Transdisciplinarity—Contemporary Contexts

Whether in the arts or beyond, it could be generative to acknowledge the dynamics of the disciplinary continuum more explicitly wherever transdisciplinary intentions are present. For the purposes of this chapter, it is most important to connect the ideals, theory, and methodology of transdisciplinarity (Max-Neef 2005; Nicolescu 2010) to operatic practice and pedagogy. In his extensive writing about transdisciplinarity, Nicolescu never downplays the necessity for and value of disciplinarity. He refers to a “big-bang” of disciplines that has expanded to more than 8,000 at present and notes that a “great expert” today can be “totally ignorant in more than 7,999 disciplines” (2012, 11). While such a situation is not in itself problematic, we also need a framework for addressing the complexity of the world that we can currently know in 8,000+ different ways. The phrase “beyond disciplines” was first employed by Nicolescu in 1985 and is indicative of how transdisciplinary research relies deeply on dialogue between specialists and specializations (2010, 18). In

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other words, without disciplinarity there is no transdisciplinarity; without the existence of many specializations, there is no possibility for researching between, across, and beyond them. From this perspective, it feels utterly nonsensical to approach transdisciplinarity as “a new discipline” as has been suggested by Rigolot (2020, 1,3), despite his proposition of transdisciplinarity as a “way of being” having significant merit (see following sections). Specifically in opera, we discover that a nonsensical “disciplining” of transdisciplinarity has become normalized through generalized and reductionist definitions of what opera involves. In the arts industry, opera is stereotypically understood by audiences, presenters, and funding bodies within narrow aesthetic criteria dominated by a disciplinary hierarchy with (loud) singing as the main attraction. In opera education, the situation is often similar, with the added irony of opera or opera studies existing as an appendage to the disciplines of music or musicology. Even though most opera curricula include some classes in acting and/or movement, it is not surprising when meaningful disciplinary exchange is limited in a music-focused environment, particularly if almost all participants consider singing as their primary specialization. As a result, when operatic performers enter non-traditional professional contexts, they face a steep learning curve.2 The traditions and structures in performing arts higher education are becoming ever more problematic as contemporary working conditions increasingly demand that performing artists demonstrate skills beyond unidisciplinary specialization. To respond to these demands, specific companies (often connected with famous artists) have historically provided time and space for select performers to experiment, develop, and/or receive specialized integrative training. For example, several artists, many leading internationally renowned organizations, have garnered significant recognition for their contributions to now-established fields such as physical theater (Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadashi Suzuki, Satoshi Miyagi), Tanztheater (Pina Bausch, Susanne Linke, Crystal Pite), and muziektheater (Heiner Goebbels, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Jennifer Walshe). Examples such as these notwithstanding, specialized integrative training is rare in professional opera where productions engage freelance artists for only limited periods to produce traditional Western repertoire. At the same time, there is a growing interest in unconventional productions, often led by directors who gained renown in theatre and dance including Krzysztof Warlikowski (2012; 2014; 2015), Trisha Brown (1998), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (2017), and Sasha Waltz (2005; 2014). Non-traditional leaders such as these are also frequently engaged to direct productions of newly commissioned works at major festivals and houses like Aix-en-Provence in France (Mitchell 2012) and La Monnaie in Brussels (Waltz 2011). Unfortunately, the type of work expected by such leaders is not addressed in most opera training programs. These curricula generally apply a multidisciplinary approach that prioritizes singing training and offer students

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piecemeal instruction in acting and movement. The hierarchical and insular nature of these approaches can be counterproductive in non-traditional contexts where openness, responsiveness, adaptability, collaboration, improvisation, decision-making, and integration are essential skills. A Transdisciplinary Counter-Critical Pedagogy—Future Contexts

As I began to address the gaps in my own training, I gradually understood that nurturing transdisciplinarity in the performing arts not only requires acquiring a new set of skills, but also learning how to assert one’s agency as a critical and collaborative artist in, between, across, and beyond multiple disciplines and working contexts. Inspired by recent provocations of contemporary critical theorist Harcourt (2018; 2020), I have developed a manifesto for a “countercritical pedagogy” (Skelton Unpublished) that reframes Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed ([1970] 2000) through the lens of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings 1995; Pirbhai-Illich, Pete, and Martin 2017) and an intersectional consideration of contemporary feminist, queer, Marxist, and Indigenous discourses (hooks 1994; 2003; Cajete 1994; 2015; Grande 2015; McLaren 2015). A counter-critical pedagogy supports an ongoing process of reflection and critique in relation to the ever-changing needs of students and teachers in their shared, situated, and varied learning-teaching contexts. Applied to performing arts education, a counter-critical pedagogy is a dynamic approach that aims to nurture an environment where young, curious artists can learn with a sense of belonging, as co-creators of a community that celebrates their uniqueness, values their personal contributions, and where they can flourish in their artistic endeavors. Achieving such lofty goals necessitates a radical inversion of how curricula are organized. In the context of opera, it would require shifting focus away from aesthetic goals—integrating disciplines—toward cultivating productive and sustainable artistic processes—on training transdisciplinarity and disciplining integration. While the word “disciplining” can carry negative overtones, this word can also be understood both positively and productively. Educator and scholar Bryon (2014) has developed a theory of performing that can be captured in the following schema and explanation: PERFORMER PERFORMING PERFORMANCE Who is doing.

Way of doing.

What is done.

Bryon argues convincingly that “performer” and “performance” emerge from “performing” (2014, 60). She explains how, as a bridge between the more static concepts of “performer” and “performance,” “performing” is an active middle field3 that can “collapse the subject and object binary”

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(2018, 40). She calls this an “active aesthetic” and explains how it cultivates a way of working that is rigorous, though it may occasionally appear “undisciplined” (42). If one embraces Bryon’s theory of integrative performing, the idea of disciplining integration quickly becomes a viable alternative to the status quo of integrating disciplines described above. Indeed, disciplining integration points to a processual focus in opera training, one that cultivates a rigorous and dedicated integration of diverse artistic practices and prioritizes the emergence (rather than the achieving) of artistic identities and results. The underlying philosophy of a counter-critical pedagogy can support this shift in focus when guided by a processual understanding of transdisciplinarity (what Bryon’s active middle field might identify as “transdisciplining”). Ironically, many theoretical and descriptive accounts of transdisciplinary work give a lot of attention to results—or rather potential results—what Nicolescu calls “the unity of knowledge” (2002, 44). However, from such an objective perspective, an ebb and flow along the disciplinary continuum is less obviously recognized or appreciated. Perhaps such tendencies are due to the fixed representations that writing produces; nonetheless, some key elements of actually doing transdisciplinary research have been overlooked or lost in the “translation” of writing up. While offering “due respect to the revolutionary thinkers on the object of transdisciplinary thinking,” education professor Gibbs suggests that its discussions are largely concerned with “what is to be thought about, not the nature of the thinking” itself (2017, 52). Noting that “[c]urriculum is semiosis,” Gibbs claims that “pedagogy needs to respect the onto-cosmology of our being developed through different modes of thinking,” with awareness of the ecological, physiological, emotional, and observational constraints we experience (54). He proposes that we “poeticise thinking;” in this way: Our pedagogical practice would be transformative, transdisciplinary and realised as a dynamic semiotic system. These practices need to let students learn about being in the world and, indeed, change what they find. Poetic thinking is transdisciplinary thinking and shifts from concepts that objectify and fall prey to reductionism to those that creatively and connectively point out difference, not to compare against but to celebrate. (Gibbs 2017, 54–55) Abstract conceptualization, through poetic and transdisciplinary thinking, is interesting and necessary when contemplating the future of higher arts education. However, a transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy must strive for greater relevance in several realities if it is to be promoted as valuable and purposeful. Here, I am pointing to the multiplicity of realities at the core of transdisciplinarity’s methodology (Max-Neef 2005; Nicolescu 2010). These include the territories of classical and quantum physics, but also several domains suggested by theoretical physicist Heisenberg ([1941] 2019) including:

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Organic Life, Consciousness, Symbol and Gestalt (communication, art, human communities), and the Creative Forces (religion, illumination, parable). I will discuss some of these levels of reality in more detail below, but first it is important to expand the conceptualization of poetic and transdisciplinary thinking beyond the purely cognitive to include more embodied and ephemeral means of perception. One can facilitate the broadening of perceptive capacities through a transdisciplinary way of being—a pathway that not only promotes emergence between, across, and beyond cognitive, embodied, and ephemeral modes of perception but also aspires to integrate them. Such a way of being opens up awareness to greater complexity and through it one can understand and critique the status quo more deeply while also striving for a symbiosis between opera curricula, its participating artists, and the numerous places where operaïng takes place. Disciplining Integration—Hypothetical Contexts

In future opera curricula, I propose not simply offering more courses in collaboration and integration but rather applying these skills more conscientiously across a broad range of transdisciplinary and interdepartmental initiatives as an artistic and philosophical imperative. Shifting curricular priorities need not diminish the importance of disciplinary specialization, but it should instill in students and teachers a shared integrative philosophy that highlights the importance of personal creativity and professional agency. Importantly, an integrative philosophy is also rooted in a complex and holistic understanding of well-being that I will explore in more detail below. I believe the framework of a transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy in consort with the processual focus of Bryon’s integrative performing theory is an ideal starting point. By combining these frameworks, artists may evade the trappings of predetermined aesthetic aspirations and/or resist emulating artistic identities that easily fit the status quo. In other words, the best way to avoid becoming an easily-replaceable cog in the ever-turning wheels of the whitestream4 opera machine (Patterson cited in Midgette 2021) is to avoid functioning like a cog in the first place. These are important points for creative performing artists because, by prioritizing their own needs and interests, they not only assert their uniqueness and irreplaceability but can also attend more easily to their well-being in a highly demanding profession. Keeping in mind the caveat that developing curricula must always be responsive to specific contexts and participants, I will now enter a hypothetical discussion of what future opera training could include. To begin, it is important to underline certain contextual or structural conditions that could help facilitate curricula development and implementation. I mentioned above the irony that opera, despite its historically grounded aspirations toward transdisciplinarity, is frequently thought of as an appendage to the discipline of music.

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To counter the implicit privileging of music that accompanies such thinking, I propose that future opera curricula be developed in multidisciplinary schools of art or as collaborations between schools or departments covering a range of performing arts disciplines including—but not limited to—dance, theatre, and music. In addition to minimizing assumed or unconscious disciplinary hierarchies, such a learning environment can open up greater potential in training transdisciplinarity by deliberately addressing the balance between one’s artistic aspirations and established artistic and pedagogical traditions. Integrative Living

Bryon’s theory of integrative performing, once adopted into one’s practice, can gradually transform into a philosophy where “integrative performing emerges from integrative living” (Skelton 2019). Prioritizing process, whether in the rehearsal studio or during the travel to get there, highlights the potential of emergence in all that we do. Just as we can relinquish our obsessions with artistic personae and performance results, so too can we critique our fixed ideas of who we are and what we ought to achieve in our lives more broadly. Identities and outcomes do not disappear, but we learn to accept these as secondary to our “pathway.” As Cajete (1994, 55) explains: Pathway, a structural metaphor, combines with the process of journeying to form an active context for learning about spirit. Pathway is an appropriate metaphor since, in every learning process, we metaphorically travel an internal, and many times external, landscape. In traveling a Pathway, we make stops; encounter and overcome obstacles, recognize and interpret signs, seek answers, and follow the tracks of those entities that have something to teach us. We create ourselves anew. Path denotes a structure; Way implies a process. Our processual guide is not arbitrary if we trust our bodies and senses as they respond and relate to our environments and communities. To begin, we must trust our “somatic intelligence”—the wisdom of the body encompassing the physical realm of posture, movement, and overall health and fitness, as well as the spiritual and mental spheres of thought, feeling, sensing, and intuition (Kaparo 2012). Practices that draw on somatic intelligence are often key in developing an integrative performing practice because they can help us bypass excessive rational thinking and bring ourselves to an increased state of wellbeing that facilitates both integrative living and performing. Indigenous philosophy and education extend the concept of somatic intelligence to the wisdom of community, earth, and spirit. As Cajete explains: “When one views the world as a sacred place, a place that reflects a living process and way of being that goes beyond the human sense of experience,

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one deals with Nature in a very different way. It becomes a life- and breathcharged experience” (1994, 88). Cajete has coined this process as a “Theology of Nature” and “spiritual ecology,” but for whitestream artists and academics who struggle to accept multiple levels of reality and/or have atheistic leanings, I propose using “holistic intelligence” as an extension of and complement to “somatic intelligence.” Whatever linguistic representation is preferred, the processes of daily living show us how we can never, and indeed should never deny or ignore our profound interdependence with the cosmos. I posit that awareness and empathy are key in the cultivation of all integrative activities. These activities require disciplined (as in rigorous) practice, but they can also form a virtuous circle of increased well-being, stronger community bonds, more ethical and ecological choice-making, and increased personal, creative/artistic, and professional agency. From the perspective of holistic intelligence, a transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy supports a holistic humanizing of education as it broadens the scope of our artistic practices and pedagogies through a transdisciplinary way of being (as previously mentioned). To discipline integrative living, we can begin through dedicated daily practice. A useful place to start is with our processes of eating and drinking. I can trace my own integrative journey back to reading Eisenstein’s The Yoga of Eating. He describes this as a philosophy and practice (it is explicitly not another diet scheme) and uses the word “yoga” in a very general sense meaning “a practice that brings one into greater wholeness or unity” (Eisenstein 2003, 2). “The central practice of the Yoga of Eating could not be simpler: to fully experience and enjoy each bite of food. From this practice, all the other subsidiary practices of mindful eating are born” (41). Eisenstein’s writing is the exception in the following survey of whitestream literature as he never fails to maintain close allegiances to and faith in both somatic and holistic intelligence. As a segue into the next section on integrative performing, I would like to mention the “circles of presence.” Identified by Rodenburg (2009, xiv) as “three basic movements of energy,” she recollects: What I came to call the First Circle was inward moving, drawing energy towards the self. At the opposite extreme was the Third Circle, in which energy is forced outward towards the world in general. In the Second Circle, energy was focused on a specific object or person and moved in both directions: taking in and giving out. Rodenburg’s conceptual frame emerged through her observation and work with actors and, as such, is highly relevant to the processes of integrative performing (also beyond the arts, as she discusses several professions in sports, law, healing, and religion). Her descriptions of the circles of presence concerning body, breath, and voice demonstrate the depth and breadth of their

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applications in daily life and the power of heightened awareness and empathic presence in the performing arts. Integrative Performing

Realizing the opera myth—that mysterious power to move people through a profound integration of diverse artistic disciplines—requires a commitment to creating and supporting the conditions for emergence, specifically emergence between, across, and beyond the numerous individuals, materials, knowledges, and disciplines involved. Often experienced as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 2014), this state of integrative performing (Rodenburg’s “Second Circle”) should be a foundational motivation in all performing arts pedagogy. To be sure, not all artists aspire to work in transdisciplinary contexts; however, in any performing context, and in addition to flow, integrative performing implies a way of being that also promotes awareness, presence, openness, trust, empathy, care, flexibility, adaptability, play, collaboration, co-operation, and risk-taking. While all higher arts education should prioritize these skills, they are essential in transdisciplinary performing arts contexts where emergence is crucial. “Somatic intelligence” was already mentioned above, and many performing artists do somatic-based practices as part of their ongoing training routines and rituals (yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais Method®, etc.). Despite the fact that these practices often emerged in service of artistic goals (for example Alexander Technique and Klein TechniqueTM), many artists make only indirect links between them and their personal performing arts practices. Since the onus is on individuals to integrate somatics into their artistic work, they can easily remain preparatory or parallel practices (like siloed acting and movement training in opera programs). In my personal experience, Breathwork, developed by Middendorf (1985; 1990), has been the most useful somatic practice in nurturing operatic (that is, transdisciplinary) performing practices. Its focus on breath-body-voice interdependence and the connections it promotes between individuals, other people, and the world around us are strong foundations for integrating the disciplinary skills and techniques of theatre, dance, and singing. In addition, the foundational principles of Breathwork can be a gauge for assessing the utility of practices and pedagogies in which integration of the performing arts is a primary goal. While certain training regimes acknowledge a fluid and complex relationship between breathing and expressive intentions (Grotowski and Barba 2002; Melton and Tom 2003), others prescribe extremely specific approaches to breathing (Lugering 2012; Bryon 2014). Prescribing a way of breathing in any performing pedagogy or somatic practice is reductionist. In certain disciplinary or interdisciplinary contexts, reducing possible artistic outcomes may be necessary or desirable; however, if we are truly aiming to work in

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a transdisciplinary way, it is counterproductive to limit expressive and aesthetic possibilities through a predetermined manipulation of our breathing. The non-prescriptive foundation of Middendorf’s Breathwork has profound implications for performers by opening up the united breath-voice-body to a much broader range of expressive potential.5 The final area I should like to highlight is improvisatory-based training as a means of disciplining integrative performing. Dance artist and artistic researcher Midgelow notes that improvisation’s “significance in the arts is growing and its importance to understanding everyday interactions, pedagogy, well-being, society, business and political action is being recognised” (2017, 121). She notes that the sensibilities dance improvisation can nurture are “inherently transdisciplinary” and include “deep conceptual and applied understanding, self-awareness and an ability to ‘listen’, collaborative know-how and flexibility, within frameworks of embodiment, responsibility, play and criticality” (2017, 122). I believe that incorporating improvisation training in opera curricula is crucial. This is not only because the sensibilities it promotes are empowering for performing artists, but also because performing artists are increasingly required to improvise, both movement and sound, in professional creative contexts.6 Learning and Teaching Researching ←→ Researching Teaching and Learning

A recurring phrase throughout Cajete’s Look to the Mountain is “remember to remember.” He explains: “Through story, humor, and ritual, people ‘remember to remember’ who they are, where they come from, and the spirit they share with all of creation” (1994, 45). In aligning Indigenous education with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Cajete explains: “Freire’s central message about education is that one can only learn to the extent that one can establish a participatory relationship with the natural, cultural, and historical reality in which one lives” (1994, 216). Moreover, by democratizing knowledge and pedagogy “[t]he knowledge and orientation of modern educators are changed from an expert-recipient relationship to one of mutually reciprocal learning and co-creation” (Cajete 1994, 217). Even though experts and Elders have much wisdom to impart, the best teachers are always eager to learn and will most likely thrive in the uncharted waters of transdisciplinary processes and counter-critical pedagogy. In the opening chapter of Transdisciplinary Higher Education, home economist and scholar McGregor reflects on how change is a crucial feature of learning. She notes that, while many discussions of conventional learning theories focus on learning as an internal and individual process, “[p]roponents of transdisciplinary learning assume that learning occurs concurrently within and outside a person, individually and collectively” (2017, 9). I fully agree

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with this observation but would underscore that we must “remember to remember” that “collectively” includes our interdependence with the natural and spiritual world also. Referencing the etymology of the word “Indigenous” Cajete states: “Indigenous means being so completely identified with a place that you reflect its very entrails, its soul” (1994, 87). Indeed, connecting to the “realities” of nature and spirit are essential if we hope to approach what I described above as “a holistic humanizing of education.” If we bypass the broader awareness that Indigenous philosophy and pedagogy can teach us— our physical and spiritual situatedness in a particular environment and community—we run the risk of skewed perceptions that lead to false assumptions on their importance and relevance in our lives and work. Most of the writers quoted in this chapter consider pedagogy in a much broader sense than formal education. Pedagogy is deeply connected to lifelong learning, the life-long pathway of searching and re-searching. Operaïng pedagogy must also cultivate skills and processes of integrative researching in addition to more dialogical and responsive learning-teaching in integrative performing. Repositioning practices of inquiry as integrative includes challenging some of the fundamental assumptions of and approaches to researching in the more academic/theoretical sense—already central in the field of artistic research (“Practice—[as/based/led/and]—Research” [Bryon 2018, 34])—but also in the applied/pragmatic/creative sense of artistic practice. Most importantly, the concepts of generating and transmitting “art” can broaden those of “knowledge” to include non-verbal, non-written, tacit, and embodied processes. Beginnings

In place of conclusions, I offer some thoughts on beginning the arduous process of reimagining not only opera training but the operatic field as a whole. Music educator Regelski advises us that “[a]ny consideration concerning action ideals for curriculum […] is a philosophical undertaking” (2020, 40). While it has many benefits for performing artists, Bryon’s theory of integrative performing also resonates with many facets in my life that are not directly linked with my artistic and creative work. I say “not directly” but, by thinking of integrative performing as a philosophy of living, the indirect connections seem infinite. One might say that my whole life is integral to and supportive of my ever-emerging operatic training. By aligning the concept of emergence with the sensibilities fostered through improvisation, we can begin to appreciate the potential, indeed the necessity, of disciplining integration so that a transdisciplinary “way of being” is possible. Midgelow (2017, 127) writes: “If we take the position, as I do, that all learning should be an adventure in critically engaged, embodied, experiential and felt modes, it might be that

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improvisation can show us ways in which disciplines can be undisciplined and the potential of transdisciplinarity can be released.” Outlining specific or necessary steps for developing a transdisciplinary counter-critical curriculum would be ineffective divorced from its situated context. However, as a beginning, I summarize the important considerations I have pointed to throughout this chapter. Transdisciplinary counter-critical curricula could: 1 Be developed within a multidisciplinary context, within schools of arts or as collaborations between institutions that specialize in different disciplines (rather than adapting existing opera programs). 2 Avoid establishing disciplinary hierarchies (although still acknowledging and supporting the disciplinary traditions, skills, and techniques that individual participants embrace). 3 Aim to challenge disciplinary assumptions around aesthetics, techniques, and creative processes. 4 Avoid establishing a fixed canon of artistic works (even if still acknowledging the history of disciplinary and transdisciplinary artistic practices). 5 Prioritize the acquisition of agency by acknowledging and promoting a complex interdependence of transdisciplinary, somatic, holistic, and improvisatory practices. 6 Prioritize and actively cultivate skills in openness, responsiveness, adaptability, collaboration, improvisation, decision-making, and disciplining integration. My proposals would require nothing less than a revolution in opera education. However, they raise certain questions about the coexistence of different systems, goals, and professional realities. A counter-critical pedagogy must also be cognizant of its inefficiency in contexts that require a particular approach to working and problem-solving. For example, success in certain operatic contexts and for certain individuals could be hindered by embracing my suggestions for disciplining integration. As suggested above, this approach (in addition to promoting well-being) has the potential to increase personal, creative/artistic, and professional agency. Although few would consider increased agency as negative, it is usually not valued in professional contexts where performers are expected to be the compliant puppets of egoistic or power-hungry leaders. For this reason, we must acknowledge that, while increased agency and integrative performing have many benefits, they do not necessarily translate into immediate financial rewards (Walker 2015). That being said, higher arts education ought to acknowledge and respond to increasing shifts in the arts toward inter- and transdisciplinary activities. Revealing and emphasizing how essential performers are in such contexts through arts education will also, I hope, empower us to recognize ourselves as essential agents of influence and

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change within the arts industry. It is only by asserting ourselves and our artistic will that transdisciplinarity can carve out its own pathway on its own terms. Beginnings are filled with endless potential—also with the potential to be led astray: “Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality” (Freire [1970] 2000, 94). I offer the ideas in this chapter in the spirit of dialogue, as a teacher who is also a learner. I offer them as a contribution to the dialogues that have already begun on the future of opera training. They are ongoing, and they must remain so. Notes 1 To facilitate discussion of “opera-as-process,” I have expanded the term “musicking” as defined by Small: “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (1998, 9). By adding acting to this mix, I situate this chapter’s investigation within an active middle field of “operaïng.” 2 Many of the claims I make throughout this chapter are based primarily on my experiences as a singing student (at the University of Toronto and Indiana University) and anecdotal evidence from my conversations with singing colleagues, opera directors, and opera school administrators throughout my career. While I believe that the current programs at the University of Toronto and Indiana University are highly representative of the curriculum-specific tendencies I am critiquing (Faculty of Music 2021; Indiana University 2021a, 2021b; University of Toronto 2021), there is currently no comprehensive survey of existing opera curricula. However, there are some notable curricular exceptions in formal opera training, including the elite Artist Diploma at The Juilliard School (2022). 3 Bryon also includes in this middle field: doing, making, reading, designing, constructing, researching, and knowing (2018, 41). 4 “Whitestream” is intended to emphasize the largely tacit but insidious and oppressive forces that exist in society broadly speaking and my writing and thinking in particular (Grande 2015). 5 In my own experience, I have noted that several established practices approach breathing in similarly open and generative terms. These include: Open Source Forms (Hood 2016; Hood and Skura 2020), Fitzmaurice Voicework (Fitzmaurice 2015); and Suzuki/Miyagi method (Suzuki 1986; Miyagi 2017). 6 Already mentioned, Open Source Forms is also a viable training in integrative performing as it is rooted in physical and vocal improvisation emerging in the spaces between, across, and beyond language, perception, and imagination. My experience of Contact Improvisation (Nachbar 2016) has also been immensely influential in developing Integrative Performing Training (Skelton 2019) in which I promote improvisation with additional points of contact related to the structures of music and the felt vibrations of vocalization in bodies and space.

References Brown, Trisha. 1998. “Orfeo.” Presented at La Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium. Bryon, Experience. 2014. Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer. New York, NY: Routledge.

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———. 2018. “Active Aesthetic: Knowledge Performing.” In Performing Interdisciplinarity: Working Across Disciplinary Boundaries Through an Active Aesthetic, edited by Experience Bryon, 7–55. London, UK: Routledge. Büning, Eleonore. 2005. “Sasha Waltz: Verflixtes Gesamtkunstwerk.” Frankfurter Allgemeine. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/verflixtesgesamtkunstwerk-1212415.html. Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. 2019. A History of Western Music. 10th ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company. Cajete, Gregory. 1994. Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. 1st ed. Durango, CO: Kivakí Press. ———. 2015. Indigenous Community: Rekindling the Teachings of the Seventh Fire. 1st ed. St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2014. Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. New York, NY: Springer. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa. 2017. “Così Fan Tutte.” Presented at the Opéra National de Paris, Paris, France. Eisenstein, Charles. 2003. The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self. Washington, D.C: NewTrends Publishing Inc. Faculty of Music. 2021. “Graduate Students: 2021–2022 Course Descriptions.” University of Toronto, Faculty of Music. https://music.utoronto.ca/docs/course_descriptions_2021_22.pdf. Fitzmaurice, Catherine. 2015. “Breathing Matters.” Voice and Speech Review 9 (1): 61–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268263.2015.1014191. Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Continuum. Gibbs, Paul. 2017. “Transdisciplinary Thinking: Pedagogy for Complexity.” In Transdisciplinary Higher Education, edited by Paul Gibbs, 45–56. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-561851_4. Grande, Sandy. 2015. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. 10th anniversary. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Grotowski, Jerzy, and Eugenio Barba. 2002. Towards a Poor Theatre. 1st Routledge ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Harcourt, Bernard E. 2018. “Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention in Contemporary Critical Thought and Practice.” Critical Times 1 (1): 5–22. https://doi. org/10.1215/26410478-1.1.5. ———. 2020. Critique and Praxis: A Radical Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. Epub. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. https://doi. org/10.7312/harc19572. Heisenberg, Werner. (1941) 2019. Reality and Its Order. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25696-8. Hood, Susanna. 2016. “Workshop in Open Source Forms.” Brussels, Belgium: P.A.R.T.S., April 25. Hood, Susanna, and Stephanie Skura. 2020. “Classes in Open Source Forms.” Online (Montreal and Seattle). hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Indiana University. 2021a. “Courses (Voice Department).” Jacobs School of Music Intranet. https://musintra.sitehost.iu.edu/departments/academic/voice/courses. html. ———. 2021b. “Master’s Programs Major Field Requirements.” Jacobs School of Music Intranet. https://musintra.sitehost.iu.edu/degrees/graduate-diploma/ masters/mastersMajors.html. Kaparo, Risa F. 2012. Awakening Somatic Intelligence: The Art and Practice of Embodied Mindfulness. Epub. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. http://www.myilibrary.com?id=487896. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 1995. “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” Theory Into Practice 34 (3): 159–165. https://doi. org/10.1080/00405849509543675. Levinson, Jerrold. 1984. “Hybrid Art Forms.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 18 (4): 5–13. Lugering, Michael. 2012. The Expressive Actor: Integrated Voice, Movement and Acting Training. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Max-Neef, Manfred A. 2005. “Foundations of Transdisciplinarity.” Ecological Economics 53 (1): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.01.014. McGregor, Sue L.T. 2017. “Transdisciplinary Pedagogy in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Learning, Learning Cycles and Habits of Minds.” In Transdisciplinary Higher Education, edited by Paul Gibbs, 3–16. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56185-1_1. McLaren, Peter. 2015. Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Melton, Joan, and Kenneth Tom. 2003. One Voice: Integrating Singing Technique and Theatre Voice Training. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Middendorf, Ilse. 1985. Der Erfahrbare Atem. Paderborn, Germany: Junfermann Verlag. ———. 1990. The Perceptible Breath: A Breathing Science. Paderborn, Germany: Junfermann-Verlag. Midgelow, Vida L. 2017. “A New Kind of Learning: Somatics, Dance Improvisation and Transdisciplinarity.” In Transdisciplinary Higher Education, edited by Paul Gibbs, 121–35. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56185-1_9. Midgette, Anne. 2021. “Fleeing the Gilded Cage.” NPR. 2021. https://www.npr. org/sections/deceptivecadence/2021/12/14/1063035430/opera-singerspandemic-covid-shutdown-career-freedom?t=1646556743797. Mitchell, Katie. 2012. “Written on Skin.” Presented at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, France. Miyagi, Satoshi. 2017. “Classes in Miyagi/Suzuki Method.” Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre, Japan, February. Nachbar, Martin. 2016. “Workshop in Contact Improvisation.” Brussels, Belgium: P.A.R.T.S., October. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2002. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2010. “Methodology of Transdisciplinarity–Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity.” Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering and Science 1 (January). https://doi.org/10.22545/2010/0009.

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———. 2012. “The Need for Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education in a Globalized World.” Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science 3 (December): 11–18. https://doi.org/10.22545/2012/00031. Pirbhai-Illich, Fatima, Shauneen Pete, and Fran Martin, eds. 2017. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Working Towards Decolonization, Indigeneity and Interculturalism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Regelski, Thomas A. 2020. “Tractate on Critical Theory and Praxis: Implications for Professionalizing Music Education.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 19 (1): 6–53. https://doi.org/10.22176/act19.1.6. Rigolot, Cyrille. 2020. “Transdisciplinarity as a Discipline and a Way of Being: Complementarities and Creative Tensions.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00598-5. Rodenburg, Patsy. 2009. Presence: How to Use Positive Energy for Success in Every Situation. London, UK: Penguin Books. Salzman, Eric, and Thomas Desi. 2010. The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Skelton, Kevin. 2019. “Integrative Performing Training: Genesis (2014–2019).” https://kevinskelton.com/research/integrative-performing-training/. ———. Unpublished. “Counter-Critical Pedagogy: A Manifesto.” Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Matthew Wilson. 2007. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York, NY: Routledge. Suzuki, Tadashi. 1986. The Way of Acting: The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki. 1st ed. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Tanner, Michael. 1998. “Opera, Aesthetics of.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1st ed. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-M033-1. The Juilliard School. 2022. “Opera Studies, Artist Diploma.” Juilliard Music. https:// www.juilliard.edu/music/vocal-arts/opera-studies-artist-diploma. Thom, Paul. 2011. “Aesthetics of Opera.” Philosophy Compass 6 (9): 575–84. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00423.x. University of Toronto. 2021. “Master of Music (Field: Opera).” School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Calendar. https://sgs.calendar.utoronto.ca/music-musicperformance-mmus-field-opera. Wagner, Richard. (1849) 1892. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works. Volume 1, The ArtWork of the Future. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. London, UK: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. Walker, Jessica Lucy. 2015. “The Singer-Actor as Creator and Collaborator: A Model for Performer-Led New Music Theatre Works.” Doctoral Thesis, The University of Leeds: School of Performance and Creative Industries. Waltz, Sasha. 2005. “Dido & Aeneas.” Presented at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, Luxembourg. ———. 2011. “Matsukaze.” Presented at La Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium. ———. 2014. “Orfeo.” Presented at De Nationale Opera, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Warlikowski, Krzysztof. 2012. “Lulu.” Presented at La Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium. ———. 2014. “Don Giovanni.” Presented at La Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium. ———. 2015. “La Voix Humaine.” Presented at the Palais Garnier, Paris, France.

13 SUSTAINABLE FUTURES IN PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, PRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION ECOLOGIES Max Zara Bernstein

Introduction

As a transdisciplinary artist, I work at the intersection of liveness and mediation across many disciplines, including theatre, dance, music, film, and mediated installations. Seven months before the pandemic, I was fortunate to have secured a faculty position teaching media design and production at a large, public US institution. From the stability of my new institutional position, I witnessed a total collapse of my industry; a sea of grief drowning all hope, leaving widespread uncertainty in its wake. Simultaneously, I had to contend with the realities of reimagining my approaches to teaching production practices in a time when the performing arts world had ceased nearly all activity. The deeply seated assumption that “the show must go on” no longer felt sustainable. In fact, it felt highly problematic, and it left me wondering if this ethos ultimately contributed to the fragility of performing arts industries and practices. The uncertainty of COVID-19 created a scenario where the show could not go on, throwing many performance practitioners and institutions into crisis. Since academic pedagogies often reflect the dynamics of professional landscapes, the state of performing arts education followed suit. In recent years, sustainability has unquestionably become a buzzword, as all industries must examine their contributions to the precarious environmental conditions that currently threaten our world. Much work has already been done to examine the ecological impacts of theatrical production on the environment (Arons and May 2012; Jones 2013; Sweigart-Gallagher 2022). While I am in complete agreement that taking care of our planet is our civilization’s greatest priority, I write toward a future in which we have a stable planet on which to continue our work as performing arts practitioners, and, in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-16

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process, improve and sustain the cultures of practice that manifest in various performing arts ecologies. In this chapter, I center aspects of sustainability as they relate to agency, distribution, and economics in theatrical production. If we view performance production and distribution as an ecosystem, we may think about sustainability as a relevant frame within which we can examine the spectrum of robust and fragile aspects of these various production practices. From there, we may notice elements that may no longer be serving the future landscapes of performance ecosystems, and by proxy, we may notice practices within academic spaces that may also require attention and revision. From within my professional experience as a media designer, I have drawn many examples that utilize emerging media tools to support greater agency and sustainability of practice. “The Show Must Go On”: Perpetuating Fragility in Production Pedagogies

Traditional performance practices rely on a community’s ability to gather, witness, and exchange in order to immerse themselves in kinetic, corporeal, architectural, sonic, visual, and textural worlds. These worlds are not only embodied by performers but are developed by designers and executed by technicians with capacities to develop production environments that approach utopia. In the theater, we can make the sun rise and set, change the sound of the weather outside of a window, and create conditions that transcend and transform time and space. These experiences commonly relied on being together inside of presented or augmented worlds, yet our pandemic world found itself without access to such currency. It is important to examine how performing arts industries responded to this loss. What infrastructural and cultural factors may have contributed to the immediate world-wide collapse of nearly all live events? What adaptations from this time could serve to stabilize our pedagogical approaches to professional and academic performance practices for the future? New, sustainable models of production practices that challenge “the show must go on” mentality need to be cultivated in higher education. We must develop cultures and curricula that contribute to sustainable world-building that grow out of affirmed and practiced agency and equity. From within these sustainable practices, students can create their own varied futures. Based on my experiences in the professional world and teaching media design in higher education I believe we must build cultures of techno-fluency, nimbleness, and creative inertia, responsive to shifting global and professional landscapes. Only in this way can the next generation of production artists respond and contribute to emergent paradigms for rethinking currencies of “liveness” in performing arts. As a freelance media designer working across a spectrum of modalities and communities, I developed a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary orientation toward

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world-building and collaborative performance practices. During this time, I was also deeply aware of the scarcity of resources in the field: I was consistently underpaid—or unpaid—for my labor. I often worked overlapping 14-hour days on consecutive tours for weeks at a time. A pride in one’s work, its prestigious visibility on a global scale, and the promise of future opportunity in the field were always at stake—an unsustainable reflection of the “the show must go on” mindset that is all too prevalent in the field. The phrase, “the show must go on,” is attributed to the circuses of the 19th century. Rogers (1985) explains that when a performer was hurt or an animal got loose, the ringmaster would keep the show in motion to prevent the audience from panicking and turning into a dangerous crowd of fleeing people. From its initial use, this phrase signals the prioritization of the continuation of the show even in perilous circumstances. Over time, “the show must go on” was applied more widely throughout the theater industry. In contemporary contexts, it is often used to comment on the surprising, and sometimes absurd, events that occur during a performance, tour, or production. While often used to create levity around misfortune, “the show must go on” has also pervaded production practices in the form of long hours, burnout, low wages, inequitable pay, toxic power dynamics, uncredited labor, and unsafe working conditions that negatively impact the bodies, minds, and spirits of those responsible for the accretion of a work.1 “The show must go on” contributes to ecologies of performance, romanticizing currencies of loyalty and an unyielding dedication to a process or product in exchange for an idealized glory. Instead, these exchanges often lead to a decrease in the well-being of those who participate. Further, since performing arts communities are often insular, attempts to set healthy professional boundaries can easily result in exclusion from future jobs. There is always an eager intern or understudy in the wings ready to replace you, and likely for cheaper wages. “The show must go on” ethos is connected to the economic scarcity that pervades performing arts industries. The League of Resident Theatres (LORT), the largest professional theatre association in the United States, has established a production model that normalizes long hours during a truncated window for rehearsal and/or production time. This arrangement is a function of budgetary limitations, since the required number of people, tasks, and departments can only be supported for so long. These conditions exacerbate demographic inequities as it excludes those without supplemental financial support and flexible schedules demanded by the typical LORT production model. These dynamics maintain privilege, homogeny, and exclusion that, ultimately, impact creative conversations and the representation of diverse perspectives in professional production practices. In academia, representation and access are similarly problematic. Like professional productions, design and production students are also required to work long hours, often at the expense of their coursework or personal lives.

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Students with outside jobs or other commitments are effectively ineligible for the most privileged production roles. Additionally, while many programs are working to create more inclusive curricula and programming, I have found that there is significantly less attention paid to the modes/practices by which works are produced, presented, and distributed. Improvised and devised production models often include “immersive” and “participatory” structures that offer unique interactive opportunities for audiences and performers. However, these processes often lack conscious preparation or support for performers or participants in vulnerable situations. I have witnessed performers and participants groped, assaulted, objectified; pressured into revealing vulnerable information to a room full of strangers; asked to engage with triggering content; or put in otherwise dangerous situations, all without a process for aftercare or debriefing. Performers must then repeat these structures throughout a tour, often without either the agency or awareness to request changes to such harmful arrangements. Instead, many performers will endure such conditions while being encouraged to feel that they are fortunate to participate in the work of a “critically acclaimed, visionary director.” Yet again, “the show must go on” sets up a harmful dynamic around one’s commitment to the art, the process, or the director’s vision. While my current program utilizes a “post-mortem” structure, in which cast and crew assembles to debrief at the end of a production, this process often comes too late to address any harms that have already occurred during a production. In the context of “the show must go on,” calling it a post-mortem seems oddly aligned and appropriate, particularly if the unconscious expectation is that casts and crews are to be murdered by a production. Toxic production environments create expectations around one’s total dedication to a production, which includes all of one’s time, energy, resources, and attention, regardless of how this may impact their mental or physical well-being. In their reliance on professional industry standards, many performing arts programs lack regard for representational context or the identities of those actually making the work. For example, in my current program, a season selection committee endeavors to choose productions that prioritize equity, diversity, and inclusion as they determine the productions for the season. However, once those choices have been made, students are required to produce those works with a singular production model, which in our case is consistently the LORT model. Thus, rehearsal and production calendars, budgets, and production roles are often decided far in advance of determinations around the participants (professors, students, guest artists) that will be creating and performing these works. This creates tension and dysfunction around the needs of the form, the content, and the pre-determined learning outcomes of the curriculum. Further, this approach disregards the needs and histories of performing arts students and what currencies and outcomes may be most valuable to them.

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The Failures of Pandemic Live-Streaming

As the tools of mediation and processing power have developed over the last few decades, so too have the potentialities of “liveness,” a term used by Auslander (2012) to indicate the radical cultural shift from performance as an intrinsically in-person/proximity-based experience to performance as mediated through radio, television, and network technologies. However, the conventional practices of the performing arts—both inside and beyond academia—have yet to embrace these new potentials. The trajectory of mediated performances has led to separate architectures, production practices, tools, and distribution modes. Mediated performances conventionally require a production studio filled with equipment not often found in conventional proscenium stages or rehearsal spaces. The architecture of the production is often remote from the architecture of the presentation, as sound and image are either captured or beamed live through networks and airwaves to radios, television sets, computers, mobile devices, and virtual reality headsets. Student media designers in performing arts programs are often expected to learn technical skills in software and hardware but receive significantly fewer opportunities to practice these skills with performers, or to practice directing performers for pre-produced media assets. Consequently, live student performers lack opportunities to explore the unique opportunities for agencies that real-time media systems and technologies can create. In academic settings, mediated production models are often embedded in non-performing arts programs including film, media studies, broadcast/­ journalism, visual arts, or engineering. Many media-based academic programs also compartmentalize production roles (e.g., cinematographer, editor, screenwriter, or visual effects/VFX) in curricula and career preparation. Mediated design elements in performing arts environments are often limited by performing arts’ architectures, schedules, and orientations, which typically disregard media design, production potentials, and histories of practice. In general, tool-centered pedagogies tend to neglect the bodies of those involved in both the making and the experiencing of production, which can create unintentionally harmful conditions for performers and audiences. The continued neglect for mediated cultural histories within performance practices consistently leads to experientially deficient outcomes. The presentation of proscenium-based works through mediated platforms, without awareness of the impact of mediated cultures, further propagates a narrative of live performance as a culturally disconnected, irrelevant, and dated form. The rigidity of the LORT pedagogy was exemplified in the semesters immediately following the post-COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Our April production of The Crucible, which was to be an “immersive media performance in the round,” was canceled two weeks prior to opening. As grief and loss spread through our academic community, I found myself in hourly Zoom and phone

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meetings with my theatre colleagues considering how to proceed with virtual instruction… “Maybe we can simply do a stripped-down reading of the play over Zoom?” “Zoom won’t adequately support the learning outcomes of the design process.” “Perhaps we should only do paper projects for the next semester?” “Should we attempt to revive the work we have already done on The Crucible, or should we move on to next semester’s season as planned?” “My students won’t be able to participate without access to university facilities.” “What is our responsibility to our students at this time?” As ideas bounced around, I began to imagine the possibility of a hybrid, networked performance that would enable actors to perform from home and designers to contribute to the production with social-distancing, masking, and an elaborate delivery system of materials and equipment distributed to students’ homes. I suggested that we set up green screens in the actors’ homes and use Skype to remotely composite them into a virtual set that could be remotely controlled from a computer lab on campus. A miniature version of the set could be built and lit on a stage. Lighting cues on set could be filmed and composited behind live images of actors on greenscreens in their homes. This seemed plausible to my colleagues, and we cautiously agreed to proceed in this fashion. While I was excited by the prospect of introducing new tools, practices, and ideas into our codified process, a significant hurdle remained when we determined to retain the LORT structure and schedule of our season, despite significant shifts in modality. In essence, it was a “the show must go on” mentality once more. As we endeavored to implement our plan, a rigid commitment to LORT production structures repeatedly conflicted with necessary structural changes required to produce a mediated performance successfully and ethically. In mediated performances, the technological elements often need to happen first to give actors, especially less-experienced ones, time to adjust to performing in virtual spaces. Then, design is implemented alongside performance rehearsals to ensure that cues are responsive to performers and to allow performers to develop deeper proprioceptive relationships in mediated spaces. In contrast to the expectations for proscenium stage settings, the use of cameras introduces additional guidelines for labor and privacy which became a significant issue with cameras in students’ homes. Rather than shift our approach, we proceeded to compartmentalize design and performance trajectories, attempting to place actors in virtual spaces for the first time one week prior to show opening. This resulted in stress, tension, feelings of overwhelm, conflict, confusion, and, potentially, harm to all involved in the production. In the following three productions that year, expectations were revised slightly, and media systems were made more robust, but LORT

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structures persisted without opportunity for discussion or revision. Production calendars were not adjusted, and no further resources were allocated to support changes. While there were nightly post-show production meetings about the show, we rarely had opportunities to discuss participants’ wellbeing or to provide resources to navigate harms. While I am proud that we were able to offer our students opportunities to produce work in a time when the professional world of performing arts was on hiatus, I regret unintended harms experienced by students, staff, and faculty, to which I attribute to “the show must go on” ethos. While each approach has intrinsic value, a pedagogical model that requires a large, compartmentalized team, a series of complicated technical systems, and highly specific architecture, all in service to a text that often originates from outside the community of makers, diminishes both the agency of the practitioners and does a disservice to performing arts students’ opportunities to practice. At my current institution, students in the traditional design and production program have six opportunities, at most, to practice their craft before graduation. The significant number of community college students that transfer to our program have half as many opportunities. This rigid pedagogical structure erases the spectrum of diverse production practices that better prepare students for the range of skills needed in the professional world. In my professional experience, my survival as a freelancer was dependent on my ability to fluidly transition between jobs as designer, technician, programmer, cinematographer, post-production specialist, performer, writer, and dramaturg. Many of my colleagues also navigated these shifts in various industries including theatre, fashion, television, and music. In addition to its contribution to a debilitating monoculture, strict adherence to a singular production modality does a disservice to students because it eliminates important opportunities to practice nimbleness. While I am critical of the LORT production model as a universal approach, I acknowledge its value for students who aspire to work in such professional environments. Instead, I ask: Can a single model remain at the center of a sustainable performing arts pedagogy? In our current time of uncertainty, one of the most profound skills we can impart on performance practitioners is that of nimbleness—an ability to fluidly move between models, communities, industries, and opportunities, in response to shifting cultural and professional landscapes. The impacts of a global pandemic have disrupted our understanding of the trajectory of our industry. We can no longer propagate pre-pandemic pedagogies that were established under radically different global conditions, and often modeled from economics of scarcity, which may not be relevant to academic spaces. In this indeterminate period, we must take advantage of our uncertainty to reassemble our disciplines for more robust and sustainable futures of practice.

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Proximity versus Intimacy

Although documentation is scant, histories of performing arts in previous eras have been interrupted by contagious diseases. Nevins (2020, n.p.) relates that European “theaters did not devise safe, sanitary ways to retain the theatrical experience, but rather accepted that playhouses had to close. During an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the early 17th century, performances in London were canceled when the death toll exceeded 30 people per week.” During the pandemic, many events found their way outdoors, as they did in theatre’s earlier eras. Yet unlike our predecessors, we can make decisions based on readily available and evidence-based medical knowledge. As we learned that social distancing can mitigate disease transmission, many performing arts spaces opted to modify their seating arrangements to create safer conditions for audiences. While this may be an appropriate short-term solution, this response has the potential to decrease access to performance through limited seating capacities and higher ticket prices while increasing the demand on performing artists who may need to add performances to compensate. In our current post-pandemic era, we find ourselves with a different set of agencies, as the performing arts world broadly found use for technologies of mediation as a way to continue production rather than moving all performances outdoors or closing theatres as our predecessors did. Once again, many decisions were made based on “the show must go on” economics, which was frequently the only option for many institutions, as performing arts industries have long relied on extremely fragile infrastructures and operations. While the value of in-person gatherings to experience live performance are indisputable, I question whether they must remain the highest priority in the performing arts. How does the requirement of in-person gatherings limit our industry’s robustness? Auslander discusses the history of “liveness” in the performing arts, offering that …liveness is not an ontologically defined condition but a historically variable effect of mediatization. It was the development of recording technologies that made it both possible and necessary to perceive existing representations as “live.” Prior to the advent of these technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no need for a category of “live” performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. The history of live performance is thus bound up with the history of recording media, and extends over no more than the past 100 to 150 years. To declare retroactively that all performance before the midnineteenth century was “live” would be to interpret the phenomenon from the perspective of our present horizon rather than those of earlier periods. (2012, 3)

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In the early 20th century, new time-based recording mediums required new language to understand technological mediation in performance. While many early mediated performances and broadcasts were adapted to fit the conventions of theatrical traditions such as vaudeville and opera, these same traditions have largely failed to embrace media technologies as an extension of itself. As a result, mediated performance and new notions of liveness evolved to occupy separate domains distinctive from proscenium productions. In conventional performing arts, media technologies are occasionally utilized in design elements, but have more traditionally been relegated to the role of performance documentation. In the era of live streaming, we find ourselves able to enact media technologies to propagate live performance. However, postCOVID-19, many institutions and practitioners adopted these tools without considering the historical-cultural context of their use, or how conventional production practices may need to adapt to better embrace and utilize the context of mediated tools. Histories and cultures of media production have their own established ethics, aesthetics, currencies, modes of distribution, and practices, many of which differ greatly from stage cultures. In essence, for media to be more fully integrated, performing arts practitioners must understand these tools as both form and content, medium and message (McLuhan 2001). Performing arts production has also largely neglected the ways that mainstream audiences now consume media. Streaming platforms, networked technologies, mobile devices, and various other emerging distribution platforms have not been fully taken advantage of by the performing arts world. From a philosophical perspective, I am interested in exploring the exchanges that happen between performers and audiences in live theater and what is transferred symbiotically, literally, energetically, and experientially. This leads me to question our reliance on physical proximity as a fundamental component of theatrical presentation. Is proximity the same thing as intimacy? Intimacy is certainly not intrinsic to physical proximity, since I have attended countless in-person productions in which performers were detached and experiences were ill-conceived, mediocre, and unmemorable. While it is only one of several elements that contribute to the potency of performance, it is useful to examine how intimacy is created in a performance and to, perhaps, reimagine how intimacy might function more effectively in virtual performance. For example, in “Concert for the Biocene,” a “concert for plants as a symbolic proposal for a paradigm shift,” a quartet performs Puccini’s Cristantemi to an opera house filled with 2,292 plants, which were later gifted to 2,292 frontline healthcare workers at a hospital in Barcelona (Ampudia 2020, n.p.). This performance was live streamed and later released as a single channel video and as a series of five photographs. While the hospital staff were not physically present during the performance, they became intimately connected with the work through the plants as a unique form of performance currency and transmission. Rather than an apparent compromise, the asynchronicity of “Concert

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for the Biocene” was a conceptual strength as it gave hospital staff an unexpected opportunity to participate in the work, as the plants embodied a form of exchange; a kind of digital/analog hybrid portal into the unique intimacy that performance gestures can offer. An intimacy that doesn’t necessarily require a proscenium, a box office, or a lighting grid, and in this way, the hospital space was transformed into an intimate performance experience. The audience at home, safely viewing the gesture on their computer screens, and the frontline workers taking on the role of the archetypal heroes in this performance. When I first saw this performance, it immediately struck me as a kind of medicine for our times, as a signifier of change and a possibility of new modalities. I experienced an authentic connection with the work, despite the lack of physical proximity to the performance itself, and also resonated with the possibilities of transference of performance into a non-human audience. Additionally, beyond the novelty, and seeming absurdity, of performing classical opera for houseplants, and while acknowledging its poignancy for performing artists and frontline workers, “Concert for the Biocene” offers deeper possibilities for the sustainability of performance practices through scalability. Scalability is a profoundly important tool in any sustainable practice, as it allows for a single work to occupy multiple times, places, and venues rather than a fixed architecture reliant on a fixed demographic of participants. The global scalability demonstrated by “Concert for the Biocene” improves accessibility, transference, tourability, archival opportunities, and, by proxy, opportunities to expand funding bases among audiences who are less invested in proscenium performance. Academic Adjustments: Developing Sustainable Performing Ecologies

Academic performing arts programs must recognize the ways that new modes and tools can create more opportunities for access, nimbleness, and relevancy. Economic and distributive forms of sustainability could contribute crucial aspects to the future survival and anti-fragility of performance practices. There are a number of ways that we can organize our thinking around sustainability in our production practices and pedagogies, but for the purposes of this essay, I will center economic, distributive, and communal modes of sustainability. Sustainable Economies

When considering sustainability, the economic models of scarcity, which have so often prevailed in the performing arts, need reconsideration. How could performing artists benefit by embracing streaming platforms, mobile and networked devices from the beginning of production planning? If one examines the variety of media platforms, from Netflix and Amazon to virtual reality, podcasts, and Patreon, it becomes obvious how many additional venues

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performing arts could occupy, and how few they often do. Embracing these platforms as venues could provide greater access to the field for those without access to permanent structures or resources to produce their work. It creates opportunities for mobile, site-specific, and interactive theatrical models, decoupled from geography and capacities to operate in many communities at once. Could performing arts institutions develop more techno-fluent pedagogies around broadcast and mediation? What could that increased access do for their funding bases? If funding bases become more democratized, does that liberate performance practitioners to produce work in more diverse ways? Does that enable more stable budgets for practitioners and presenters? If notions of sustainability are examined from an economics perspective, we might recognize advice from financial advisors who recommend that one invest in a diverse portfolio. As the conventional currency of performance has relied on in-person togetherness as a primary and singular currency, it has left the industry in a tremendously fragile place, unaware of, and in many cases neglectful of the possible futures which encompass things such as COVID-19. How can we continue to diversify the kinds of currencies that occupy performing arts systems? Mediation of live performance also serves to develop better infrastructures for the documentation and archiving of performances. Integrating tools of mediation from the beginning of a process allows for more conscious translations of performance work in both live and post-production contexts. Sustainable Distribution

Sustainability also relates to distribution: Is it effective to allocate so many resources to devise, produce, design, rehearse, perform, and tour a work that can only exist in one format for a limited time? There is great potential for developing iterations of works to be presented in multiple spaces, times, and modalities. Artist Michelle Ellsworth, for example, creates works that have many iterations in and beyond conventional theater architectures; works that inhabit performance, community, museum, textile, mediated, and virtual spaces. Ellsworth’s work generates abundant artifacts, concepts, and materials that give her the agency to move many directions with individual performances and as well as opportunities to respond to various cultures and environments. Ellsworth’s work has grown increasingly complex as it becomes more interactive, allusive, responsive to audiences, and decentered from the proscenium. The intricacies of presenting these kinds of works are accompanied by the challenge of documenting and translating them. For Ellsworth’s Clytigation: State of Exception, we created a video game version of the show to offer audiences a sense of the mobility, perspective, and interaction like the in-person experience. Gamification also offers an infinitely more tourable and accessible version of the show that relies on the architecture of a Web browser rather than

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the expense or limitations of physical inventories. Instead of discarding the labor and materials used to mount a show, how can we educate future practitioners to iterate a work to maximize its accessibility in multiple ways? Sustainable Communities

I often think about the role institutionalization has on the sustainability of performance practices. How do we help students to recognize themselves as the primary resource, instead of the architecture, institution, and infrastructure? How do we prepare students to create sustainable practices outside of our academic walls? Unlike institutions in professional spaces, academic spaces can function as a kind of resource utopia. However, not all non-profit organizations will have access to the same resources. In my classroom, I incorporate training in open-source analogs when I teach students to use industry-level tools as alternative ways to work once they no longer have access to institutional resources. I provide multiple modes of application so that students may choose what culture or context the tools are in service to. This contrasts with my colleagues’ whose pedagogies orient designers and technicians to serve a singular production model. Alongside industry models, we must offer curricular space for practices that strengthen students’ individual skills, which they can further develop when a tour ends, a contract is canceled, a company disbands, or an industry collapses. Creating sustainable production practices equips students to navigate cultures and industries after graduation. The Show Must Respond

If we rid ourselves of “the show must go on” culture, what can we replace it with? To navigate uncertainty, embrace opportunity, and bolster our performance practices for more sustainable futures, we need to develop models that teach our students how to operate beyond the academic setting. We must help them create worlds where the ethos is less about how “the show must go on” and more about how to navigate and revel in imperfectible liveness: the beautiful, unpredictable, and risk-laden practice of liveness, the ultimately sustainable liveness of performance, and liveness of bodies in space. Instead of “the show must go on,” I argue that “the show must respond.” Just as we ask performers, designers, and audiences to respond to the liveness of the stage or screen, we must ask our pedagogies, institutions, and practices to respond to the liveness of the world. The show must respond to contexts, to cultural shifts, and in the service of the well-being and humanity of makers and viewers. Institutions must also respond. Our academic pedagogies must shift in response to our changing world and how these changes are reflected in our learning outcomes and structures. As educators, we must become comfortable acknowledging what we do not know, particularly in the midst of global

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paradigm shifts. Embracing honesty regarding a lack of expertise can open the door to conversations about change, supported by responsiveness to real-time conditions. We must assess the harms our practices have caused and respond to those histories with practices that enable agency, nimbleness, access, and greater sustainability. Note 1 Specific events from my experience that come to mind include: 1) Being responsible for locating and installing of replacement equipment and sets in a foreign country, when the touring sea freight was temporarily lost for a week, so the director could maintain daily rehearsal schedules; 2) Actors being forced to perform while injured; 3) Gaslighting a cast and crew about a significant instances of physical/ sexual assault in order to “keep working”; 4) Not receiving contractually promised per-diem until after a tour was complete while it being made clear that your labor is an obligation; 5) Being forced to stay awake for 26 hours in order to hunt down the source of a power issue, and the list goes on.

References Ampudia, Eugenio. 2020. “Concert for the Biocene.” Filmed on June 22, 2020, at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. http://www.­eugenioampudia.net/en/portfolio/ concierto-para-el-bioceno/. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May. 2012. Readings in Performance and Ecology. ­London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Auslander, Philip. 2012. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34 (3): 3–11. Jones, Ellen. 2013. A Practice Guide to Greener Theatre: Introduce Sustainability into Your Productions. London, UK: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall. 2001. Understanding Media. London, UK: Routledge. Nevins, Jake. 2020. “Looking to Past Pandemics to Determine the Future of Theatre.” New York Times Style Magazine, September 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/09/16/t-magazine/theater-coronavirus-covid-pandemic.html. Rogers, James T. 1985. The Dictionary of Cliches: If You Wonder about the Origins of All Those Old Saws—from First Blush to Bite the Dust—You’ll Find This Book the Cat’s Meow! New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Sweigart-Gallagher, Angela. 2022. “Sustainable Theatre Practices.” St. Lawrence University Digital Initiatives. https://www.sustainabletheatre.org/narrative/ sustainable-theatre-practices.

14 FIGHTING FOR EQUITY WITH(IN) PARASITICAL RESISTANCE Jessica Rajko

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore Fisher’s (2020) research on parasitical resistance as a framework for examining how academics negotiate, survive, and strategically resist pressure to tokenize their own work toward preserving an academic institution’s progressive identity. Spanning many fields including digital studies, performance studies, and critical theory, Fisher’s research critically analyzes the effects of artistic, resistive acts within what she calls a parasite-host system. In this system, parasites are those who perform complicity to maintain their connection to a larger host, while simultaneously causing enough irritation to slowly wear down a host’s defenses without running the risk of ejection. In other words, parasitical resistance explores what happens when people lean into their compromised status to conduct resistive acts and move the needle toward institutional change while also remaining dependent upon the institution itself. To situate parasitical resistance within the context of tertiary education, faculty and students pushing for change while maintaining their institutional relationship may perform acts of parasitical resistance toward their hosts—the institutional and academic structures their professional identities depend upon. Fisher (2020) identifies parasitical resistance as unique to the 21st century where acts of disruption and dissent are quickly and effectively co-opted and commodified by larger entities to hold onto power. Such institutional acts attach a host’s identity to popular progressive movements, garnering attention outside the academy and strategically conflating the two without necessarily changing the institution’s structural operations. To exemplify the host-like behavior of contemporary academic institutions, consider how colleges and DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-17

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universities communicate new initiatives by co-opting trending, progressive language. Institutions regularly use words such as “innovation,” “interdisciplinarity,” and “transformation” to gain currency within evolving, technologydriven job markets. Similarly, words such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “belonging” have become ubiquitous in defining initiatives aimed toward parity. The appropriation of popular language allows institutions to leverage cultural capital, while also weakening the initial intention of the language itself as it relates to its non-institutional origins. As an example, I offer a brief examination of the popularization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In 2020, academic institutions across the United States made significant efforts to manage their response to social disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as social unrest sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. University responses were frequently communicated as initiatives to develop or better resource DEI programming, which effectively conveys aspirations to generate institutional parity. However, launching DEI programs does not guarantee their effectiveness. Critics have already begun to articulate their frustrations with how efforts have been actualized. In a piece for Inside Higher Ed, California State University’s associate dean for faculty affairs, Jawaharlal, emphasizes, “DEI initiatives today have become prime examples of feel-good activities that, sadly, will not lead to tangible results,” citing these actions as largely tokenistic because they lack critical, long-term investment in changing the infrastructures that hold up existing, exclusionary practices (2022, n.p.). Jawaharlal’s sentiments highlight the frustrations felt when academic institutions co-opt progressive movements to retain power without meaningful actualization. Given present efforts to address these issues, the question then is: How is parasitical resistance useful in a discussion about the future of tertiary education, and what does this have to do with the performing arts? An awareness of academe’s hypocritical practices is not necessarily new or novel—particularly for those in the performing arts. However, awareness does not necessarily address a need for academics to reflect on how one’s own actions contribute to the perpetuation of problematic institutional practices—particularly for those who, by virtue of their social privilege, have historically been welcome within academe. Parasitical resistance offers a framework for those working in academia to engage in needed reflexive analysis as to why issues persist. Going further, parasitical resistance examines why efforts to incite change from within an institution may be most effective when academics lean into, rather than disavow, their compromised status. Rather than differentiating oneself from the institution to perform a moral stance, academics can consider instead how the following questions could impact their ability to affect change: How is one’ own desire to remain within the academic system partially to blame for the persistent tokenization of progressive rhetoric? How is one’s own complicity a critical form of survival that also thwarts impactful change efforts? What

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can one actually do to change the academic system when one also desires a successful academic career? How can one create lasting change by recognizing and leaning into the realities of one’s own institutional complicity? Accessing this type of reflexive discourse is difficult when the nuances of operation are so different from institution-to-institution, and best practices fall apart once extracted from their original context. This is why I suggest a reflexive framework may be useful looking forward. Parasitical Resistance and Interdisciplinarity

To examine parasitical resistance, I use the area most familiar to me, which is activity at the intersection of dance, computing, and engineering (hereafter written as DCE). In my examination, I look intimately at scenarios where colleges and universities bring in new individuals under the auspices of crossinstitute collaboration as a means to assert progress toward “innovative,” “collaborative,” and “interdisciplinary” programming. DCE academic activity is often affiliated with, but rarely exclusively located within, dance programs. Instead, DCE initiatives tend to exist between multiple academic programs, generating content related to media art, creative technology, digital media, computer science (CS), mechanical engineering, and/or electrical engineering (EE), to name a few. To this end, it is common for DCE faculty positions to exist between more than one department, school, or college through joint appointments or affiliate faculty arrangements. Similarly, DCE students typically work across disciplinary programs through double majors and concentrations, which means navigating multiple mentors from different disciplines. The mechanics of this process function similarly to pandemic-related institutional DEI initiatives. Institutions leverage tokenistic and progressive narratives depicting themselves as innovative for hiring academics who are integrating radically different disciplines, such as dance and computer science. Institutional groups such as academic departments benefit from the novelty of DCE academics’ labor. At the same time, they must also determine how to steward cross-disciplinary hires through the gauntlet of established institutional infrastructures such as promotion and tenure, discipline-specific curricular plans, and budget allocation standards—all of which are not designed to acknowledge or value the needs, goals, and outcomes of DCE activity. Meaningful departmental stewardship requires significant labor, which often goes unrecognized within an institution’s evaluation metrics. As a result, essential departmental investment overextends already encumbered programs, resulting in the delay, depreciation, or outright abandonment of DCE research and teaching efforts. This further perpetuates the ongoing critique that institutional investment in DCE activity functions mostly as a progressive “feel-good activity.” Those directly involved internalize sentiments that failure is due to lack of support without necessarily acknowledging their own role in perpetuating the issue.

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The complexity of managing DCE-related institutional relationships as they relate to an institution’s desire to appear innovative provides a compelling perspective from which to explore parasitical resistance—though little research has been done in this area to date. To initiate this area of DCE research and ground my analysis of parasitical resistance as a framework, I facilitated interviews with three women who have all conducted DCE research as faculty or graduate students and consented to being identified by name in this chapter: Kristin Carlson, Varsha Iyengar, and Amy LaViers. Throughout this chapter, I highlight their personal stories, along with my own, to contextualize how parasitical resistance might address the complexities of implementing change from within US tertiary education institutions. Here, I briefly introduce each interviewee and myself. Kristin Carlson

Kristin is an Associate Professor of Creative Technologies in the Creative Technologies Program (CTK) at Illinois State University (ISU). She passes as White, gender-conforming, non-disabled, and middle class. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and an MSc and PhD from Simon Fraser University in Interactive Arts and Technology. ISU is classified as an R2: Doctoral University, which designates ISU as producing “high research activity;”1 however, Kristin’s faculty position places an equal emphasis on teaching, research, and service. Kristin’s position is located within the CTK program, but CTK functions independently of any one school or department. Therefore, Kristin’s faculty appointment is supported through the School of Theatre and Dance. Varsha Iyengar

Varsha is a software engineer for the online retailer Amazon, where she works as a software engineer for Amazon Lab 126. She passes as gender-conforming, non-disabled, and middle class. Prior to working with Amazon, Varsha was a software and data engineer in Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects hardware invention studio, where she conducted motion capture and human movement data analysis. Varsha grew up in India, training in Indian classical dance, and completed her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at People’s Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT) Bangalore before moving to the United States to complete her MS in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). Amy LaViers

Amy LaViers is the Director of The Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to research in robotics and dance. She

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passes as White, gender-conforming, non-disabled, and middle class. Amy’s work with the RAD Lab began in 2013 while she held an Assistant Professor appointment in mechanical engineering at University of Virginia (UVA). She held a similar appointment at UIUC before transitioning away from academia. Amy holds a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a certificate in Dance from Princeton University. She completed her MS and PhD at Georgia Institute of Technology and is a certified movement analyst, completing a two-year program at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Jessica Rajko (Author)

I am an Associate Professor at Wayne State University (WSU) in the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance. I pass as White, gender-­conforming, non-disabled, and middle class. I was hired at WSU as part of a provost-­ initiated, hiring initiative in big data and analytics. Prior to my faculty appointment at WSU, I was an Assistant Professor of Dance in ASU’s School of Film, Dance, and Theatre and an affiliate faculty member within the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering (AME) and the Global Security Initiative. I served as the graduate faculty mentor for dance students completing an AME concentration in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance. I completed my BS in Dance and Psychology at Hope College and my MFA in Dance and Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance at ASU. While I cannot say with certainty that I, or any of the women I interviewed, would self-describe as parasites, I would describe some of our actions as “parasitic” in nature. Rather than work to label us parasites, I am more interested in exploring how Fisher’s concepts of parasite-host systems elucidate the ways we are already operating within academic institutions through various forms of resistance. My refusal to label us as parasites functions within the ethos of Fisher’s work, which is not meant to depict the parasite as a fixed entity, identity, or thing: “The parasite is not an identity but rather a mode of playing the system, a form of agency without a predetermined moral coherency. Since its agency unfolds in a dynamic system of play, parasitism is not an ethics of the individual but an ethics of relation” (2020, 204). To this end, my goal with this chapter is to use the “ethics of relation” afforded by Fisher’s framework to examine relationships between academic members, performing arts programs, academic institutions, and other interested academic parties. To do this, I first discuss how institutional host-like behaviors compel DCE academics to tokenize their own work to remain in good standing. From here, I examine how self-tokenizing moves toward acts of parasitical resistance, and I analyze the social privileges that predetermine such actions. Finally, I interrogate the possibilities and precarities of parasitical resistance as a framework for inciting change from within the institution. Since this is an emerging area of research,

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the chapter itself functions as a call for continued research and broader, more robust analysis.

Coercive Hospitality and Faculty as Guests

Identifying institutions as hosts does not acknowledge a new entity but rather characterizes the ways in which legacies of power have evolved in the 21st century to hold onto power. Hosts, as Fisher describes, operate within a paternalistic logic promoted as a form of care or generosity. Emphasizing this, Fisher plays on the term “host” by depicting hosts both as homes for parasites and dignitaries who receive or entertain guests. In her description of hosts as entertainers of guests, the act of performing the gracious host effectively deflects critique. As a gracious host, institutions downplay their authority to select and reject guests, which functions as the first layer of defense. Selection jurisdiction grants hosts the power to refuse entry to those who deviate too far from normative institutional desires and pressure invited guests to conform to host protocols. When guests inhabit the host’s home, they become intimately familiar not only with the host’s policies but its tendency to evolve and reshape rules over time. This results in different forms of indoctrination where guests begin to take on the desired behaviors of hosts. Adjustments to host p ­ rotocol—often depicted as “for safety and comfort of guests”—work effectively in retaining the host’s power. As faculty hired to participate in interdisciplinary programming across DCE sectors, Kristin, Amy, and I shared similar experiences as we discerned the limitations of our status as institutional guests. Kristin, for example, recounts initial conversations at the beginning of her new appointment: When I started at ISU, people kept asking me what dream courses I wanted to teach. And I said, “I would love to teach an Alexander Technique, dance, and technology class.” And they said, “Oh, what is that? Maybe you could write a description for it?” So, I did, and then everyone looked at it and said, “We have no idea what this would be or how it translates to students. Maybe we can do a workshop to try and feel it out?” But, at that point, I was already so overwhelmed with everything else I needed to do. I had my first daughter a month before I started the job and was running ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Art). That was already so much. Kristin, like Amy and myself, was specifically hired for the novelty of her knowledge across disciplinary domains. Rather than taking a vacant position after a faculty retirement or transfer, Kristin was hired to help build out a new programmatic area. As she discovered, institutions as hosts tend to transfer the

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necessary labor of both building out new programmatic areas and demonstrating their value to new faculty members. This can be disorienting after a rigorous hiring process that performs a different level of institutional commitment to actively support new faculty member’s progressive research agenda. Under these circumstances, the burden of faculty labor, as Kristin mentions, can often be too onerous to realistically take on. As a result, new faculty tend to fit themselves into existing systems, letting go of the initial goals they proposed during the hiring process. As Kristin later describes, faculty are at times pressured to conform under the premise that it will best serve them in keeping their job: When I started, a mentor in the Theater and Dance Program, right away, said, “I don’t understand anything about your research, but if you’re going to get tenure in this department, you need to show up to all the performances. And, if you can engage in the performances at all, or publish, that’s great…but do the things that we understand. That’ll help you.” Returning to Kristin’s initial invitation to design a new course, we also see how the institution maintains a sense of control over the situation while purporting to care about Kristin’s desires. The institution asked Kristin to dream up any course, and when that course was not readily legible, suggested she could make a workshop instead. The institution’s response places the entire process of development on Kristin while appearing to demonstrate interest in helping her realize her curricular desires. The initial review of her course description effectively functions as a good faith effort to accommodate her course while doing little actual work to ensure the course is able to run. This scenario illustrates what Fisher describes as coercive hospitality or, “a paternalistic logic of administration that distributes and controls access under the guise of care” that is particular to contemporary neoliberal strategies of domination (2020, 39). In this, institutions use the rhetoric of openness and access to evade critique and even claim ownership over faculty’s labor-intensive actions. The institutional use of coercive hospitality is effective in keeping guests within their roles because of its ability to convincingly perform seemingly genuine acts of care while also evading responsibility for the added labor they ask faculty to accommodate. Returning to Kristin’s comments, one could look at the university response and see their actions as common and even logical. This is why it’s so effective. As Fisher describes, “[…] protocol is what systems use to perform logically as a means of disavowing their agency” (2020, 58). By leaning on standard university protocol for new course development, the institution deflects the fact that Kristin did not propose a class on her own, but was asked by the institution to envision a new course. Leaning on standard protocol for new course development, the institution maintains the guise of care while ensuring little responsibility for the labor needed to realize their initial invitation.

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Similarly, Amy discusses how her prior experiences with academic hiring impacted her approach to interviewing with UIUC: I went to UIUC with a dance-forward job talk, because I already had another position, and I wasn’t trying to move institutions. I thought it was really clear about what I would do there—and I did it. I really feel like I did it. And they really felt what I was doing wasn’t mechanical engineering. As Amy recounts, her potential to bring novel research got her hired, but once an employee, the institution expected her to conform to the mechanical engineering program’s traditional research approaches. At the same time, Amy recounts how the university capitalized on the novelty of her research to promote the institution as progressive and innovative. They would like, advertise my startup, and I met the governor. I thought, “Oh my gosh, my department is happy with me.” None of my official reviews [for tenure] even mentioned I was working on a startup. So, the department used my startup to advertise and promote itself. Right? And, that happened with the interdisciplinary component too. They’d write up articles about my resident artists and then tell me behind closed doors that this isn’t mechanical engineering. Here, Amy demonstrates how the university regularly capitalized on and rewarded her research efforts while simultaneously penalizing her for them. I had similar experiences while at ASU. The university’s research office, the Office of Knowledge and Enterprise (OKED), regularly sought me out to participate in public events, including a university TEDx talk and recorded research presentations. These moments were celebrated by the university as exemplars of ASU’s innovative research. I was told by OKED that my work was bringing university-wide visibility to dance and gaining the attention of major institutional leaders. At the same time, my research was described by dance faculty mentors as largely illegible to the external reviewers in dance who would likely assess my work. At one point, I was encouraged to spend less effort doing DCE research and instead focus on research legible to dance. The confluence of these conflicting perspectives was discouraging to me as a junior faculty member. The recommendation that I commit to research readily legible to dance was legitimate advice toward keeping my job. However, OKED celebrated the transdisciplinary research I desired to do—research I proposed during my job interview. The complexity of this scenario further highlights the ways academic institutions function both as a mega-host (as the college or university) and an ecosystem of multiple, smaller hosts (academic colleges, departments, programs) with competing interests, protocols, and power.

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Transition Toward Parasitical Resistance

Fighting to retain some aspect of what DCE academic members initially desired to do when joining an institution is often where parasitical resistance begins to emerge. In this transition toward parasitical resistance, DCE academic members appear to identify what of their initial research goals and teaching aspirations simply cannot be negotiated out of the work for it retain personal meaning. For example, Kristin states: It’s easier to have the vision of how you want to do it [one’s own creative research] than it is to actually do it. I am continuing to think about my research, my close at heart research ideas, but I don’t really have the time to engage with them, though I try to infuse it into every single thing I do. Kristin’s comments demonstrate how she negotiates her role within a teaching program and finds ways to implement her research into teaching. However, when one’s personal interests are placed in direct conflict with student needs, it can feel like a lose-lose situation. For example, Amy says: I almost left [academia] so many times. There’s the novelty of my lab that makes it sound so sexy and interesting, but there’s clearly a mismatch between what students want and need, and what I’m asking of them. The types of students I can recruit are only half of the types of students I need. So, I’ve always had that feeling of imbalance and misfitting. This can feel like personal failure, which, as Fisher points out, is symptomatic of how hosts operate. In academic institutions, a host’s patronizing actions can feel like institutional gaslighting, ultimately leading to imposter syndrome. For example, Varsha points out that when she first arrived to ASU’s AME program, she went through a period of self-doubt when she realized her classical Indian dance training impacted her ability to engage in dance-based DCE research institutionally rooted in EuroAmerican movement vernacular. There was a hole when I was trying to do my research. I have been trained in a completely different way than what I’m seeing here [in the US]. I thought, “Maybe I should learn the movement here and then I will understand my research better.” And then I took a step back and thought, “Maybe my point of view should not be influenced by what is ‘normal’ here.” I like to draw on my own roots. But, at that point I almost couldn’t. The process of fighting for the non-negotiable aspects of DCE academic activity is where parasitical resistance can emerge. In other words, parasitical resistance appears to respond to the tension generated between

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maintaining good institutional standing and holding ground on that which matters to a parasite. Interlude: Who Is (Willing to Perform as) a Parasite?

Before discussing the specifics of how DCE activity functions as a form of parasitical resistance, it is important to briefly unpack the concept of parasites. Fisher defines parasites by focusing particularly on the actions of artists who lean into their ability to comfortably pass as non-hostile subjects within a host system by virtue of their social privilege. The concept of passing is flexible, though as Fisher identifies, it is most often tied to visible, distinguishing factors related to race (skin color), gender (gender-conformity), religion (visible religious signifiers), and so on. Thresholds for determining who passes are also intrinsically related to the structures and desires of the host. Consider for example, how factors such as geographic location, administrative leadership, philanthropic donors, and academic mission impact a performing arts program’s internal thresholds for determining who qualifies as a student, faculty, or staff member. Thresholds also evolve over time and in response to fluctuating social tolerances, mostly in an effort to retain power (Fisher 2020). Again, the surge in DEI initiatives launched in response to COVID-19’s disproportionately negative effects on women and historically marginalized employees is a strong example (Reed 2022). Such efforts can and do push institutions to expand their tolerance for who passes, but this does not guarantee that institutions will effectively change internal policies so that newly passing, historically marginalized employees will feel welcome or supported. One’s ability to comfortably pass does not inherently mean one wishes to operate as a parasite—this is contingent upon one’s willingness to perform complicity within a particular host system. Speaking particularly to passing individuals for whom complicity holds little appeal,2 Fisher acknowledges that one’s ability to comfortably pass does not predetermine one’s willingness to perform as a model minority figure and, therefore, a parasite (2020, 43). Parasitical actions tend to be most accessible to those who find hosts egregious but also easy to placate. Here I would like to point out that, while the intersectional identity of a parasite is flexible, Fisher’s research and my own predominantly analyzes parasites who identify as women passing as White or light-skinned, cisgender, middle-class progressives. Parasitical Acts as Disruptive Charges

The expression of resistance in current DCE activity mostly clearly operates through what Fisher describes as disruptive charges, or actions that demonstrate the hypocritical nature of coercive hospitality, “effectively turning the host’s

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words and actions against it” (2020, 36). Disruptive charges force institutions to support activity or make public declarations they would not otherwise agree to by threatening the institution’s public perception as a gracious host. In DCE academic activity, disruptive charges are most visibly present within the research itself, since pursuing DCE research is itself an act of resistance. In my own research I have used somatically informed movement and contemporary dance practices to push back against the normalizing forces of computation that essentialize and optimize movement. For example, my collaborative research with digital, touch-based (haptic) interfaces explores how first-person dance knowledge could inform the growing field of haptic interaction design. Disruptive charges are present throughout published research language, for example: But, perhaps the most problematic barrier to the inclusion of touch in sensory research is that of method. Traditional HCI design relies on thirdperson, empirical research methods to observe, document, and taxonomize sensory experiences. Typically the intention of such research is to design a standard set of best-practices or aesthetics; but touch is tricky. Given its complexity, attempts to taxonomize touch-based aesthetics often break down or lose impact when considered in a new context. (Hayes and Rajko 2017, 1) Similarly, Amy’s co-authored paper on choreographic and somatic approaches toward expressive robotics presents disruptive charges in highlighting multiple disciplinary gaps: Returning to the questions of engineers and choreographers, a problem can occur when either one becomes too beholden to their value systems. For engineers, the problem occurs when valuing efficiency and function (i.e., rhetoric) trump user experience (i.e., phenomenology). Conversely, for choreographers, the problem occurs when first-person experience (of the performers) is not observable by an external viewer (and therefore, maybe one day, quantified). As with any practice, balance is imperative. (LaViers et al. 2018, 3) At first glance, these examples may not appear disruptive given their careful wording; however, the very act of questioning disciplinary methods that intersect with one’s own cross-disciplinary research is precarious when the work already does not reflect disciplinary norms. In my own experience, interdisciplinary critique is regularly met with counterarguments suggesting critical perspectives lack depth and disciplinary integrity, thereby invalidating arguments. DCE academics deflect these critiques by leaning into disciplinary expertise, rather than disavowing it. Arguments are carefully crafted so that they speak

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legibly toward identified concerns without oversimplifying disciplinary practices to make their case. By thoughtfully demonstrating disciplinary expertise to make critical arguments, DCE researchers bolster the research’s disciplinary integrity and ensure arguments are difficult to negate. Well-crafted research arguments compel institutions to continue supporting DCE research despite potential concerns that the work no longer effectively panders to technology industries, financial resources, and job markets. Researching in the Echo-Chamber

Given the perniciousness of parasite-host systems, it is easy to associate parasites with a certain humble, moral nobility; however, acts of parasitical resistance are not exclusively noble or altruistic. In fact, they can function solely as acts of self-serving survival. Fisher discusses the complex parasitical legacies of White, cisgender, feminist performance artists by reflecting on the echochamber effect of recurring, parasitical acts: Even as they struggle under the precarious economic conditions, the artists I discuss make work that reflects their own structural implication in systems of privilege: they are white women who have benefited from legacies of capital accumulation and racial privilege passed on through mechanisms of social reproduction. However, these white performance artists’ appropriation of earlier white performance artists’ works (even in the reflexive mode of self-critique) performs yet another erasure of trans feminists and feminist women of color, which as Uri McMillian has shown, treat “white female subjectivity…as an unofficial norm.” (2020, 147) The same could be said for my own research efforts as well as those of Kristin and Amy. We are all White women trained in Western dance, somatic, and movement analysis practices operating with varying levels of privilege. Our freedom to openly interrogate and critique DCE activity is effectively built upon our ability to work from within the normalizing forces between dance, computer science, and engineering. We all work within and between multiple, Western-dominated disciplinary practices and explore them in relation to each other. This can look and feel like critical work, particularly when one discipline is used to amplify the faults of another. However, drawing out critical differences between fields again obfuscates the reality that the research activity works within Western ideological frameworks. Otherwise stated, using normalized, Western frameworks to drive criticality still—as Fisher warns—runs the risk of erasing the work of non-passing minoritarian subjects and treating passing minoritarian subjectivity (in this case White, cisgender, non-disabled subjectivities) as the unofficial norm.

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The maintenance of sociocultural echo-chambers does not appear to be intentional or malicious. In fact, the ongoing lack of critical discourse around Eurocentricity is more likely to a biproduct of survival tactics necessitated in absence of genuine institutional support. For example, Amy speaks to her experience writing engineering papers and grants: Anything that’s going to be reviewed where I have to describe what dance is in “two sentences”—or however much space I have. I always have to write a cartoon there, and it’s most effective if it fits the cartoon they already have in their mind. That’s a challenge. That’s truly selling your soul, because you’re trying to get money or you’re trying to get a paper accepted. Despite a clear tone of frustration, her somewhat dubious tactics keep resources flowing to the RAD Lab, which is critical to her and other lab members’ sustained existence within the host institution. It is possible to characterize this labor as “self-serving”—fulfilling only her lab’s needs and keeping resources within dominant canons. However, parasitical acts are critical to avoiding expulsion, which is a legitimate threat. In fact, Amy disclosed that despite her successful research ventures, she did not receive tenure UIUC. Legitimate threats and justifications aside, it is clear that the impacts of echo-chambers are felt across DCE research. In response to her observations that EuroAmerican movement systems and aesthetics have been normalized in DCE research, Varsha completed her graduate work with a co-authored paper on designing motion capture movement repositories toward comparing different geocultural movement vernaculars. This paper, while subtle in its critique, intentionally focuses on Hip-Hop, Bharatanatyam, and other diasporic dance forms not traditionally represented in existing repositories (Iyengar et al. 2016). When we discuss her perspective in more detail, Varsha mentions: Data of more “complicated” movement [meaning non-Western diasporic movement vernaculars] is missing from the research and it’s a vicious cycle. Data from non-Western movement does not conform to the fields of Western movement notation. Movement that comes from different backgrounds, races, cultural histories—we do not have the means of recording and capturing rich, inclusive data sets [on our own terms], which leads to the research and data being skewed. Throughout our conversation, Varsha acknowledges a desire to return to tertiary education, particularly in her home city of Bangalore, India. When I ask her why return to Bangalore rather than stay in the United States where she already participated in established networks of DCE researchers, she says it is largely personal—her family and dance networks are in Bangalore. She also

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articulates that working in Bangalore means fully entrenching herself in the geocultural contexts informing her work, which changes the type of work that can be done. To be clear, it is likely that Varsha would easily pass within the US tertiary academic system, yet existing US institutions with more readily accessible DCE networks hold less appeal when her ambition is to focus on research in Indian movement vernaculars. Returning to the earlier section about who is (willing to be) a parasite, in the context of Western tertiary education systems, Varsha could be described as a passing minoritarian subject for whom performing complicity simply holds little appeal. Futuring Parasitical Resistance: What (Good) Can Parasites Do?

Moving forward with parasitical resistance efforts in DCE research, I see a necessity for DCE academics to more seriously consider what Fisher describes as redistributive effects, where one leverages the “ability to recirculate what they [parasites] take from the host beyond the parasite’s own interest and in solidarity with similarly or more precarious others” (2020, 36). By syphoning resources and redistributing them toward more radical efforts, DCE academics may more effectively wear down the structural and rhetorical practices that normalize passing minoritarian subjectivities. More importantly, it may be more effective in actualizing the aspirational change described throughout DCE research. I recently experienced the potential for redistributive effects when the International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO) held its 2021 online, durational conference rebranded as SloMoCo.3 Traditionally, MOCO functions like most academic conferences, where researchers present their work in paper sessions, workshops, and small performances over a short, threeday period. It also traditionally organizes a paper proceeding series published by ACM Multimedia—one of computing’s most prolific and internationally recognized academic publishers. When MOCO temporarily became SloMoCo, it set aside the prioritization of published conference proceedings and instead focused on virtual artist residencies and durational research support. This fundamentally changed who participated and how research could be shared across attendees. By functionally building out SloMoCo as a support mechanism for ongoing works in progress, attendees trended younger, more interested in investigating intersectional identity, and more knowledgeable of geoculturally diverse movement vernaculars. In acknowledging the effectiveness of SloMoCo, it’s important to note the entire conference was managed by PhD student Garrett Laroy Johnson in collaboration with a team of graduate and PhD students. Furthermore, participation by MOCO steering committee members and well-established DCE researchers was unilaterally lower than in past MOCO conferences.

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This highlights one of the realities of redistributive effects within parasitical resistance frameworks. Redistributive effects are less likely to be valorized by an institution’s evaluation metrics and could even be depicted as consciously functioning outside systems of institutional recognition. Engaging in research with a focus on redistributive effects—such as the RAD Lab’s paper comparing Bharatanatyam and Kathak dance styles (Kaushik and LaViers 2019) or Kristin’s work with Carney and Irannezhad (2022) exploring socio-cultural voyeurism with 360 video—prioritizes redistributive potential over maximizing citational prospects. I am not suggesting that publicly progressive efforts are immediately in conflict with parasitical resistance. However, if an academic who largely benefits from their own social privilege strategically targets their institution’s progressive rhetoric to ensure parity work receives academic accolades, then efforts run the risk of playing into an institution’s coercive hospitality tactics, thereby strengthening rather than dismantling institutional strongholds. To be clear, engaging in redistributive effects is still an incomplete act within the social justice movement, since redistribution is not about retaining power over resources or leveraging them to control radical efforts. This would merely be another form coercive hospitality—host-like behavior. Rather, redistribution is simply about moving resources to more radical others who are less likely to pass within host systems. It is an action in solidarity toward wearing down the host. Conclusion

As performing arts programs continue to make efforts toward social parity, Fisher’s framework for compromised equity work provides a compelling schema for describing what is already happening within institutions. Parasitical resistance offers an aspirational framework for characterizing current and future efforts of passing minoritarian academics—particularly those who comfortably pass as White. As institutions continue to diversify and expand their threshold of tolerance to include traditionally non-passing minoritarian subjects, parasitical resistance gives those who already pass the capacity to acknowledge their own privilege-based power and imagine avenues toward supporting systemic change. Parasitical resistance differentiates itself from other popular efforts such as decolonization by emphasizing that those who are already privileged enough to benefit from comfortable relationships with hosts are inherently compromised figures and likely function outside minority-led movements such as decolonization. This being said, the potential for disruptive charges and more importantly, redistributive effects to support more radical efforts means parasites could work in solidarity with those effectively dismantling the structural inequities that buttress tertiary education.

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Notes 1 The basic description for the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education can be found here: https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/classification_ descriptions/basic.php. 2 For example, light-skinned racial or ethnic minority subjects who pass as White. 3 The traditional MOCO conference format was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

References Carney, Laina, Zahra Irannezhad, and Kristin Carlson. 2022. “Desquamation: An Interactive 360-Video & Choreographic Study on Socio-cultural Voyeurism, Agency, and Race.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Movement Computing, Chicago, IL, ACM Multimedia. Fisher, Anna Watkins. 2020. The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayes, Lauren, and Jessica Rajko. 2017. “Towards an aesthetics of touch.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing, London, UK, ACM Multimedia. Iyengar, Varsha, Grisha Coleman, David Tinapple, and Pavan Turaga. 2016. “Motion, Captured: An Open Repository for Comparative Movement Studies.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Movement and Computing, Thesaloniki, Greece, ACM Multimedia. Jawaharlal, Mariappan. 2022. “Why DEI Initiatives Are Likely to Fail.” Inside Higher Ed online, July 21, 2022. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/07/21/ why-dei-initiatives-are-likely-fail-opinion. Kaushik, Roshni, and Amy LaViers. 2019. “Using Verticality to Classify Motion: Analysis of Two Indian Classical Dance Styles.” In Proceedings of the Symposium on Movement That Shapes Behavior, Falmouth, UK, 5–6. LaViers, Amy, Catie Cuan, Catherine Maguire, Karen Bradley, Kim Brooks Mata, Alexandra Nilles, Ilya Vidrin, Novoneel Chakraborty, Madison Heimerdinger, Umer Huzaifa, Reika McNish, Ishann Pakrasi, and Alexander Zurawski. 2018. “Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems.” Arts 7 (2): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7020011. Reed, Autumn. 2022. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Faculty Recruitment.” In Proceedings of The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Workshop in Promotion, Tenure, and Advancement through the Lens of 2020, September 20-30. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.

15 A TERTIARY MUSIC PERFORMANCE EDUCATION THROUGH A LENS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP Deanna Swoboda

What is entrepreneurial thinking and why is it important for the 21st century artist-musician? What is the role of a trained musician in our society today? What is entrepreneurship in the context of music? Are educational institutions responsible for preparing music performance students for life beyond music school? The future of classical music performance depends on the actions taken as a result of continuous inquiry into these questions. Today, as a university music educator and artist-musician, these questions remain important. During my own education, I questioned my place as a musician in the world and wondered how my career path would evolve. Much of the emphasis in my musical training as a performing orchestral musician was placed upon the technical skills needed to play the instrument well—both alone and in context of large ensemble performance experiences—with very little emphasis placed on the entrepreneurial skills that would be needed to design a career as a working musician. These questions remain important today. As an entrepreneurial artist-musician who has practiced and experienced a multifaceted career as a performer, teaching artist, educator, and leader, I have observed that the concepts of ideation, opportunity recognition, resilience, cultivation of collaboration, and a genuine hard work ethic are vital to the growth and education of a musician. Over the years, I have met and experienced the work of musicians who pursue purpose-driven creative work while contributing positively to their community. These are individuals who follow their passion, devise creative ways of connecting with others through music, and make a living doing so. It wasn’t until later in life that I recognized this as an “entrepreneurial approach.” Although an entrepreneurial approach-based music performance degree blueprint led me to design a successful career as an artist-musician, it

DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-18

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failed to answer the question about the role of higher education in preparing music performance students for a career in music. It is increasingly clear that teaching entrepreneurial thinking and opportunity creation while identifying and addressing challenging issues facing societies around the world is important for student success that will make a positive cultural impact. My experience as a music educator has shown that students benefit from a music performance education that is learner-centered and experiential in its design. To accomplish this, students increasingly consider a host of factors when planning their career objectives including diversity, equity, inclusion, health and wellness, diverse cultural experiences, arts policy, grant writing, the creative economy, branding, and basic marketing, and recognize the importance of the metaverse and the incorporation of technology. To this point, Lorenzo de Reizabal (2020, 365) asks, “What skills are needed to be successful and/or start a professional career? What and where are the future work opportunities? What are the changes in the 21st century that influence the concept of higher education in music? What academic curriculum could cope with current changes and demands?” What follows is a discussion of the topic of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking in the context of a music performance degree while drawing upon personal experiences, student reflections, and conceptual frameworks of music entrepreneurship. As educators, we have an ethical obligation to educate our students and prepare them for the realities of the real-world following graduation. “Educating” is larger than the discipline, as it helps students understand how their values relate to and manifest in their work as artists with a sense of responsibility to their communities, and not simply in the discipline itself. All of this is presented in the hope that postsecondary educational institutions will continue to examine the role of music performance programs and music faculty to prepare music performance students for success as well as to offer ideas to reshape the curriculum. Challenges and Changes That Have Resulted in Fewer Fulltime Jobs for Musicians

The practice of music teaches focus, organization, and systematic approaches to learning and doing, and requires the development of intrinsic motivation. Beyond the practice room, it requires creativity on a social scale, flexibility, a connection to a public purpose, strategic innovation, and confidence in one’s own abilities. Many classical music instrumental performance students who enter a university program imagine winning a position in a symphony orchestra and having a single source of income. While this is certainly one path, training classical musicians for successful and fulfilling careers in music requires more than preparing to be a great musician and winning the job. Clague (2011, 168) argues,

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“Certainly [a symphony orchestra career] is a worthy and ultimate goal, but the orchestra is not the typical way musicians have made a living either in American culture or any other musical culture across time or across the globe.” In light of economic challenges, increasing costs, and the need to redefine their audiences, symphony orchestras have made changes over the past decade to include more community outreach, audience engagement, and more diverse programming. However, many orchestras have downsized the number of players they hire for each performance and have reduced the length of the concert season, thus eliminating concerts and creating a gap in employment for musicians. In addition, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on arts and culture: “27% of musicians were unemployed in the third quarter of 2020, compared with just 1.1% in 2019” (Guibert and Hyde 2021, 5). Live performances were directly affected by COVID-19, which significantly contributed to the drop in musician employment. In addition, […]the National Endowment for the Arts’ analysis of American Community Survey data have revealed that artists are 3.6 times more likely to be self-employed. They also are often employed part-time or in multiple jobs. Long before COVID-19, independent artists and musicians often struggled to secure long-term or consistent income, epitomizing the ‘gig economy’ and sometimes personifying the ‘starving artist’ axiom. (Guibert and Hyde 2021, 3) Other challenges and changes that have resulted in fewer fulltime jobs for artist-musicians include a shift in the hiring of fulltime teaching positions at tertiary institutions. Higher education teaching is a career trajectory that many performing artist-musicians aspire to and actively pursue as a viable career path. However, more and more colleges and universities are hiring part-time, adjunct faculty who teach only one course or only a few applied lesson students. These positions come without the security of tenure track or health and retirement benefits. The inability to secure affordable health insurance is an important factor that discourages many individuals from piecing together a career from the gig economy where no single employer provides access to health insurance. For many artist-musicians, this can be a deterrent to applying for a position or even choosing to stay in an arts-related job, especially if one is interested in having a single source of income or has to relocate to accept a part-time position. Additionally, Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) survey data (cited in Frenette et al. 2020) revealed that arts graduates overwhelmingly lament and are dissatisfied with necessary career preparations while in school; they lack entrepreneurial, business, and financial preparation. They recognize a need for better preparation after graduation, revealing a curricular gap that should be addressed. Graduates reported the need for an education about networking, self-promotion, and personal finance—specifically

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how to handle debt and how to create and read budgets. This survey data also revealed that artists will make several changes in careers throughout their life. To successfully navigate those changes, “artists would greatly benefit from more of an entrepreneurial curriculum within higher education” (Frenette et al. 2020, n.p.) This is not to say that alumni do not value the artistic knowledge and general knowledge they received. However, graduates concluded that in addition to their education, they would also have greatly benefited from learning business and managerial skills that would serve to eliminate or minimize uncertainty they felt when starting their career. In light of this, educators and higher education institutions have an ethical obligation—now more than ever—to shift their thinking about the way classical music students are educated for a career in music. Students benefit as they recognize and create opportunities through an entrepreneurial lens. As Bennett and Bridgstock (2015) and Breivik et al. (2015) note, many graduates become freelance musicians, and develop their skill sets to work a “day job.” “Musicians, as students in the performing arts, often maintain portfolio careers through a combination of professional roles as music teachers, freelancers, and performers, in which they depend on a set of entrepreneurial competencies and thinking to maintain a livelihood.” These skills, Toscher writes, “include marketing, self-promotion, small business [savvy], and opportunity recognition” (2019, 5). Students experience more success when they develop these competencies and skill sets to do the many things that will be required of them in the workplace in order to have a successful career in music. This can be described as a “hub and spoke career.” Imagine a bicycle wheel and position yourself at the center. The spokes represent all the things one can do in a career to make a living and fulfill one’s passions. For example, in addition to performing part-time in a community orchestra, a musician might—to cite but a few examples—teach private lessons, perform in chamber music ensembles, design inclusive programs, engage audiences, design tours and/or educational residency programs, work in digital media or sound engineering, work as a church musician, start a non-profit organization, or be involved in arts management. Recent SNAAP survey data show that many individuals in arts-based careers tend to be more of “generalists” rather than “specialists” (Frenette et al. 2020). This is often referred to as a “jack of all trades, master of none,” which, as it turns out, can be quite beneficial for artists as they design their “hub and spoke” career and work multiple jobs while increasing their pay and work opportunities. This variety leads to artists staying in arts-related careers longer while doing what they love rather than changing their career trajectory simply to make more money. In fact, the SNAAP data report that while being more of a “generalist,” those artists that “expand the number of occupations in which they work, in turn, raise the odds of staying in the arts by 140% for each occupation” (Frenette et al. 2020, 41).

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Entrepreneurship in Music

When we speak about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial mindset, it is important to associate them directly with music. In the context of the broader business community, entrepreneurship is associated with starting a business and making a profit. Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) note many artist musicians worry that entrepreneurship means art is subservient to business profit and artistic vision will be sacrificed. This apprehension might prevent artists from even being willing to learn about techniques and tools that can help them sustain their careers. Thus, Toscher makes clear that arts educators may be wise in carefully framing or reframing entrepreneurship in an artistic context (2019, 6). To this end, it may be helpful if students are provided some understanding on the meaning of the word entrepreneur. Lorenzo de Reizabal’s summary of the evolution of the term is helpful. As she notes, “The origin of the word [entrepreneur] comes from the French entreprendre meaning to undertake, which is to commit oneself to and begin an enterprise or responsibility” (2020, 354). Lorenzo de Reizabal unpacks this history by noting that the concept of an entrepreneur originates in the 18th century with French economist Richard Cantillon who used the word to describe a person who was able to assume risks in an uncertain or hostile setting. Later writers, as Lorenzo de Reizabal describes, framed an entrepreneur as one who faces challenges by employing innovation. By the 20th century, the word entrepreneur came to be associated with recognizing opportunities and then creating new projects, companies, or organizations that fill needs. Entrepreneurship in the context of music involves more than employing the study of economics to create new business models. Rather, it is a creative thought process that helps one develop an intrinsic motivation for one’s work and leads musicians to understand that a successful music career is put together by design. “Thus, the goal of entrepreneurship,” Beckman explains, “especially in an arts context, becomes the manifestation of ideas through creative means” (2005, 14). Further, Barker argues that, “Entrepreneurship—the ability to imagine and identify opportunity, combined with the skills to creatively build something of sustaining value—is now a central and necessary part of the lives of artists, the development of organizations, and the future of music ensembles” (2017, 2). “Being a musician” is not simply the successful participation in a job that one is hired to do. Rather, it is an ongoing process of developing a lifetime of creating, of turning passions into reality, connecting with people, engaging with audiences, finding a niche, filling a gap, and doing something that no one else is doing, or doing it in a way that attracts a different audience or customer. In the entrepreneurial mindset, a musician first develops a skill (one’s own musicianship to the highest level), and then identifies something that creates value for people (an exceptional artistic product). Important questions for every musician to ask are: What is the value of the product I am creating? Who am I creating it for? Why is this important? Who wants or needs what I have to offer? What team of people can help me realize my goals?

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Current Music Performance Curriculum

“The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) was established in 1924 for the purpose of securing a better understanding among institutions of higher education engaged in work in music” (NASM 2022, 1). Many—but not all—US higher education music institutions are members of NASM and continually design curricula within the guidelines outlined in the NASM handbook. A music performance program requires courses that teach knowledge, skills, and competencies related to music such as theory, history, pedagogy as well as performance training. When defining “musicianship,” the NASM handbook states that undergraduate musicianship or studies “will provide a set of capabilities for independent work in the music profession” (2022, 88). Additionally, “supportive courses in the area normally total 65% of the curriculum and each program curriculum will contain opportunities for free electives or electives chosen from a specified set of courses or experiences” (104). The language used in the NASM handbook leaves flexibility for interpretation of what courses are included and how they will be taught. This language is encouraging and allows room to add specific elective choices, such as entrepreneurial and business courses, that would better prepare students for a music performance career. According to SNAAP data (Frenette et al. 2020), musicians graduate with a lack of confidence about what to do next and must learn from peers and mentors following graduation about how to create or find artist-based networks to connect them with job opportunities. The data also suggest that postsecondary higher education institutions have an ethical obligation to address this gap in music performance curriculum. By doing so, they can remedy the lack of entrepreneurial coursework and experiential learning opportunities to better prepare students for the reality of their post-graduation world. Students need more than an understanding of entrepreneurship; they need to learn the practice and skills of entrepreneurship that will prepare them for real life. Classes That Teach Music Entrepreneurship

Teaching concepts of entrepreneurship in the context of music performance is more than requiring students to take a business or marketing class, as it is often challenging for music students to make direct connections between external business focused concepts and their own artistry. Developing courses that contextualize entrepreneurial skills within music are important. In 2013, I designed and taught, “The Enterprising Musician,” a course that teaches concepts of entrepreneurship including product development, marketing, branding, finance, entrepreneurial thinking, opportunity recognition, and value creation, all in relation to a music career. In addition, students learn how to develop a professional portfolio, identify creative ways to brand and market oneself or a physical music product, provide experiences for cross disciplinary

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collaboration, and understand how to pitch oneself as an artist musician in the community. Students learn and apply public speaking skills and craft an “elevator pitch”—a persuasive sales pitch that is a succinct summary of one’s work as an artist-musician—that is evaluated at the end of the semester by a panel of invited entrepreneurial faculty and community members. An exercise in selfdiscovery helps students identify personal strengths and current skill sets. Each student makes a list of their skills outside of music then forms a small group to share and discuss their self-evaluation. Once strengths and skills are shared in small groups and then with the full class, students identify a team of people in class that could enhance each other’s skill sets. This is the first step in learning that an entrepreneur’s work is enhanced and strengthened when working with the right group of people. It is an important step in learning a collaborative process, which is core to entrepreneurial thinking. One student who took the Enterprising Musician course in 2020 expressed, “Before college I didn’t think about a career, I just wanted to play my instrument.”1 This enthusiasm to perform provides an initial motivation for pursuing a music performance degree. When the performance curriculum introduces concepts of entrepreneurial thinking at the beginning of the program—­resilience, perseverance, opportunity recognition, and opportunity creation—in combination with technical training, students are engaged in a higher learning process and are thus more engaged and more confident about their choice of pursuing music as a vocation. In the Enterprising Musician class, students learn to define themselves more specifically as artist-musicians in their community. They learn how to communicate more effectively and learn opportunity recognition through value creation. When asked if they would recommend this class to their peers, the participants who took the class between 2018 and 2021 unanimously said “yes,” and often followed up saying that it should be a required course for all music majors because it changes the way one thinks about a career in music. Participants in the class elaborated on why the course was important in shaping their perceptions about a music career. Many students commented that without this course, their education would have been insufficient, they would not have recognized the opportunities that surround them daily, and they would not have had the confidence to create their own opportunities. When students were asked, “What are the most important takeaways from the Enterprising Musician class?” the following content, aptitudes, and pedagogical themes emerged:

• The ability to collaborate with peers and hear their stories about career

development. • Learning from guest speakers/professional musicians and learning about the current marketplace. • Learning about customer development and who needs what you have to offer.

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• Developing your creativity. • Honing of communication skills and learning to speak about yourself as a product.

• Learning how to develop professional relationships in the community. These interviews reveal that music performance students enthusiastically see themselves as entrepreneurs not simply in an aspirational sense, but as learners and practitioners. This realization helps them shape their ideas for success long before graduation, provides confidence about pursuing their chosen life’s work, and helps them develop their identity and consider more possibilities as a working artist-musician. In 2014, I re-designed and taught another class that focuses on entrepreneurial skills, “Music Product Creation and Development.” Having taken the foundational Enterprising Musician course, students enter this class with an idea for a product or service they would like to develop. One student created and launched a successful music podcast, interviewing well-known classical musicians around the United States about their own experiences and why music is important in the world. Through the process of developing the podcast, this student drafted a business plan, and implemented networking skills and professional communication to establish themselves in the greater music community. Another student developed their unique niche as a rap artist through personal branding, strategic social media marketing, identification of a target audience and revenue streams, design of an engaging show for the community, and booking themself for a tour following graduation. Throughout the course, students focus on the development of a music product or service while applying concepts of the business model canvas specifically to a music product and focus on venture creation. As part of learning an entrepreneurial process for testing an idea, we utilize an online platform called Udacity.2 Students progress through a course developed by entrepreneur educator Steve Blank called, “How to Build a StartUp, The Lean LaunchPad.” Combined with in-class activities and discussions, students learn how to create a business model canvas for their product or service. By the end of the course students develop confidence in their own creative process, acquire the necessary tools to connect with their community, and learn to apply problem solving and critical thinking skills to develop a successful music product. The Entrepreneurial Mindset

Encouraging students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset while also developing their creativity and helping them recognize their own processes to achieve success is an integral part of the learning process that is required for positioning oneself as an artist-musician in the community. Entrepreneurial thinking is inherently a skill that musicians acquire through the process of

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developing their musicianship. Through diligent practice and frequent performance, musicians increase their capacity for resilience, perseverance, maintaining a positive attitude, learning to communicate, and persisting with passion for their craft. When applied to the concept of career development, the entrepreneurial mindset presents opportunities to cultivate success instead of waiting for success to happen. One of the first exercises we do in the Enterprising Musician class is to make lists of words that students might associate with the words “entrepreneurial mindset.” Among the words that students suggest are taking risks, opportunistic, creative, confidence, growth, perseverance, organized, develops positive relationships, passionate, resilience, and self-starter. Following this exercise, students then choose three words that best describe themselves as entrepreneurs and craft a personal statement that includes those words in the context of their work as an artist. This exercise helps students identify and connect with their individual strengths and fosters continual growth during the semester. Pollard and Wilson (2014, 3) note that […] an arts entrepreneurial mindset has five important elements, each with an indelible link to creative practice via a firm focus on the dissemination of creative work. These are the capacity to think creatively, strategically, analytically, and reflectively, confidence in one’s abilities, the ability to collaborate, well-developed communication skills, and an understanding of the current artistic context. As music educators, it is an ethical imperative to devise more ways to connect elements of entrepreneurial thinking to other required music courses for students to understand connections between course content and real-life application. This can be developed through more student-centered learning projects, working collaboratively with peers, or experiencing field related work. For numerous decades, tertiary music programs in the United States have designed curricula based on traditions of Western Classical music, centering the symphony orchestra as a primary career trajectory for instrumentalists. Accounting for changes in technology, economics, and societal issues, these traditions may no longer match the needs of current music students or the demands of society. To begin, entrepreneurial thinking and real-life application of knowledge-based courses being taught can be woven through the inclusion of student-centered learning projects, working collaboratively with peers, or experiencing field related work. Music Entrepreneurship Certificate

The music industry is undergoing enormous changes in how content is produced, distributed, and consumed, and it is important for musicians to go beyond traditional skill sets to prepare for the vast opportunities inherent in

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the changing marketplace. In the process of developing and teaching courses specific to music career design and entrepreneurial thinking, I recognized that music performance students craved more entrepreneurship-related course options and more experiential opportunities within their community. One solution to this was to design and implement a certificate in Music Entrepreneurship for undergraduate and graduate students. Through the program, students shift their mindset and begin thinking of themselves as artist-musicians, artist-citizens, people with the ability to affect the world in a positive way, through music. The goal of the Music Entrepreneurship Certificate is to equip students with the skills and tools necessary to create sustainable careers in the 21st century. To that end, several core outcomes are achieved:

• Students define themselves as artists while identifying a need in the community and creating an artistic venture.

• Students develop an increased understanding of products, markets, needs, and value in the music industry. • Students gain an increased understanding of audience/customer engagement. • Students learn to identify needs, gaps, and opportunities in the music industry. • Students develop communication and presentation skills.

Other learning outcomes of the certificate include opportunity recognition and opportunity creation, understanding the importance of entrepreneurial thinking, and obtaining the necessary knowledge and skills for opportunity recognition in the music industry. The certificate program welcomes and accommodates all students (music majors and non-majors) who are interested in exploring the business of the music industry in an entrepreneurial context. Core values of the Music Entrepreneurship Certificate include entrepreneurial thinking, being grounded in the current landscape while looking to the future, collaboration, mentorship, interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectival thinking, being socially embedded in the community, socially engaged practice/community engagement, and experiential learning. Music entrepreneurship certificate students benefit from a menu of courses specifically designed for musicians seeking to develop entrepreneurial skills and an understanding and synthesis of these skills from a music perspective. Such courses include The Enterprising Musician (a required course), Music Product Creation and Development (application of entrepreneurial concepts), Music Industry Studies I and II, Music Entrepreneurship Fieldwork (culminating experience choice), Music Entrepreneurship Capstone Project (culminating experience choice), and Internship (culminating experience choice). In consultation with the certificate advisor, students may select an appropriate course outside of the

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music curriculum that fits into the student’s vision of the necessary career skills, courses such as Business and Legal Practice in Entertainment, Building Leadership Skills, Creative Futures Studio, the Digital Audience, and Media Entertainment as well as related topics such as arts management, personal finance, and principles of marketing. Our goal moving forward is to design more entrepreneurial focused topics and courses through a music industry lens. The certificate program has attracted a diverse population of students and is making a direct impact on the regional community in the form of diverse live performances and students who are entering the workforce as arts leaders. Designing a Music Entrepreneurship Certificate

The Music Entrepreneurship Certificate is a 15-credit program that allows for all courses to also count in the context of a student’s major. The two required elements are The Enterprising Musician course and a culminating experience. Students are given three options to fulfill the culminating experience: an internship (in person or virtual); a capstone project (to further their venture idea); or music entrepreneurship fieldwork. Internships with a music business or an arts organization within a community can be completed in person or remotely. A platform such as Handshake. com—which helps students identify an area of interest, determine personal skill sets, schedule career advising appointments, develop a profile, and upload a resumé for potential employers to view—is a good place to search for internship opportunities. Students have experienced working in an office setting, being project driven, collaborating with co-workers, and learning essential communication and networking skills. Additionally, businesses or organizations that are identified by the student as possible internship positions but are not yet connected with Handshake.com, can be paired and listed for future intern opportunities. Capstone projects may take many forms depending on student interests. Examples of completed capstone projects include a professional recording project (project planning skills, product development, marketing), a performance project in the community (booking a venue, branding, marketing, promotion, performing), and developing a music residency program related to the issue of climate change (ideation, education related research, developing curriculum, programming). Music entrepreneurial fieldwork is different from an intern position in that it may comprise several shorter music-related experiences alongside working musicians or administrators, such as conducting interviews with small music business owners or with leaders in an organization, shadowing a non-profit arts organization leader, or working with a local performing arts organization to help them solve a problem. Fieldwork experiences may consist of several

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separate experiences throughout the semester, depending on the student’s area of interest and what will best serve their career trajectory. Experiential learning options such as these are critical in helping students to envision themselves and their work in the community and to formalize how their “hub and spoke career” may take shape. With diverse learning styles, the choice of internship, capstone project, or entrepreneurial fieldwork creates a unique set of experiences for every student. Guest Artists

An important piece of an entrepreneurial education is learning from peers who have recently graduated. Guest artists for music entrepreneurship courses have included music alums who are engaged in entrepreneurial endeavors, community arts organizations, and working in the non-profit arts world. Other guests have included music faculty who present and facilitate conversations and activities around creativity, innovation, copyright law, and publishing, and professional musicians who share experiences about freelancing, self-publishing, social media marketing, the recording industry, successful online music business creation, and personal and career development. Seeing entrepreneurial work in action and hearing about the processes or the steps that are needed to be successful help students define themselves as artist-musicians, see their connection to their community and the world, and begin a rough sketch for their career blueprint. Integrating Theory and Practice: Approaches to Teaching Entrepreneurship

In addition to the course materials, discussions, and activities, music entrepreneurship classes provide opportunities for students to integrate theory and practice and connect with entrepreneurs around the globe. An opportunity to connect with companies both in the community and worldwide is presented through an experiential learning platform, Riipen.com. In this, the professor seeks a company or organization on Riipen.com that matches the learning goals and outcomes of the class and designs a syllabus with that organization to complement the classroom goals and learning outcomes. Riipen.com collaborations take many forms. For instance, Riipen.com offered a valuable collaboration with Super Holiday Tours, a Florida-based company that books tours for high school bands. In a virtual meeting with company leadership, Super Holiday Tours explained their business, shared their business model, and explained that they needed assistance with marketing—including their online and social media platforms—to improve their sales. Utilizing strategies outlined in Borg’s (2014) text, Music Marketing for the DIY Musician, students researched competing organizations, devised

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smart goals, and developed an online and promotional mix strategy along with tactics for implementing the ideas. Riipen.com also offered a partnership with the International Indigenous Speakers Bureau of Canada (IISB n.d.). Arizona State University acknowledges that its “four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today” (ASU Music Library, 2022). Because of this acknowledgement, sharing knowledge about Indigenous culture and providing opportunities for students to think deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the context of entrepreneurial identity, provides a natural connection for a partnership. Together with the IISB, we created a project that helped students recognize the importance of creating a safe and respectful platform when communicating with people of a different culture, and we provided an opportunity for the students to learn communication skills through personal interviews and social media artist promotion. While learning entrepreneurial skills in the context of professional communication, marketing, and branding, students were also able to reflect on their own work as artist musicians through the exercise of devising introductions for the Indigenous speakers. These professional Indigenous speakers had diverse and high-profile careers including that of a naval aviator and astronaut, a leadership developer and author, as well as Indigenous musicians and artists. Students interviewed each of the speakers and subsequently wrote a professional biography for them that was posted on the IISB website. Students also created social media posts for the organization to use in a strategic way for promoting the speakers. Outcomes of Entrepreneurial Courses

Students who take the music entrepreneurship courses or complete the certificate program have expressed feeling more confident in their own abilities as artist-musicians and are able to recognize more opportunities for artistic expression. During the student interviews, one student stated, “I really want to feel like I’ve made a difference in my community, to create more, and use more skills than just my instrument. I want to use my voice, use my pen, use my communication skills.” Another student offered, “When I started to approach [my ideas] from an entrepreneurial standpoint I recognized that I needed to make my venture suit the problems I was identifying in the community.” And a third student remarked, “Learning about customer development and talking to potential customers, [helped me] figure out what [artistic product] I wanted to package.” Many of the students who participated in an entrepreneurship course shared that they are more likely to initiate new conversations or act upon a creative, non-traditional idea, such as the third student mentioned above: “I was literally living the assignments performing shows in

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the community. I would hop off stage and literally talk to people about their experience.” The program has also attracted business, marketing, and finance majors who have some background in music. This student population that pursues diverse degree programs helps all members of the classes recognize skill sets and identify unique collaborative opportunities. An ancillary goal of the certificate program is to help increase the number of students taking music courses, thus eventually increasing the fulltime enrollment (FTE) for the music program. Moving Forward

Learning to recognize opportunities and developing the skill of opportunity creation through an entrepreneurial lens is proving to be lucrative, sustainable, and rewarding for musicians who choose to do so. As higher education music educators, we have the responsibility to provide up-to-date tools and strategies for our music performance majors to be successful upon graduation. Part of this is the ongoing conversation about the evolution of college curricula. Requiring a course such as The Enterprising Musician as part of a music performance degree program and requiring the opportunity for experiential learning (such as internships, fieldwork, etc.) are elements that can help begin a needed paradigm shift in music performance curricula. A heightened focus on entrepreneurship has proven to be an effective force in equipping students for an increasingly challenging future in the arts. Today, educators have a unique opportunity to shape, innovate, and be agents of change both in and outside the classroom. The question we all have to face is: What kind of change will you make? Notes 1 Institutional Review Board permission for this research was granted from Arizona State University in 2021. Student quotes are used with permission. 2 Udacity is an online platform that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs) in a variety of subjects. https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup– ep245.

References Arizona State University Music Library. 2022. “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.” https://lib.asu.edu/indigenous-land-acknowledgement. Barker, Alain. 2017. “Music Entrepreneurship.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Out-ofSchool Learning, edited by Kylie Peppler, 517–522. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483385198.n200. Beckman, Gary D. 2005. “The Entrepreneurship Curriculum for Music Students: Thoughts towards a Consensus.” College Music Symposium 45: 13–24. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/40374517.

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Bennett, Dawn, and Ruth Bridgstock, 2015. “The Urgent Need for Career Preview: Student Expectations and Graduate Realities in Music and Dance.” International Journal of Music Education 33 (3): 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0255761414558653. Borg, Bobby. 2014. Music Marketing for the DIY Musician: Creating and Executing a Plan of Attack on a Low Budget. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers/ Hal Leonard. Breivik, Magnar, Randi M. Selvik, Reidar Bakke, Solveig Welde, and Karoline N. Jermstad. 2015. Referat fra programrådet for musikkvitenskap 13.04.15. Clague, Mark. 2011. “Real World Musicology: Integrating Entrepreneurship throughout the Music Curriculum and Beyond.” In Disciplining the Arts: Teaching Entrepreneurship in Context, edited by Gary D. Beckman, 167–176. New York, NY: R&L Publications. Frenette, Alexandre, Timothy J. Dowd, Rachel Skaggs, and Trent Ryan. 2020. “Careers in the Arts: Who Stays and Who Leaves.” Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. https://snaaparts.org/findings/reports/careers-in-the-arts-who-staysand-who-leaves. Guibert, Greg, and Iain Hyde. 2021. “Analysis: COVID-19’s Impacts on Arts and Culture.” Harvard Business Review. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ COVID-Outlook-Week-of-1.4.2021-revised.pdf. International Indigenous Speakers Bureau. n.d. “About IISB.” Accessed May 15, 2022. https://iisb.ca/about/. Lorenzo de Reizabal, Margarita. 2020. “When Theory and Practice Meet: Avenues for Entrepreneurship Education in Music Conservatories.” International Society for Music Education 38(3): 352–369. DOI: 10.1177/0255761420919560. NASM. 2022. National Association of Schools of Music Handbook 2021–2022. ­Reston, WA: National Association of Schools of Music. https://nasm.arts-accredit. org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/04/M-2021-22-Handbook-Final04-08-2022.pdf. Osterwalder, Alexander, and Yves Pigneur. 2010. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. Vol. 1. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Pollard, Vikki, and Emily Wilson. 2014. “The ‘Entrepreneurial Mindset’ in Creative and Performing Arts Higher Education in Australia.” Artivate 3 (1): 3–22. https:// doi.org/10.1353/artv.2014.0009. Toscher, Benjamin. 2019. “Entrepreneurial Learning in Arts Entrepreneurship Education: A Conceptual Framework.” Artivate 8 (1): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1353/ artv.2019.0003.

16 “UNDERVALUED, UNDERPAID, UNDERAPPRECIATED” The Lived Experiences of Adjunct Faculty in the Performing Arts Karen Schupp, Artemis Preeshl, and Joya Scott

In the United States, postsecondary classroom education is facilitated by a wide range of faculty constituencies. In general, faculty can be classified into categories of tenure-eligible or tenured—those to which the institution makes a long-term commitment and who participate in the areas of teaching, research, and service—and contingent—those who are contracted to teach, without research opportunities and responsibilities, for a fixed period of time. The contingent faculty, which as of 2016 made up 73% of postsecondary instructors (American Association of University Professors n.d.), can then be divided into two groups: those who are full-time, salaried, benefits eligible employees and those who are part-time and paid per course or credit hour without benefits—the adjunct faculty. While at one time adjunct faculty made up a small percentage of those teaching on college campuses, adjunct faculty now compose two-fifths of all faculty (Douglas-Gabriel 2019). Increasingly, part-time adjunct and full-time contingent faculty are hired across campuses to teach more courses for less compensation than their tenure-­line peers. As educators and researchers in the performing arts who have worked as adjunct faculty members, we, the co-authors of this chapter, have observed first-hand what the rise of adjunct faculty means for the artists, scholars, and educators hired per course in performing arts programs. Over the last few years, the American Association of University Professors (n.d.; 2021) and University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education (2019) have addressed the plight of adjunct faculty nationwide. These studies speak to financial, emotional, and professional challenges, and the occasional joys, of working as an adjunct faculty member. Extant published discourse covers the dilemmas of adjunct faculty generally, but specific research into how adjunct DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-19

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faculty in the performing arts function is limited. This prevents performing arts programs from fully strategizing solutions to better recognize adjunct faculty members and support the unique needs of adjunct faculty in the performing arts. This chapter seeks to address this gap in information about the characteristics of adjunct labor that are specific to performing arts (dance, music, theatre, and interdisciplinary) programs. We hope that sharing the lived experiences of adjunct faculty will encourage more ethical and equitable engagement with adjunct faculty in performing arts programs. Contingent Faculty in the Postsecondary Education Labor Landscape

While it may seem that the reliance on adjunct faculty is a recent phenomenon, the increase of part-time positions, including adjunct faculty, can be traced to the mid-20th century. Across the United States, college enrollment increased 500% between 1945 and 1975, in large part due to the government-subsidized tuition benefits offered to soldiers after World War II (Thedwall 2008; Alker 2017). As federal assistance and the expansion of land-grant and public universities increased accessibility to higher education, institutions needed more faculty to deliver curricula in the face of rising costs. From then until now, institutions have accommodated changing enrollment by hiring more parttime adjunct and full-time contingent faculty for lower wages without professional development, research support, or guaranteed employment (Thedwall 2008). This solution has provided academic institutions with flexibility and salary savings. Institutions receive other, less obvious benefits from relying on part-time adjunct faculty and full-time contingent faculty. Institutions, particularly those designated as Research I: Doctoral Universities (US universities with very high research activity), prioritize research over teaching by placing a higher value on research productivity than teaching for achieving tenure and promotion. They often rely on adjunct faculty to teach high-enrollment, lower-division courses, allowing for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty to teach smaller upper-division and graduate courses (Thedwall 2008), especially courses related to their specialized research area. This arrangement creates space for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty to publish, create work, and secure grants. Thus, reliance on adjunct faculty contributes to the institution’s research productivity and academic prestige. At the same time, despite teaching courses that are often critical for student retention and success, and/or meet departments’ contributions to general studies requirements, adjunct faculty have little to no access to professional development funded by institutions (Thedwall 2008; Bolitzer 2019). Tenure-eligible and tenured scholars, researchers, and practitioners often suggest that their creative activity and scholarship make them more informed teachers than adjunct faculty who can ill-afford the time and

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money to self-fund research, further reinforcing the hierarchy of academic positions in higher education. The precarity of non-tenure-line faculty—lower pay, lack of job security, and being viewed as less capable—is also reinforced by a lack of institutional support. Although adjunct faculty constitute a large portion of instructors on campus, many are not permitted to participate in departmental or institutional governance (AAUP 2012). Due to the nature of the term-to-term employment status, some adjunct faculty may have no or limited access to a university email address, office space to meet with students, physical mailboxes, or IT support critical to communicating with students (Bolitzer 2019). Finally, those who occupy adjunct positions are often also members of marginalized communities. Recently, more Black, Indigenous, and People of Color ­(BIPOC) and female faculty members have been hired on campuses, but they are “disproportionately concentrated in non-tenure track, adjunct positions” (Bolitzer 2019, 135). Women are more likely to be and remain adjunct faculty throughout their careers, which could reflect the feminization of labor related to teaching across academia (Alker 2017). Bearing this in mind, it is unsurprising that many adjunct faculty members feel they are treated as second-class citizens within their campus communities. Despite the challenges they encounter, adjunct faculty take these positions for specific reasons. Perhaps the most meaningful part of working as adjunct faculty are the rewards of teaching on both emotional and intellectual levels (Bolitzer 2019). For those professionals who work outside of academia by choice or circumstance, working in an adjunct position provides an opportunity to share their knowledge with students and colleagues with the flexibility and financial compensation that the position affords (Washburn 2017). Adjunct faculty are dedicated to their art forms and disciplines, their teaching, and to their students. Methodology

An exploratory, mixed-method empirical approach was used to capture information about how adjuncts perceive their relationship to and roles in performing arts programs and see the “big pictures” of their lived experience. Data were gathered through an online survey (n=112) that collected both quantitative (i.e., multiple choice questions) and qualitative (i.e., write-in responses) data in early 2022. This survey used a cross-sectional design that is intended to collect data from a specific population at a specific moment in time (Edmonds and Kennedy 2012). Because of the dearth of information specific to the experiences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts, the survey used quantitative questions to achieve a broad overview of participants’ experiences, concerns, and outlooks. Qualitative information was collected to bring the quantitative data to life. Write-in responses serve as narrative data, and an emergent

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qualitative coding process was used to identify rising themes (Blair 2015), which allows for participants’ voices to be prioritized in the research process and sharing of findings (Saldaña 2015). Survey participants included adjunct faculty from across the performing arts with 36% from dance, 17% from music, 34% from theatre, and 13% working interdisciplinarily. Survey participants were able to indicate their race or ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual orientation. Respondents ranged from younger than 30 to older than 71 years old: 41% were 31–40 years old, 33% were 41–50 years old, 14% were 51–60, 11% were 61–70, and 1% each were younger than 30 or older than 71 years old. The vast majority of respondents (83%) identified as cisgender females. Nine percent identified as cisgender males. Though no respondents identified as transgender, 4% identified as non-binary. Five percent declined to self-identify. The majority of respondents (58%) identified as heterosexual, while 11% identified as bisexual, 9% identified as gay or lesbian, 7% identified as pansexual, and 1% identified as asexual, a-romantic, or other. Eleven percent declined to self-identify. Regarding race, ethnicity, and national origin, most respondents (92%) identified as White, while 4% identified as Hispanic or Latinx, and 3% identified as Asian. No respondents identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, or, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and 2% declined to self-identify. Survey Findings

Emergent themes in the data coalesce around the idea of value. Survey respondents shared a wealth of information and experiences that situate their perceived value in performing arts programs in relation to four distinct yet connected themes: financial compensation, agency, professional development, and interpersonal relationships. Combined, these realms contribute to how respondents perceive their value, which is presented as a separate, fifth theme. Financial Compensation

“Teaching at a college does not mean I earn a livable wage.” Survey respondents were asked “What is your average pay per credit hour for your work as an adjunct?” to gain a baseline understanding of the financial impact of their work. Average pay per credit hour for respondents varied greatly: 10% reported earning $1,501 to $2,000, 23% reported earning $1,001 to $1,500, 18% reported earning $751 to $1,000, 13% reported earning $501 to $750, and 13% reported earning less than $500. A small percentage (3%) reported earning $2,001 to $2,500 per credit hour. The median reported pay divided by the number of respondents was $478 per credit hour. While 12%

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thought that compensation was fair, only 5% thought compensation was too high. The vast majority of respondents (82%) considered their compensation inadequate for the amount of work and experience required. Survey respondents shared additional thoughts about financial compensation through open-ended questions asking what they would like students, administrators, and faculty to know about working as an adjunct faculty member. Many responses stressed the lack of adequate compensation, health benefits, and additional costs of working as adjunct faculty. Numerous respondents wanted students, faculty, and administrators to know that they were paid unfairly, citing examples such as having “no security [or] raises,” “no guaranteed work semester to semester,” and no “pa[y] for any extra time for spending with [students]…see[ing] shows [or] auditions… grading and/[or] student management.” Similarly, one-third of respondents wanted administrators to know that adjunct faculty are paid less than a living wage. Many decried the lack of benefits. One respondent admitted, “[M]ileage and parking fees eat away at our already abysmal pay.” Another respondent described working conditions as “stealing labor.” While one respondent shared that lack of adequate pay, guaranteed work, health care, and/or retirement is “scary,” and “unacceptable for adults” to “liv[e] paycheck-to-paycheck [to] make ends meet”; another respondent shared: “[W]e teach 5X more and are paid 10X less than [tenure-line faculty] are.” Of the more than 200 write-in responses for these three open-ended questions, only one response indicated a potentially favorable perception of compensation: “It is a very good part-time job.” Agency

“We deserve a seat at the table.” As shared governance is considered a key tenet of academia, survey respondents were asked if they were invited or required to participate in departmental functions and/or decision-making. Forty-five percent were invited, 34% were not invited, 19% were occasionally invited, and 2% indicated the question did not apply to them. When asked to describe how or if this participation occurs, 66% of respondents indicated that they were denied agency in departmental decision-making. Seventeen percent actively participated in decision-making, and 17% could contribute thoughts on issues without suffrage. Because participating in meetings requires additional time and labor for adjunct faculty, survey respondents were asked if and how they were compensated for attending meetings and other events that fall under the umbrella of shared governance. Most survey respondents (77%) were uncompensated for attending university meetings and trainings. Fourteen percent were compensated. Nine percent considered the question “not applicable.” Reported examples of compensation included “time earned toward a step increase,”

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credit toward “required professional development hours,” pay “at the end of the show in a lump sum,” pay for attending a one-day meeting or training, pay only for “require[d] transformative justice workshops” or meetings at the beginning of the academic year, and unspecified separate compensation. Two respondents reported that institutions no longer paid for mandatory meetings or training sessions. Another respondent was only paid for meetings at unionized universities. In open-ended questions about what respondents wanted tenure-line faculty and administrators to know, survey respondents shared about lack of decision-making power, feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, and the desire to be more involved. One respondent wanted tenure-line faculty to ponder, “[I]f we’re not included in departmental culture, how can we address particular issues that show up in our classes?” Respondents also shared feeling “discourag[ed] to be perpetually peripheral” and “constantly feel[ing] ignored and left out of important decisions,” and wishing that tenure-line faculty would stand up for adjunct faculty who “can’t be vocal with [their] complaints” about policies and procedures without fear of losing their jobs. One respondent wanted administrators to know that they “want to be more involved in the department/school,” but they will not invest in those steps until they know they will “have a voice and compensation.” Another respondent pointed out that “especially in terms of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] initiatives, …it is important to more fully integrate adjuncts into departments.” Professional Development

“Be concerned with our professional development.” Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) hold terminal degrees in their disciplines; 88% indicated that they work as established or emerging performing artists outside of higher education on a full-time or part-time basis. Since the majority of respondents have the same academic credentials and conduct creative research in the performing arts in the same ways as full-time tenureeligible and tenured faculty do, it is perhaps unsurprising that observations about professional development and support emerged in response to openended questions about the level of resources and financial support institutions provide such as access to studio space or library privileges to advance skills and opportunities as performing artists, scholars, and/or educators. For those who shared experiences with professional development or support, the type and amount ranged from a few respondents feeling wellsupported, to some instances of modest support, to most sharing that no professional development or support was offered to adjuncts at their institutions.

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One respondent mentioned that there was “lots of PD [professional development] for their adjuncts, and it is almost always paid well,” and another indicated eligibility for a tuition discount. Examples of modest support included instances of a chair finding funding for an adjunct to attend a conference, small stipends to attend on-campus or virtual professional development on teaching, and access to campus resources such as studio space (when not in use by tenure-line faculty), library access, and teaching excellence centers. While some survey respondents indicated a robust or modest level of support, nearly half (48%) reported no support; an additional 20% reported very little to no support from their departments or institutions. Interpersonal Relationships

“Consider us first as colleagues.” Academia is dependent on fostering respectful relationships between faculty. The abilities to work independently and as a team member are essential to build curricula or to share constructive feedback on a colleague’s work that may advance creative research or scholarship, for example. Perhaps more so than in other academic disciplines, collaboration is inherent to the performing arts, making the need and desire for respectful relationships among all stakeholders in a program of particular importance. Across all open-ended questions in the survey, respondents shared examples of interactions with students, faculty, and administrators to illustrate their perceptions of their status on campus. The majority of remarks about interpersonal relationships focused on interactions with and perceptions of tenure-line faculty members, perhaps because there are overlaps of responsibility, credentials, and professional practices between adjunct and full-time faculty. When examining responses to the question “What would you like the fulltime faculty to know about being an adjunct faculty member?”, 54% of responses pointed directly to relationships with faculty around ideas of equality and respect. Among these responses, 16% indicated positive relationships with full-time faculty. Respondents who felt respected appreciated tenure-line faculty who are “on the ground with adjunct faculty,” guide them on “conduct in the department,” “know how hard they work, which is refreshing,” or regularly demonstrated respect and kindness toward adjunct faculty in their programs. However, the overwhelming majority (84%) of respondents want full-time faculty to treat them with more respect. Examples of these responses include: “We are the backbone of your department. Please treat us as an equal;” “Do not take advantage of us. Say thank you. Show more appreciation for us teaching the majority of the classes;” “Take us seriously, even if we don’t match your credential level;” and the frankly stated, “You make us feel like s—.”

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Perceived Value

“More and more people who want full time jobs are being relegated to secondrank precarity…it is not serving the students or the field.” When asked if there was anything else they wanted to share, most respondents voiced needs for raises and stable employment. Overall, most respondents felt “challeng[ed], disenfranchise[ed], disrespected, underpaid, expendable, disappointed, worthless, exploited, forgotten and ignored, marginalized… devalue[d] and[/or] discount[ed], insult[ed], second-rank, and precarious” in a “toxic…deplorable…unfair [and]…unsustainable” system. Respondents painted a bleak picture about their position within the “system” of higher education. One respondent stated, “Until the ENTIRE Academic world starts looking at WHY they’re actually in business, nothing will change” for adjunct faculty. Another respondent predicted, “Higher education is doomed if it continues to rely on adjuncts to pick up the slack.” Another asserted, “Adjunct positions should be outlawed—exploitation is worse than in any industry, while ‘admin’ is bloated and sucking money and quality from education.” Lastly, numerous respondents thanked the researchers for conducting this study, for providing a space for adjunct faculty to share their experiences to improve employment in higher education. That being said, one respondent pointedly advised researchers and administrators alike to “[s]it in a room with us and compensate us for the time” in order to truly understand adjunct faculty experiences. Discussion: “We Are the Backbone of Your Department”

Survey results reveal that adjunct faculty in the performing arts do not feel valued in academe. Overwhelmingly, survey respondents shared that they are underpaid and overworked, lack participation in shared governance or decision-making processes, have little to no support for professional development outside of occasional teaching and learning opportunities, and often feel disrespected by full-time faculty. Collectively, these factors potentially place adjunct faculty at professional and personal plateaus at best: an arrested development that limits both professional and personal prospects due to work as adjunct faculty. Time and the Unpredictability of Adjunct Work

The contingent nature of working as an adjunct faculty member often means they are engaging in unpaid labor. If adjunct faculty secure enough part-time assignments across various campuses to make ends meet, they often spend

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extra time driving between teaching jobs on different academic calendars while also trying to find summer employment. Time spent getting from campus to campus between classes and accommodating shifting schedules adds to unpaid labor on activities done outside of scheduled class time such as mentoring students, writing letters of recommendation, and grading. Further, adjunct faculty may have classes canceled at the last minute due to low enrollment, despite taking the time to prepare for the course prior to the start of the term. The unpredictability in work affects adjunct faculty members’ personal and family lives. Constantly paying to move from one adjunct position to another adjunct position year-to-year may inhibit significant relationships with partners, families, and friends and prevents having, adopting, or fostering children. Even when adjunct faculty secure jobs across multiple campuses, part-time work renders adjuncts ineligible for insurance benefits or retirement plans. Lack of ongoing health insurance that covers pre-existing conditions and multiple in- and out-of-network deductibles in one year combined with lack of steady employment year-to-year and unemployment in the summer may mean that adjunct faculty cannot budget effectively for basic needs. Consequently, adjunct faculty members may spend significant energy seeking professional gigs outside of academia or applying for tenure-line positions. Further, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the ability to claim a moving expense tax deduction, which is particularly onerous because institutions rarely supplement the underpaid adjunct salaries with moving expenses, not to mention time-consuming preparation of filling out tax forms for multiple states if adjunct faculty move from state-to-state or work across state lines to sustain a living wage. Lack of Access to Faculty Development

It is not uncommon for institutions to offer financial support (e.g., travel funds, startup funds, project grants) to their full-time faculty, particularly tenure-eligible faculty, as a means to support their ongoing professional development as artists, scholars, researchers, and educators. Adjunct faculty are excluded from these opportunities; they rarely have access to funding to support their own professional development, scholarly research, and creative activity as educators and artists/scholars. Respondents who had access to professional development cited examples of improving classroom effectiveness—an important area of growth for all who teach. Yet, financial support or paid leave for professional activities for adjunct faculty’s continued development, presentation, or publication of new work is limited at best, non-existent at worst. Deprivation of such support undermines adjunct faculty members’ abilities to engage in research and/or creative activity necessary to obtain a tenure-eligible post—a goal for many with terminal degrees in their discipline and an oft-touted outcome of performing arts graduate programs.

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Limited Opportunities to Develop Curricula

Many performing arts programs seek to revise curricula, both in response to the needs of their students, communities, and fields of practice, and to the faculty’s areas of expertise. Yet, adjunct faculty are often hired to teach large, introductory, lower-division courses with little room to revise or rethink curricula. Unlike tenured or tenure-eligible faculty, adjunct faculty rarely teach a course in their own specialization, which prevents adjunct faculty from developing new courses that integrate their research into the classroom. Further, though institutions may offer a stipend for course development to tenure-line faculty, if adjunct faculty are given the opportunity to teach a new course, institutions rarely pay adjunct faculty to develop curricula. If the course is canceled without ever being taught, adjunct faculty may spend 20 to 60 unpaid hours developing coursework for future instructors. While introductory courses enable non-majors to meet requirements in the performing arts, this practice of giving the biggest classes and heaviest course loads to adjunct faculty, without teaching assistants to help grade coursework, further inhibits professional growth of adjunct faculty as teachers even as performing arts programs increasingly seek faculty with potential for and evidence of teaching “new” coursework.

Performing Arts-Specific Concerns

While the pressures are formidable regardless of academic discipline, the unique demands that the performing arts place on instructors’ bodies make adjunct faculty work especially daunting. In dance technique courses, for example, instructors are expected to demonstrate movement material with proper form and to use their body to devise course content by choreographing dance phrases for students to learn. In voice courses, instructors demonstrate how to project, how to match pitch, support breath, and articulate clearly in diverse accents. Lack of adequate health insurance can mean that injuries and health concerns that may arise as the result of years teaching often go untreated, thereby limiting what can be shared in class and professional settings. Additionally, how time is used outside of class differs for performing artists. Many adjunct faculty engage in artistic projects, which often need to be scheduled at a specific time and place—it is not work that can be done on a laptop in a cafe at whatever time is most convenient. Performing artists often need to rehearse in a studio synchronously at a mutually convenient time with collaborators, which is different from disciplines where scholars can collaborate with peers asynchronously. Unlike those who can plan their course lecture days in advance, performing artists need to prepare immediately before they teach or rehearse so their bodies are warm and ready.

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Therefore, unpredictable or erratic schedules, reduced flexibility to work outside of class, and insufficient insurance complicates personal and family lives, negatively impacts their contributions to the institutions, and stymies growth of adjunct faculty in the performing arts on- and off-campus. Further, although many adjunct faculty work more than a full-time schedule, the stratification of academic ranks inhibits advancement inside academia—a gradation that explicitly manifests inequitable policies and procedures and implicitly constrains interpersonal and collaborative relationships. Conflicts between Values and Practices

Increasingly, when situating the value of performing arts in society, performing arts organizations and university programs emphasize how the arts strengthen communities, make a positive economic impact, promote well-­being, and promote growth and education (Americans for the Arts 2023; Arts Council England 2023). Given this rhetoric, the poor treatment of adjunct faculty in performing arts programs, particularly the negative interpersonal relationship between full-time and adjunct faculty, lack of suffrage, and low pay, is highly problematic. What does it mean when performing arts programs in higher education contradict their own stated values in their interactions with adjunct faculty, many who are professionals within the performing arts? How can performing arts programs and tertiary educational institutions claim to value adjunct faculty members’ contributions inside and outside of the classroom? The tenure process purports to protect the jobs of fewer and fewer faculty and administrators who make decisions about the working conditions of a growing and disempowered majority. In a time of re-assessment of consent-based and trauma-informed engagement with students, tenured and full-time faculty and administrators should consider how those same values of consent and harm reduction are present in their engagement with adjunct faculty, in the stated and unstated expectations placed upon adjunct faculty, and how their own choices in the classroom inform students’ expectations of adjunct faculty. A critical first step is enfranchising and equalizing pay, workload, and benefits for adjunct faculty. Doing Better

The results from this survey provide an introductory examination of the lived experiences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts, revealing critical areas that require immediate attention. However, more research is needed to fully understand the full range of experiences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts. Survey respondents overwhelmingly identified as White. Additional research should be conducted to learn about the similarities and differences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts across ethnic and racial positionalities.

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Given that BIPOC faculty frequently experience marginalization, microaggressions, and epistemic exclusion (Settles et al. 2021) and take on an inordinate amount of invisible labor supporting BIPOC students and equity efforts (Troung 2021), performing arts programs and researchers must learn about the specific experiences of BIPOC adjunct faculty if a more equitable engagement with all adjunct faculty is truly desired. Additionally, while there are commonalities across the performing arts, dance, music, and theatre, each has distinct academic cultures and expectations. In this chapter, the experiences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts are aggregated across disciplines. Future research should investigate the unique experiences and needs of adjunct faculty in dance, music, and theatre to identify what each discipline can do to improve the labor conditions for their adjunct faculty. Like any profession with a long history and assumed, concretized ways of conducting work, full-time faculty and administrators in higher education may sympathize with the experiences described by respondents, but also feel resigned to the status quo from which they benefit. Tenure-line faculty may rationalize that certain practices are beyond their control or scope of responsibilities. However, if the majority of adjunct faculty surveyed perceive that they are second-class citizens within academe, then full-time faculty and administrators need to consider how their institutional privileges contribute to these disparities and seize the opportunity to use the power of their positions to remedy this inequity. Often, faculty and program administrators cite the lack of resources as the primary reason that they are unable to better support adjunct faculty. Kezar and Maxey (2013, 1) urge campus leaders to “dispel the myth that constrained resources are the primary reason they do not provide what would often be considered even basic forms of support or opportunities for the involvement of non-tenure-track-faculty,” including adjunct faculty. They outline strategies for identifying opportunities and supporting adjunct faculty in ways that benefit adjunct faculty and their students. Some suggested changes require minimal to no cost to the department, such as collecting report data about adjunct faculty members’ work so that leaders can identify and improve policies and practices to ensure that adjunct faculty know they are protected under academic freedom clauses (and support their protection). Other recommendations include accessible instructional materials (e.g., website with a library of syllabi, loaning copies of required textbooks); office privileges (e.g., use of photocopier, telephone, general office supplies); and access to the campus library and teaching resources, including interlibrary loan. Finally, Kezar and Maxey urge campus leaders to provide access to private or shared office space for adjunct faculty to meet with students and colleagues, to include adjunct faculty in shared governance, and to offer robust onboarding, faculty mentoring, and on-campus professional development. While these changes would have a negligible impact on department budgets, allocating access to these

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resources would provide a significant improvement in the work lives of adjunct faculty. While additional research is needed to identify solutions that specifically address the needs of performing arts adjunct faculty, we offer the following suggestions based on the survey findings and extant research as well as our own experiences in academia:

• Make rehearsal studios and practice rooms equally available for full-time and adjunct faculty to make and rehearse their work. • Provide free or low-cost access to studios, rehearsal spaces, practice rooms, and campus libraries during the summer and between semesters to support the research and creative activity of performing arts adjuncts. • Encourage student opportunities to connect with local and national performing arts communities by promoting adjunct faculty professional work through departmental guest artist or residency programs. • Hire adjunct faculty who are active scholars as guest speakers in courses aligned with their areas of inquiry. • Advocate for suffrage for adjunct faculty. Notify adjunct faculty of current discussions, policies, and procedures in performing arts and institutional programs and encourage them to voice concerns and participate in decision-making. Provide ways for them to participate asynchronously through online (perhaps anonymous) forms. Provide regular and timely email updates to adjunct faculty and offer them opportunities to meet with tenureline faculty and leadership on a one-on-one basis. Do not assume that what works for full-time faculty will work for adjunct faculty. Prioritize needs by taking the initiative to learn from what participation looks like for adjunct faculty. • Because peer review makes their pedagogical contributions visible to faculty and administrators and supports their ongoing development as educators, provide structured and thoughtful peer review of adjunct faculty members’ teaching through a dialogue between the adjunct faculty and reviewer, a written evaluation, and/or a letter of recommendation from a faculty member or administrator. Since many full-time job applications require letters of recommendations, peer review and a letter of recommendation supports the aspirations of many adjunct faculty to be hired full-time. • Allocate a portion of programmatic research or professional development funding for adjunct faculty. Like some internal funding, this could be a competitive process that brings adjudicated recognition to adjunct faculty work. Depending on the parameters, funding could support a performing artist’s contribution to development of the local arts scene, allow an emerging scholar to present their research at a national conference, or create space for a teacher to reinvigorate their pedagogy, which benefits the adjunct faculty member, their students, and the institution’s program.

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• Change hiring practices so that adjunct faculty have ample, paid time to

prepare for the semester; if adjunct faculty are expected to teach the same course for multiple semesters, offer multi-term contracts. • Finally, treat adjunct faculty members with respect at all times. Express gratitude for the numerous ways they engage with students and recognize their contributions in the field at large. Adjunct faculty are colleagues in performing arts programs and artists, scholars, and educators in local, national, and global communities. While these strategies would better support adjunct faculty individually and collectively, none of them directly addresses the underpayment of most adjunct faculty in the performing arts. In addition to the suggestions above, every effort should be made to increase compensation, both per course and for work conducted outside of the classroom, and to offer health and retirement benefits. While this is important across academia, it is of critical importance in the performing arts due to the lower income potential for artists compared to other career fields. Performing arts programs cannot assume that their adjunct faculty are pursuing their work in academia with a part-time mindset or that they are otherwise well-supported financially. Adequately, if not robustly, compensating adjunct faculty in the performing arts is one way that programs and institutions can demonstrate the value of the arts in higher education and their local, regional, and national communities. While the focus of this research is on the experiences of adjunct faculty in the performing arts, performing arts students—the artists, scholars, and educators of the future—also need to be considered. The American Association of University Professors (n.d.) reminds us that “faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” If adjunct faculty lack job security, have insufficient time for preparation, inequitable access to department-wide conversations, and feel disrespected by their colleagues, they are unlikely to feel secure in their classrooms. This, in turn has the potential to compromise their capacity to cultivate an atmosphere for student artists that invites healthy vulnerability or supports their engagement with challenging content. When institutions task them with facilitating the growth of the next generation of performing artists/scholars/educators, adjunct faculty should feel supported by their institution. In the words of one respondent, adjunct faculty are “the backbone of the department.” Adjunct faculty in the performing arts make numerous contributions in their programs—they interact with large numbers of students both inside and outside the major and deliver meaningful learning experiences across an array of performing arts forms and course types. Given the growing trend in parttime and contingent faculty over the last 40 years, it is likely that performing arts programs will increasingly rely on adjunct faculty to fulfill their educational and artistic goals (Wallis 2018; Lumpkin 2022). As such, it behooves

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programs to strategically address how to support the professional and personal well-being of their adjunct faculty members. Educators, artists, and scholars in the performing arts are known for their abilities to revise scripts, dances, scores, and manuscripts; to adapt material for different audiences; to collaborate; and to turn ideas into practices, artwork, and manuscripts. These same skills—revising, adapting, collaborating, and implementing—situate performing arts programs to be leaders in rethinking how higher education engages with adjunct faculty members. References Americans for the Arts, 2023. “About Americans for the Arts.” https://www.­ americansforthearts.org/about-americans-for-the-arts. Alker, Gwendolyn. 2017. “From a Contract Faculty Member to Her Colleagues: It’s a Feminist Issue.” American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup. org/article/contract-faculty-member-her-colleagues-its-feminist-issue. American Association for University Professors. 2012. “The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments.” https://www.aaup.org/ report/inclusion-governance-faculty-members-holding-contingent-appointments. American Association for University Professors. 2021. “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty Positions.” https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/backgroundfacts. American Association for University Professors. n.d. “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed - AAUP.” Accessed December 15, 2022. https://www.aaup. org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20Snapshot%20Tenure.pdf. Arts Council England. 2023. “The Value of Arts and Culture to People and S ­ ociety.” https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/exploring-value-arts-and-culture/value-artsand-culture-people-and-society. Blair, E. 2015. “A Reflexive Exploration of Two Qualitative Data Coding Techniques.” Journal of Methods and Measurements in the Social Sciences 6 (1): 14–29. Bolitzer, Liza Ann. 2019. “What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Adjunct Faculty as Teachers at Four-Year Institutions.” The Review of Higher Education 43 (1): 113–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2019.0092. Douglas-Gabriel, Danielle. 2019. “‘It Keeps You Nice and Disposable’: The Plight of Adjunct Professors.” The Washington Post, February 15, 2019. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/it-keeps-you-nice-and-disposablethe-plight-of-adjunct-professors/2019/02/14/6cd5cbe4-024d-11e9-b5df5d3874f1ac36_story.html. Edmonds, W.A., and T.D. Kennedy. 2012. An Applied Reference Guide to Research Designs: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kezar, Adrianna, and Daniel Maxey. 2013.“Dispelling the Myths: Locating the Resources Needed to Support Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” The Delphi Project, Pullias Center for Higher Education. https://pullias.usc.edu/download/ dispelling-myths-locating-resources-needed-support-non-tenure-track-faculty/. Lumpkin, Lauren. 2022. “In a City Full of Adjunct Faculty Members, Many Struggle to Get By.” The Washington Post, April 26, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost. com/education/2022/04/26/adjunct-professor-american-georgetown-gwu/.

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Pullias Center for Higher Education. 2019. “The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.” https://pullias.usc.edu/delphi/. Saldaña, Johnny. 2015. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Settles, Isis H., Martinque K. Jones, NiCole T. Buchanan, and Kristie Dotson. 2021. “Epistemic Exclusion: Scholar(ly) Devaluation that Marginalizes Faculty of Color.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 14 (4): 493–507. Thedwall, Kate. 2008. “Nontenure-Track Faculty: Rising Numbers, Lost Opportunities.” New Directions for Higher Education 2008 (143): 11–19. https://doi. org/10.1002/he.308. Troung, Katherine A. 2021. “Making the Invisible Visible.” Inside Higher Ed, May 28, 2021. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/05/28/why-and-howcolleges-should-acknowledge-invisible-labor-faculty-color-opinion. Wallis, Todd. 2018. “The Rise of Adjunct Faculty: A Brief History.” InsideScholar. https://blog.insidescholar.org/the-rise-of-adjunct-faculty/. Washburn, Jeanne. 2017. Adjunct Faculty Needs Assessment and Closing the Loop: A Comparative Study. Doctoral dissertation, University of St. Francis.

SECTION III

Responsibilities to Society

17 INTRODUCTION Karen Schupp

As both education and performing arts reflect specific cultural, social, and political values, performing arts programs in higher education must constantly reassess how to ethically exist in and contribute to the well-being of their communities. While the theme of social consciousness is present throughout the book, chapters in this section, Responsibilities to Society, examine how social justice, healing, and well-being can manifest through curricula, pedagogy, and programing. By making visible and then challenging historical assumptions that undergird how performing arts education unfolds, authors explore how performing arts programs can be sites for addressing democracy, responsible citizenship, access, and inclusion. This section challenges the notion of the “ivory tower” that still quietly but strongly pulses throughout academia with chapters sharing approaches that seek to rectify past practices and assumptions that have not served the needs of students and their communities, both on campus and beyond. Through exploring how curriculum, pedagogical approaches, and programming can center justice, democracy, equity, and healing, authors in this section demonstrate how performing arts programs have the potential to proactively contribute to the well-being of society. Prichard’s chapter, which starts this section, “Performing Arts Education for Democracies: Are We Cultivating Citizens or Docile Laborers?” posits that the strongest rationale for including performing arts programs in academia rests in the performing arts’ capacity to foster civic responsibility—an approach that challenges the neoliberal tendency to justify arts’ inclusion, or exclusion, in relation to economic profitability. Next in “Revitalizing the US Baccalaureate Dance Major: Integrating Values of Diversity and Interdisciplinarity,” Barr and Oliver use an exploratory methodology to interrogate if and how values of diversity, equity, DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-21

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and inclusion and interdisciplinarity are shaping the present and future of US postsecondary dance education curricula. Evison then raises critical questions about the responsibilities composers and composition faculty have to their communities in “Interrogating the Academy’s Role in the Journey of Art ­Music to Heart ­Music.” Evison investigates her own and others’ experiences to reveal complicated connections and disconnections between music programs’ expectations and community composition work. In “Toward a Pedagogy of Care: Well-being, Grief, and Community-based Theatre’s Role in Higher Education,” ­Eckert asserts that theatre programs can responsibly contribute to well-being and healing through community-building theatre practices by exploring a series of playwriting workshops involving students and incarcerated individuals. Parks employs a qualitative research study to uncover and contextualize the many purposes of community college arts programs, both within US higher education and the larger arts ecosystem, in “Arts Education in Community Colleges: A Critical Connection.” In “Pedagogies of Critical Embodiment: Activating Submerged Histories, Moving Toward Anti-Racist Futures,” ­Chapman probes her pedagogical approach to an undergraduate course that integrates dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies to engage with the legacy of white supremacy at a small liberal arts college in the Southern United States. In the closing chapter, Witte raises questions about access and inclusion in relation to shifting US demographics, canonical assumptions, the reduction of arts programs in PreK–12 schools, and the financial realities of musicians and performing artists in “The Performing Arts in Next America: Preparing Students for their Future.” For this final section, the following questions are offered for consideration:

• How do socio-political, economic, cultural, and regional frameworks shape the performing arts in higher education and vice versa?

• How can performing arts programs shift or broaden the academic canon to more inclusively represent the performing arts?

• How do performing arts programs reinforce or challenge local, national, and international socio-political and cultural norms?

• How and why do connections and disconnections exist between the studio and stage, the campus and community?

18 PERFORMING ARTS EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACIES Are We Cultivating Citizens or Docile Laborers? Robin Raven Prichard

The American liberal arts system of higher education historically developed not as job training, but as education of the whole person in order to sustain a free and open democratic society. Yet, as the 21st century has brought an erosion of public funding, sky-rocketing tuition costs, and precarious job markets, educational institutions are increasingly evaluating academic disciplines based on their economic profitability. In economic development analyses, the arts invariably lose out to STEM fields, which are viewed as critical to increasing the gross domestic product (GDP) and competitiveness in a global market. Arts educators and advocates seek to compete within these dialogues, demonstrating the ways in which the arts develop the local, national, and university economies. In this way, the fundamentals of how higher education creates and sustains democratic societies are getting lost in the parade that requires repeatedly proving the economic value of arts education. I contend that arts educators need to shift the argument from educating for economic profitability to educating to sustain a thriving democracy. Performing art education’s strongest justification lies in its abilities to foster the skills necessary for a self-governing nation. I ask: what are the abilities and capacities that democracies require, and how can the performing arts cultivate them? What practices are antithetical to democracy, and how can arts education transform them? How can the arts become indispensable through the lens of educating for democratic citizenship? Through an educating citizens perspective, the performing arts are crucial in our contemporary political climate by creating active, imaginative, and thoughtfully critical citizens in a complex world.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-22

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US Higher Education

The United States has proudly owned liberal education as a process that prepares citizens for the responsibilities of freedom, and this educational system made the United States an intellectual and economic powerhouse (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012). The 1947 Truman Presidential Commission on Higher Education foregrounded democracy as the driving force for higher education and the vehicle by which the United States would achieve justice for all (President’s Commission on Higher Education 1947a). This was not empty rhetoric; rather the commission outlined what was at stake: “Only an informed, thoughtful, tolerant people can maintain and develop a free society” (President’s Commission on Higher Education 1947b, 3). The commission also acknowledged that the United States had failed democracy by denying the opportunity to attend college to most citizens. These principles and goals for higher education remained in place through most of the 20th century and created economic and social stability and movement towards equality. Full justice would be achieved, it was believed, once college was accessible to all. The turning of higher education toward solely economic results signals a dramatic shift from its origins and the characteristics that made it enviable to the rest of the world. Policy discourse from political entities has increasingly focused only on economic goals, workforce preparation, and global competitive advantage (Sparks and Waits 2011). Ironically, while the United States is reducing liberal arts in favor of “workforce preparation,” economic up-andcomers such as South Korea, Singapore, and China are looking to the US liberal arts system to ascertain how to foster the entrepreneurial skills of critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and other known benefits of the US educational system. These countries, having focused too much on workforce preparation, found that they have not fostered innovators, groundbreakers, visionaries, or leaders. China’s hesitancy in adopting a liberal arts system lies in whether or not they can include elements that create leaders without fostering the independent thinking that will lead to democracy (Nussbaum 2016). That our global competitors recognize the economic value in liberal arts education signifies an important point—that the liberal arts system of educating citizenry and economic competitiveness are far from mutually exclusive. Research has repeatedly shown that employers are looking for the exact skills that liberal arts teach: effective listening and oral communication, creative/ critical thinking and problem solving, the ability to work effectively in diverse groups, agency and collaborative decision making, ethical analyses of complex issues, and intercultural understanding and perspective taking (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012; Nussbaum 2016; MacLean 2017). The call for educational reform modelled as only a matter of workforce preparation mistakenly adopts a 19th-century industrial model for complex 21st-century needs (The National Task Force on Civic

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Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012). Even if one were only concerned with economic growth, the liberal arts tradition should be maintained and defended: narrow training is bad for the economy and for democracy. While education for economic growth and citizenship are not mutually exclusive, it is clear from empirical studies that economic growth does not correlate to better health, education, political liberties or more equality (Nussbaum 2016). In short, economic growth does not produce democracy. Nor does it promote a “healthy, engaged, educated population in which opportunities for a good life are available to all social classes” (Nussbaum 2016, 13). A strong economy is a means to an end, not the end in itself; it will not get a democratic society to a self-sustaining status. Since a flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship, and since economic growth contributes nothing toward democratic citizenship, why would any democracy choose an educational system that snubs citizenship to focus only on economics? Education for the Marketplace: The Paradox of Flexible Labor Markets and Rigid Vocational Education

As work becomes more precarious, and while workers are expected to be more flexible in duties, hours, compensation, as well as the number of jobs they have at one time and over their lifetimes, education is moving toward teaching inflexible and non-transferrable vocational skills. This type of education greatly advantages employers by providing a glut of workers with the exact vocational skills they need, and disadvantages students and future workers, who may only use those skills for a few years, if at all, before having to re-skill and re-train for their next job. The performing arts—with its especially precarious work and short career span for some—have always known this; nevertheless, many performing arts programs, particularly conservatories, have been content to prepare students only for their first job as performer and abdicate the responsibility for anything more. It is worth performing arts educators asking themselves what good education is if it is only relevant for the first few years after graduation, and then only for a small percentage who will still need to earn money in more stable non-arts markets. Education as job training redirects the responsibility for job preparation and its attendant costs from employers to public institutions and individuals. In the mid-20th century, employers considered employee training and development to be their responsibility, and training was an investment into both the employee and the business. This helped to create a system in which employer and employee were both invested in each other and widely contributed to stability and prosperity for both (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012). When employers no longer invest in employees, employees become more expendable. An ideal situation for an employer is to have 100 highly skilled

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people with specific skills for a job in which they need only ten individuals. The greater the surplus of trained employees, the bigger the benefit for corporations. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, admitted as much when he advocated for boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States to suppress US wages, which he considered too high (Caplan-Bricker 2013). The real point of producing more STEM majors, for Greenspan and the likes, is to suppress workers’ wages. Therefore, education as job training leads to less secure employment, lower wages, and diminished power for workers. Current economic arguments for education conflate workers’/students’ interests with corporate/employers’ interests––and students and society are being sold a fake bill of goods. The rhetoric that education as job training gives employees more economic capital obscures the fact that when the public is expected to foot the bill for job training, employment becomes less stable, more precarious, and the benefits accrue primarily to the employers. The rhetoric also hides the fact that workers then are indoctrinated to see other workers as the enemy instead of as their potential allies. Workers race against other workers to develop the current necessary skills, rather than employers working with employees to develop skills that benefit both parties. Moreover, economic development does not care about equality or equitable distribution; it does not matter if those employed and contributing to the GDP are all from the upper classes or a few well-connected families. A nation can grow very nicely while the poor remain illiterate and without basic resources. Both equality and democracy are threatened when social mobility is limited. South Africa during Apartheid serves as an example of a country that was consistently among the highest GDP per capita of nations while containing alarming inequalities and a resulting unstable society (Nussbaum 2016). Early 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a considerably wealthy man himself, stated it clearly: “We must make our choice. We may have our democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both” (Dilliard 1941, 42). Focusing educational benefits on the economic development of the individual ultimately undermines arguments of public support for education. For, if the gains are primarily individual, why should society bear the costs? If, however, educational institutions see their mission as educating a well-rounded person for a lifetime of potential gains—economic, personal, emotional, and societal—societies, public taxpayers, and the individual benefit as a whole. And, when society benefits from an individual’s education in the form of a strengthened democracy, then society should bear the costs. Thus, educating for democracy strengthens arguments for public funding of education. Students’ interests are not the same as corporate interests. What is in the economic interests of students is to develop a broad range of highly applicable and transferable skills and aptitudes that can be used flexibly in a wide range of

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employment. These should be skills that can be used in multiple employment situations throughout a lifetime. That is exactly what the US liberal arts system was designed to do and a role that performing arts education is positioned to embrace. Educating Democratic Citizens

Democratic citizenship does not need to be attached to any political leaning, either progressive or conservative, nor does it need to be attached to activism. Each partisan side defines citizenship differently, and it seems each is unaware of the activism of their own partisan position: “the crux of the debate is whether education should provide students with the skills and knowledge base necessary to fit into the existing social structure or prepare them to engage in social transformation” (Fish 2017, n.p.). Rather than argue about which view of citizenship is correct, I argue that education should prepare students to critically and deliberately decide for themselves which view of citizenship they embrace and how they will participate. Authoritarianism, as well, has no inherent political leaning. Although in the recent decades, movements toward authoritarian regimes are connected with conservative movements, numerous liberal and democratic revolutions from 1789 on have ended in widely supported dictatorships (Applebaum 2020). Karen Stenner, an economic behaviorist, has argued that about a third of any country’s population has an authoritarian predisposition. A frame of mind rather than a set of ideals, an authoritarian predisposition favors homogeneity and order, is anti-pluralist, dislikes debates, and is suspicious of people with different ideas (Applebaum 2020). Authoritarianism appeals to people who cannot tolerate complexity; they dislike divisiveness and prefer unity. The enemy of authoritarianism is tolerance for complex thinking, differing viewpoints, and dissent—all of which are necessary for democracies. The whole of a democratic society benefits when students are educated for democratic citizenry including both conservatives and progressives; to reinforce this, performing arts teachers should consider citizenry as a nonpartisan, politically neutral act. The fostering of democracy, which requires free-thinking individuals and participation, should be an educational goal that both partisan sides can agree on. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. Politically driven attacks reveal that not everyone wants students to be educated to think independently, for possible leadership, or to create social equality. The 2009 political platform of Texas Republicans, for example, took a stance against critical thinking in schools, and it included a statement that schools should not educate students to question authority or question the values of their families. What has been starkly revealed in these policies is that some wish to create a system where the masses supply the labor and leave the thinking to a few at the top. This problematic position can be succinctly summed

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up as “individuality is good for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it” (Ranciere 2006, 280). It is difficult to find a well-rounded definition of democracy in which this fits. It does, however, fit exceedingly well into definitions of authoritarian regimes and oligarchies. While the attacks on democracy have been most visible in the United States since 2016, they have been going on for years. Denigrating democracy makes the rule of a few more palatable, and educating for democracy is opposed to those interests. The Birch Society and right-wing news have been inculcating their publics for years, readying them for actions such as widely suppressing popular sovereignty and eroding public institutions. The attacks on higher education and specifically the liberal arts are not incidental; rather, they are meant as a direct attack on democracy. The arts and their funding have been attacked over the last 40 years specifically because they develop free-thinking traits: Educators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality. It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them. As Tagore said, aggressive nationalism needs to blunt the moral conscience, so it needs people who do not recognize the individual, who speak group-speak, who behave, and see the world, like docile bureaucrats. Art is a great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists (unless thoroughly browbeaten and corrupted) are not the reliable servants of any ideology, even a basically good one—they always ask the imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways. So, educators for economic growth will campaign against the humanities and arts as ingredients of basic education. This assault is currently taking place all over the world. (Nussbaum 2016, 23) Economic arguments for education are harmful not just because they replace arguments for education for democracy, but because they are a cover for the undermining of democracy itself. The economic growth argument is not designed for the arts to fit into—rather it is the means to obliterating the arts and individual thinking. Therefore, performing arts academics should not try to compete within current economic discourses: the game has already been rigged. Rather, performing arts should recognize its strengths and distinctions within the university: creating independent, thoughtful, empathetic, equality minded, responsible citizens who can participate in self-governing. The question is: What are the performing arts doing to create such citizens?

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Strategic Discourse or Real Practices?

Inclusion of the arts in education does not in any way guarantee education toward democracy: anti-democratic movements have successfully used the arts to their advantage as well. Performing arts education comprises a wide variety of teaching content and practices, both within and across genres, and universalizing statements of teaching and outcomes is unwise. Yet, undoubtedly, much performing arts education (much of it in non-liberal arts institutions) is content to teach-to-the-trade—focusing predominantly on the job skills that students will need in their first performing jobs. Discourses are changing, however, and arts educators are using the concept of artistic citizenship as a formulating idea for 21st-century education (Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman 2016; Schupp 2019). Yet performing arts education still contains much authoritarian pedagogy and content. The change in rhetoric often has not been accompanied by a change in practices, leaving a mismatch between the discourse and actual practices. For example, the worldfamous Venezuelan youth orchestra, El Sistema, uses as its central tenet the idea that it develops citizens, not musicians. Yet, Baker closely examined the organization and its rhetoric and revealed that the type of citizenship it fosters is authoritarian and based on productivity, rather than democratic and based on participation. For all El Sistema’s discourse on democracy, their language reflects domination and submission in valuing discipline, obedience, being quiet and on-time—or what some of their students deemed “tyranny, repression, and control” (Baker 2016, 324). Baker found that El Sistema’s language around citizenship was a strategic discourse which transmutes “authoritarian reality into democratic illusion” (2016, 316). Lakes highlights the contradiction between the liberatory power of arts education and the continued legacy of authoritarian pedagogies, and she points out the irony of attempting to use authoritarian methods in creating antiauthoritarian art. As an example, Lakes recounts an event in which an outside funding evaluator refused Martha Graham financial support because Graham’s methods were in direct opposition to democracy, women’s rights, and human dignity. While this incident took place in 1935, the legacy of authoritarian teaching has been passed on and continues today: “Such teachers are engaged in teaching practices that replicate and reproduce in the dance studio the very power relationships they are often critiquing as unjust and inhumane in their artwork onstage” (Lakes 2005, 3). Sometimes, the rhetoric of artistic citizenship is not so much a mismatch as it is purely empty. Former Juilliard President Polisi titled his 2016 book about an artist’s place in society The Artist as Citizen; unfortunately, the title is both the beginning and the end to the consideration of citizenship. While Polisi (2016) details the challenges for the arts and artists in the 21st century, he offers no explanation of what citizenship is, how artists can take up that particular role, or how arts training might develop it. Kahlich, in writing about democracy in

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dance, offers a definition of democracy as a collection of individual rights. His definition of a democratic system as one in which “each of us is a valued individual, has the right of self-expression, and the capacity for personal fulfillment” (Kahlich 2011, 93) resonates less with democracy and more with pre-conditions for creating art. The Kennedy Center’s Artsedge (n.d.) defines the foundations of democracy as liberty, unity, and equality, once again centering democracy on vague notions of individual rights coupled with hazily hopeful ideals. These explorations of artists as citizens or artists in a democracy give no direction as to how democracy might flourish within the arts or how the arts develop democracy, and they omit any conception of democracy that is beyond an individual and their rights. They exclude any consideration of citizenship that includes groups interacting—groups who must work and live together, the endless negotiation of competing values and worldviews, or how a democracy might accomplish this. As such, the rhetoric around artistic citizenship focuses on “impoverished notions of freedom” (Kloppenberg 2016, 13) rather than on how the arts might cultivate the conditions necessary for democracy. As such, much of performing arts rhetoric around democratic citizenship is merely strategic discourse. At its best, the empty and mismatched rhetoric leads to confusion, and its lack of specificity can be only inspirational, rather than aspirational. At its worst, the performing arts have reproduced docile workers through authoritarian teaching, vocational emphasis, and the focus on discipline, while simultaneously waxing rhapsodic about democracy. Just as “an unequal society does not carry any equal society in its womb” (Ranciere 2006, 93), authoritarian and vocational teaching does not carry a democratic citizen inside waiting to be birthed: Is it reasonable to expect someone whose waking life is almost completely lived in subservience and who has acquired the habits of survival and selfpreservation in such setting to suddenly become, in a town meeting, a courageous, independent-thinking, risk taking model of individual sovereignty? How does one move directly from what is often a dictatorship at work to the practice of democratic citizenship in the civic sphere? (Scott 2012, 78) Can an artist, who has been prepared to do the low-wage labor for another artist, suddenly develop the capacities to take actions that sustain democratic societies? What Is Antithetical to Democracy?

Much of performing arts education has been antithetical to democratic formation. Practices that seek to make students and future workers easily governable

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are the obvious antipathies to democracy. Performing arts often invoke the fostering of discipline as the main transferable skill to other workplaces. However, discipline, which often chiefly benefits others in the workplace, is often at odds with democratic education. It is often synonymous with passivity, muteness, obedience, not questioning working conditions or authority, and keeping in one’s place. As such, performing arts should not be so quick to queue up behind the teaching of discipline. Discipline promotes productivity, not democratic discourse. If the ends of discipline are to create an easily controlled person who submits unquestioningly to authority, then it works against an artist’s role in society. Performing arts education with a vocational focus has a legacy of fostering dependency on the teacher, keeping students in a child-like state of dependence—“you don’t know how you’re doing; only I know how you are doing” (Lakes 2005, 10). Qualities that El Sistema and other authoritarian education systems brag about such as silence, behaving oneself, following orders, and discipline seem more appropriate for preparing soldiers for an army than for artistic citizenship. Objectification of self and others is also antithetical to the purposes of democracy. Nussbaum (2016) argues that seeing others as subjects is an important aspect of liberal arts education and an indispensable part of democracy because democracy is built upon respect and concern, which requires the ability to see other people as human beings. Treating oneself as a subject is a pre-requisite to being able to treat others as subjects, and performing arts training in particular has an uneven history of doing so. Some performing arts practices, including practices of discipline, dependency, and over reliance on teachers, indoctrinate students to first and foremost objectify themselves. When students mostly see themselves in terms of use value for others, it become difficult for them to act with volition and less likely that they can engage with others as subjects (Prichard 2020). Performing arts scholars have rightly examined how a student’s self-objectification deleteriously affects individuals. A person who treats themselves as a passive object subject to the control of others is less likely to take up the roles of action, decisions, and responsibility and exercising a citizen’s responsibilities. But societies suffer as well: when a person sees their own value as transactional, they can only see others value as market-driven as well, and they will lack the ability to empathize and see others as human beings. Rich human relationships will be crowded out by relationships of use and manipulation. Democratic citizenship is incompatible with domination or submission, and, thus, performing arts educators should scurry away as fast as possible from discipline and submission-based arguments. Performing arts must foster individuality based on autonomy and empathy, and cultivate self-governance. Otherwise, the real value of the arts is lost to a world of docile workers and rote thinkers.

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Keeping Democracy DEAR

Democracy, in its simplest definition, is a system of governing that is directed by citizens for the benefit of citizens. Popular sovereignty is often the litmus test for a government directed by citizens. In considering a framework for teaching democracy through the arts, I have asked: what critical elements must be present to sustain popular sovereignty? What elements are indispensable to maintain rule by the people and for the people? I offer a provisional framework of four capacities or critical spheres that are prerequisites for sustaining democracies. In creating this framework, I have modified Kloppenberg’s (2016) framework of principles and premises of democracy.1 For discussion purposes, I have separated the four as distinct entities: Deliberation, Equality, Autonomy, and Reciprocity. They are, in fact, entangled and interdependent. For example, the development of an autonomous self requires mutually respectful deliberation and reciprocity (Hart 1992). Moreover, deliberation cannot happen without the autonomy to engage, and an active deliberation between people requires reciprocity. Deliberation, Equality, Autonomy, and Reciprocity are mutually constitutive in democracies and create meaning through each other. By thinking of democracy as crucially bound to these four critical spheres, educators can evaluate how their teaching can foster the capacities necessary for democratic citizenship, and how performing arts can keep democracy DEAR.

Deliberation

The free exchange of ideas, constant debate, and discussion are the crucial bedrock on which democracies exist. Democracies are noisy; our classrooms and studios should also be noisy. Speaking up and out should be the default for democracies, and dissent should be normalized. “Democracy thrives,” asserts Kloppenberg (2016, 708) “when individuals must articulate the reason for their commitments; it withers when individuals retreat to unexamined willfulness.” For deliberation to occur in class, teachers must abdicate the position of authority on all things and create active opportunities of formal debate, as well as formal and informal discussion. In terms of class rules and grading rubrics, students can co-construct them, thereby becoming active participants in the governing of class (Prichard and Horrigan 2018). While it can feel scary for teachers to abdicate some authority over procedures, the benefit is that students become participants in class governance rather than individuals coerced into a system in which they have no voice. An important characteristic of critical thinking in the 21st century is the ability to deal with ambiguity, paradoxes, and the ability hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Many students enter college with a viewpoint

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where ambiguity and uncertainty cause anxiety; they want the instructor to provide them with the authoritative answer (Erickson, Peters, and Strommer 2006). Indeed, endless standardized testing has led them to expect it. Yet, democracies require complex thinking in which uncertainty and doubt are assumed, not just in the beginning of a deliberative process, but throughout. So too, controversies and conflicts must be allowed to exist; performing arts teachers often gloss over differences in technique, style, and aesthetics in order to pretend that all the program’s instructors are in agreement. Students are rarely fooled. What students are really being taught in these moments is that disagreement is bad, conformity is good, and there really is one right answer for everything. Yet respectful conflict and collegial disagreement are rich areas of exploration. Democracy inevitably and necessarily involves endless negotiation and compromise between competing values and world views (Kloppenberg 2016, 13); students need to see their teachers model this behavior, and they need to practice these skills throughout their education. The noise of chaos is not the same as the noise of deliberation. Being quiet is what we do in order to work together in reciprocity, or when we listen empathetically to another. The necessity of a comfortable and unexamined viewpoint is anathema in democracies—a luxury that democracies cannot afford. The cost we pay to live in a democratic society is that there is no realm that transcends deliberation or free speech. Equality

Equality is not necessarily a given in democratic societies because of the incredible diversity that democracies contain. In theory, equality should already exist in every classroom, although there are many examples of that failing, particularly with regard to race, gender, and class. Performing arts disciplines also contain stark inequalities. Why are some groups represented and others are not? Who is not in the classroom? Who is overrepresented in your performing arts field and who is left out? What is the make-up of the upper administration of your school? Given that White men make up 30% of the US population, does the school (or performing arts field) population reveal equity, or a lack of it? Does your syllabus contain more than 30% White male authors or artists? Empathy in its simplest definition—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another—plays an important role in creating democratic equality. Empathy is crucial to the ability to recognize fellow citizens as people with equal rights, and “to look at them with respect, as ends, not just as tools to be manipulated for one’s own profit” (Nussbaum 2016, 27), and to be able to consider how policies will affect others who may be unlike oneself. Scholars who defend the humanities from attack often cite the development of empathy as one of the key traits necessary for democracy that STEM fields cannot do. Theatre, with its development of characters and embodiment in

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live performance, seems to be the best placed discipline in the university for the creation of empathy. If, however, every play is dominated by White males, contains formulaic love stories, or comes from eras with values that oppose equity and diversity, then faculty, students and audiences develop empathy for only one subjectivity. Or rather, with 70% of all roles in film played by White men (Lorenzetti 2015), society has had quite a bit of practice empathizing with White men; the challenge for society is to learn to empathize with diverse people in diverse circumstances, and for White men to learn to empathize with those that have not been so readily portrayed. Performing arts can play a particularly strong role in cultivating empathy for difference. Autonomy

Autonomy differs significantly from notions of freedom that dominate current US discourse. Autonomy requires the absence of control over individuals by the state and by other individuals; it requires a psychological and ethical self that is capable of deliberate action. Autonomy is necessarily balanced by reciprocity and must be weighed against the demands of the community. Thus, it differs from the impoverished ideas of freedom from constraint or the freedom to do as well as the “mere tallying of individual desires, the elevation of unexamined and indefensible personal preferences to the level of privileged rights” (Kloppenberg 2016, 9) that often passes for democracy. An autonomous life is absent of coercion. Autonomy is the acknowledgement of each element as self-controlled and the recognition of coercion as injurious to individuals and societies. Yet, autonomy is not the absence of constraint. Individuals are cognizant that their choices impact those around them, and they ideally make conscious choices with an awareness that individual choice is circumscribed by constraints and reciprocity with others. Nor does autonomy mean that an individual is their own authority on all issues. In fact, the idea of autonomy needs an individual to acknowledge the expertise of others as well as the presence of contradictory ideas. Autonomy requires the ability to evaluate competing authorities and to decide which authority is best for the situation: in other words, authority and expertise are contextual. This is not a concept that students automatically enter universities with: many K–12 programs as well as performing arts programs condition students to see the teacher, director, conductor, choreographer, as the sole authority. When students can only see authority and expertise in formal authority figures, it can cause great anxiety and helplessness when a student’s authority figures teach contrary ideas, such as when two teachers disagree, or an instructor’s teaching challenges an opinion the student grew up with. This is where the facility of deliberation melds with autonomy. This once again requires teachers to acknowledge the limits of their expertise, to facilitate students in forming their own ideas, values, and aesthetics.

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Reciprocity

Reciprocity balances autonomy and prevents it from becoming out of control freedom to do anything one pleases. Reciprocity recognizes that citizens are always bound to act reciprocally in their communities and to others. Without reciprocity, autonomy can be a rationale for cruelty. Reciprocity recognizes that we are anchored together—that we survive or fail together. More than any other critical sphere, reciprocity seems the most absent in the United States in political and educational US discourse. As a country that was founded on negative constitutional rights—the delineation of freedom from the government—US citizens think and discuss much less often the responsibilities the government has to the people and the responsibilities people have to each other, even though the democratic ethic of reciprocity was taken for granted by the Founding Fathers (Kloppenberg 2016, 11). Yet, a democracy cannot thrive without thought and action designed around reciprocity. As the modern progenitor of the economic growth argument, James McGill Buchanan described a predatory understanding of his fellow humans: each person desires maximum individual freedom for themselves “and controls on the behavior of others so as to force adherence with his own desires” (cited in MacLean 2017, 150). His words depart from the most basic ethical principles of classic liberalism of mutual advantage based on mutual respect. The economic argument thus encourages a predatory construction of education and obstructs the development of reciprocity. In the 21st century, as we confront the destruction of the world at the hands of expansion and exploitation, it is imperative that the United States learn to value the relational, reciprocal, and receptive over the lack of constraint or individual freedoms. Living within one’s means, living locally, and without coercion should be the new yardsticks with which we measure a society’s value and worth. Performing arts classrooms can foster reciprocity by re-thinking assignments, classroom interactions, assessments, evaluative practices to focus on the responsibilities the students have toward each other, rather than toward themselves, the teacher, or the institution.

Conclusion

Performing arts educators should trumpet performing arts’ ability to foster empathy, reciprocity, and citizens who recognize the crucial role of equality. Art’s enemies are not scared of the arts because they produce terrific violin players, astounding turners and leapers, or engaging actors; they are scared of arts education because it creates free-thinking citizens who are unsatisfied with current ways of seeing the world. That should inform arts educators as to the

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real power of the arts. It is not just about playing to an art field’s strengths; it is about recognizing the enemy and their rhetoric and then changing the ­argument—not capitulating the terms on which the argument is based. Performing arts educators should loudly proclaim the importance of their arts in creating free-thinking, equality-seeking students, but they should examine their own classrooms first to see if they are in fact actively fostering morally conscience, independent, autonomous students. Shifting the argument back to the original purpose of liberal arts education will not be easy, but we should not abdicate the argument. Once performing arts educators pick up the challenge of justifying the economic benefits of the arts, they have lost the game. One should not think that if arts educators give up teaching toward democratic ends and adopt the economic argument that the political forces that attack the arts will leave them alone. In fact, recent attacks on humanities and the sciences show that no discipline that potentially challenges authority is safe. There is no place to retreat, no argument that arts can adopt that will keep them safe in a political environment in which free-thinking and independent action are punished. Defaulting to the enemy’s argument, while it may provide a good temporary stance, cannot save the arts. Only by making a strong argument for the performing arts as actively and crucially essential for the education of democratic citizens—and never abdicating this position—can the arts maintain an essential position in higher education. Note 1 Kloppenberg uses two different models for democratic principles in Toward Democracy. I use the first model he describes. His second model—the three principles of democracy: popular sovereignty, autonomy, and equality; and three premises of democracy: deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity—is also described in Toward Democracy (2016).

References Applebaum, Ann. 2020. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York, NY: Doubleday. Baker, Geoffrey. 2016. “Citizens or Subjects? El Sistema in Critical Perspective.” ­Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, edited by David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne D. Bowman, 313–337. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Caplan-Bricker, Nora. 2013. “New Evidence: There is No Science-Education Crisis.” The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/114608/stem-fundingdwarfs-humanities-only-one-crisis. Dilliard, Irving. 1941. Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American. The Modern View Press. Elliott, David J., Marissa Silverman, and Wayne D. Bowman. 2016. Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Erickson, Bette LaSere, Calvin B. Peters, and Diane Weltner Strommer. 2006. Teaching First Year College Students. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Fish, Stanley. 2017. “Citizen Formation is Not Our Job.” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2017. https://www.chronicle.com/article/citizen-formationis-not-our-job/. Hart, Roger. 1992. Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. Florence, Italy: UNICEF. Kahlich, Luke. 2011. “Dance Education and Democracy.” Journal of Dance Education 1 (3): 93–95. The Kennedy Center Education. n.d. Artsedge. Accessed February 1, 2017. https://­ artsedge.kennedy-center.org. Kloppenberg, James T. 2016. Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lakes, Robin. 2005. “The Messages Behind the Methods: The Authoritarian Pedagogical Legacy in Western Concert Dance Technique Training and Rehearsals.” Arts Education Policy Review 106 (5): 3–18. Lorenzetti, Loren. 2015. “Hollywood Still Has a Major Diversity Problem.” Fortune, August 6, 2015. https://fortune.com/2015/08/06/hollywood-diversitywhite-men/. MacLean, Nancy. 2017. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York, NY: Penguin Books. The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. 2012. A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Polisi, Joseph. 2016. The Artist as Citizen. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus. President’s Commission on Higher Education. 1947a. Higher Education for American Democracy, Vol. I, Establishing the Goals. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. ———. 1947b. Higher Education for American Democracy, Vol. II, Equalizing and Expanding Individual Opportunity. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Prichard, Robin, and Kristin Horrigan 2018. “Using Participation Assessments to Create Active Learners in the Dance Studio.” Dance Education in Practice 4 (1): 8–15. DOI: 10.1080/23734833.2018.1417208. Prichard, Robin. 2020. “Does Dance Teach Self-Discipline or Obedience? Students Discuss.” Journal of Dance Education 22 (2): 129–33. DOI:10.1080/15290824. 2020.1792915. Ranciere, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. New York, NY: Verso. Schupp, Karen. 2019. Dance Education and Responsible Citizenship: Promoting Civic Engagement through Effective Dance Pedagogies. New York, NY: Routledge. Scott, J.C. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Pieces of Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sparks, Erin, and Mary Jo Waits. 2011. For What Jobs? Raising Expectations for Universities and Colleges in a Global Economy. Economic, Human Services & Workforce Division NGA Center for Best Practices.

19 REVITALIZING THE US BACCALAUREATE DANCE MAJOR Integrating Values of Diversity and Interdisciplinarity Sherrie Barr and Wendy Oliver

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been on the minds of many institutions in the past decade, and especially since the killing of George Floyd in May of 2020. This is evident in the many statements published on college and university websites dedicated to carrying out institutional DEI goals. In this landscape, “diversity” is best understood to reference a wide spectrum of identifiers, most prominently race, gender, class, ability, and sexual orientation. “Equity” concerns creating an equal playing field for every individual so that all may find success, regardless of one’s identity, while “inclusion” refers to including people of all identities in decision making and programming, to make them truly welcome within all aspects of the institution (Lunsford 2022). Interdisciplinarity has also been a growing focus in higher education (­ Jacob 2015; Klassen 2018), with benefits that help students “make connections across a diverse array of knowledge and skills, allowing them to move towards fulfilling lives and employment opportunities” (Bear and Skorton 2019, 60). As this mode of education flourishes, two notions have emerged. One is broad and involves the coexistence of two or more disciplines, including cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary theories. The other intentionally focuses on the integration of ideas that “… create new approaches and solutions that extend beyond the scope of a single discipline” (Rhoten et al. 2006, 3). It is important to note that dance, by its nature, is an interdisciplinary field. From its beginning in academe in 1926, the dance major has included courses from more than one field, and sometimes many. As exemplified by our project, dance’s core curriculum includes disciplinary areas of anatomy, music, education, history, and more. Areas once considered to be outside the discipline have been adapted for dance students and are now regarded as part of dance. As germane to our study are the ways in which White supremacy DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-23

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culture permeates our campuses, and how this culture has impacted dance in academia. The harsh implications of curriculum and course content stemming from ideologies centered in White Euro-American traditions, excluding many potential students and faculty, are only now beginning to be corrected (KerrBerry 2012). As DEI and interdisciplinarity continue to be significant factors in higher education policies, it follows that dance programs must find ways to absorb, adapt, and integrate them into their values and curricula. We, the authors, recognize this challenge and come to the work as two White, cisgender, female dance educators with a long history in higher education. Collectively, we have been tenured faculty at baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral institutions. Our teaching was done in various departmental homes that included a range of undergraduate and graduate dance degree offerings, as well as opportunities for minoring. In each instance, our commitment to dance in academe served as a springboard to question what it means to be an educated dancer. We built on this commitment as we sought to learn if, or how, US dance major programs were responding to the country’s societal upheavals of 2020. The research was intentionally exploratory in order to glean a program’s engagement with DEI and interdisciplinarity values. Our inquiry focused upon the current trajectory of baccalaureate dance degrees, yet to consider challenges and possibilities for the future of dance in academe, we also needed to take into account the aspirations from previous eras. Looking to the Past

Much has been written about Margaret H’Doubler, a pioneer in movement education, and her first credited dance major in postsecondary education in 1926. Often referred to as “The Wisconsin Idea,” the curriculum encouraged engagement in dance through improvisational explorations, investigating the body’s capabilities through a kinesiological lens and philosophical inquiries of dance as a path to holistic education and creative expression (Hagood 2000). During the first half of the 20th century, dance programs across the United States forged their philosophy and curriculum through these values. However, others emerged from “The Bennington Experience,” which were more professionally oriented. Over time, this approach, which saw students engaging in dance as an art form and advancing skillsets that would lead to a professional degree, began taking precedence (Hagood 2000; Dils 2007). As the 21st century approached, conversations surrounding the purpose of dance as an academic discipline became more pointed, especially in context of the nation’s changing educational landscape. Differentiating between dance education and dance training became about choosing between “either/or” (Risner 2010). Towards the end of the 20th century, the shift away from a stable, orderly, modern perspective of the world to a postmodern paradigm that is chaotic

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and complex reshaped fundamental notions about society and the world-atlarge, including the field of education (Hanstein 1990). For Hanstein, a key voice in US dance education reform during the 1980s, this changing terrain became “synonymous with a kind of interconnectedness” (1990, 56) within education, and, particularly, within curriculum design. Hanstein “calls for a curriculum which attends to, in explicit ways, the perception, exploration, transformation, and discrimination of artistic conceptions …” (1990, 57). She envisioned such a paradigm through curricular characteristics of openness, complexity, and transformative change. In this scenario, students are afforded opportunities to engage through exploring new ideas rather than replicating steps, to consider meaningfulness of a dance rather than a single meaning, and to appreciate the process of learning as being messy in contrast to predictable. Hanstein called for those responsible for developing dance curricula to be wary of compartmentalizing within the discipline, separating dance learning from other areas of learning, or segregating dance knowledge from the world in which students live. As an academic field of study, dance became embraced more as a performing art vehicle than one for education, one of the contrasts between the visions of Hanstein and H’Doubler. Amidst the economic constraints and emergent corporate sensibility of the end of the 20th century (Hagood 2000), dance administrators focused on increasing course enrollment favored the professional BFA over the liberal arts BA/BS degree, as the former had greater student appeal due its focus on training (Risner 2010). This landscape reignited conversations surrounding the essentials for a dance major as well as the fundamental premise for studying dance in higher education. Imagining what future dance educators will encounter requires a reimagining of what future dance major programs will look like—values, goals, as well as curricula particularities. Musil (2010), a leader in postsecondary education, highlights such changes, including multiculturalism, as essential to the on-going relevance of dance education. She questions whether “some of our own attitudes need reconsideration… how do individual and collective ‘elitist’ attitudes within our discipline hinder us from moving forward in a global, media-saturated society?” (Musil 2010, 111). Living in such a world only underscores the complexities of the educational and cultural landscapes of the 21st century. As dance educator Bolwell affirms, “… it is imperative that dance educators grasp the issues and enter into the fray, because if we do not, we will simply be further marginalized within the larger education arena” (1998, 84). Curricular reform is challenging, often disrupting long-held beliefs within the dance canon. Dance scholars Robinson and Domenici offer that although decentering such paradigms can feel like a rejection of traditionally dominant White European-influenced practices, “it really means sharing the stage with others as equals” (2010, 215). They warn, however, of the distinction between adding and integrating, as the former is a ghettoization that reinforces the

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marginalization of non-dominant practices and theoretical frames. The challenge lies in reshaping form and content and acknowledging diversity as central to programmatic reform (Musil 2010; Robinson and Domenici 2010). Their vision for reforming university dance programs is grounded in intercultural dialogues, “emphasiz[ing] relationships between cultures and beyond the mere inclusion implied by the word multicultural” (2010, 214). Arguing that their strategies support students in their career preparations, Robinson and Domenici assert: “we have a responsibility to prepare our students to work in this world, not in a homogeneous dance profession that doesn’t exist” (2010, 216). As the world that 21st century dance students encounter upon graduation is one of interlinked complexities, dance educators, as Hanstein (1990) urged, should develop an interconnected curriculum. Suggesting that interdisciplinarity is compatible with dance in academia, performance scholar Bannon speaks of “the breadth of features that have come to characteri[z]e dance … [have] arguably been enriched by a permeability between the varied ideas that have come to be part of [dance’s] maturing identity as an ‘interdiscipline’” (2010, 49). As such, an interdisciplinary paradigm invites an expansion of social, political, and historical analyses (Tomko 2005), for, as dance historian Morris bluntly advises dance scholars and educators: “[I]nterdisciplinarity does not just mean taking on theories from other disciplines but also moving a field outward into the world and its concerns” (2009, 94). Scholar-educator Kerr-Berry (2012; 2017) meets this challenge through integrating historically underrepresented perspectives in designing course content. Her focus centers on the missing presence of African American experiences and contributions to dance history, specifically in the United States. However, her call-to-action goes beyond what is omitted: how the Africanist presence is integrated into the canon in tangent with interrogating the dominant Western dance concert paradigm is equally essential (Kerr-Berry 2017). In connecting teaching paradigms to curricular reform, Kerr-Berry advocates for honoring student narratives. Students recognizing themselves in what they are learning to “understand the complex and interwoven history between Black and White dancing bodies in this country” (2017, 153) underscore this vision. Moreover, she asserts that this pedagogical approach must permeate all courses, whether dance appreciation and criticism or technique and choreography. Dance educator and scholar McCarthy-Brown (2014) builds on KerrBerry’s ideas by questioning the status quo of mono-cultural traditions in movement-based courses. McCarthy-Brown asserts that challenging the privilege of White Euro-American dance forms does not diminish them. Instead, it creates space for “other dance forms [to] be given the potential to grow, thrive, and attain academic legitimacy”(2014, 126). She advises decision makers to consider the needs of students and how course offerings “reflect the cultural affinities of your students and your college’s surrounding community”

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(2014, 127). Her suggestions also underscore how the interdisciplinary nature of dance affords students opportunities to engage with new perspectives (Tomko 2005). As much as looking back informs our forward imaginings, the present also needs interrogation. We cannot ignore the nation’s socio-cultural landscape resulting from the global pandemic and heightened racial injustices within the 21st century, especially alongside the reality that in 2045, the United States will no longer be a majority White country (Frey 2018). For dance to be relevant in postsecondary education, White Euro-American concert dance paradigms in dance degree programs need to be unpacked. As dance scholareducator Davis affirms, Whiteness is “a complex, ever-changing, and adapting social construct that, when paired with the identity politics and cultural histories” too readily permeates dance in academia (2018, 120). Although there is no one right answer to undo these inequities and to expand traditional disciplinary borders, only when meeting that challenge can dance fulfill the mission of postsecondary education, as dance education historian Hagood asserts to “push back the boundaries of knowledge, forward the cultural legacy, and contribute to society” (2000, 319). Our Project

Through the lens of the literature discussed above, our interest crystallized in how, or even if, tenets of DEI and interdisciplinarity are revitalizing US baccalaureate dance degrees. The first step was gathering a list of dance major programs broad enough to be representative while also establishing appropriate parameters for this query. Two criteria emerged. First, we excluded schools offering both undergraduate and graduate dance degrees. Competition for faculty resources and budgets too often arise when trying to meet the requisites of both. We sought to explore programs solely focused on their undergraduate degrees. Second, the institution needed to be a member of American College Dance Association (ACDA);1 this would underscore a program’s commitment to dance in postsecondary education and exchanges with other institutions, while narrowing the selection pool. A report from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2001) provided three institutional categories. Its classifications were divided between doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions; within each category, public, private, and religious-affiliated institutions were differentiated. Retaining Carnegie’s classifications, we finalized a list of institutions that met our criteria and organized them into geographical regions. We then explored each institution’s website to determine whether there was a dance program and if the program met our criteria. Using these guideposts to ensure an equitable representation of the total population, we randomly selected 30 institutions to serve as a focus group.2

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Data Collection

Institutional websites and their associated links served as the primary source for examining each program’s degree offering(s). We were aware that department websites might not be completely current, so the data collected are necessarily a snapshot in time of what was available on the Internet during our research.3 Nonetheless, each website revealed relevant information for cross-referencing mission, values, and goals statements between a dance program and its larger administrative unit(s). Equally significant was examining course requirements specific to each offered dance degree. Yet, as essential as these searches were to the investigation, our overarching query concerned the trajectory of baccalaureate dance degrees, rather than an examination of current strengths and limitations of any program or degree. In this way, gathering data followed an exploratory research methodology, at times descriptive, rather than focusing on a set problem (Exploratory Research n.d.). Moreover, the protocol invited opportunities to glean distinctive elements of each program. In this context, DEI became a platform to examine how systemic inequities embedded within the policies of postsecondary institutions might influence dance programs in the academy. Particularly germane to this study, DEI provided tools to unpack the prevailing White “master narrative” existing in dance and dance education. Also, while we acknowledge that the terms interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary are distinct, yet related, for the purposes of our study, we treat the two together, since many institutional, departmental, and program websites in our study used them interchangeably. In addition, although all the institutions we studied require either a core curriculum or general education degree requirements—thus necessarily providing a cross or interdisciplinary education for students overall—our study focuses more narrowly upon the courses specific to the dance major itself within the 30 institutions. Findings

This section looks at two types of educational values within the Web presence and curriculum of our focus group. These values, DEI and interdisciplinarity, are complex in their manifestations, and thus addressed separately. Although website quotations are not identified individually due to both quantity and maintaining anonymity, the full list of institutional websites used is available in Appendix 19.1. Additionally, endnote #2 provides a breakdown of types of institutional classifications represented in the focus group. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

All 30 institutions acknowledged diversity in their mission or values statements, whether fleetingly or as a direct call-for-action. Yet, this did not always

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correspond to statements made by the institution’s dance program; only 17 dance programs (56.6%) affirmed DEI values in mission, values, or goals statements. Within this group, three themes were identified: diversity/inclusivity; cultural awareness/experiences; and social justice/global awareness. Dance program statements also ranged in the rigor and depth of their DEI commitments. On the topic of demonstrating diversity/inclusivity, less substantial mission statements included phrases such as “diverse faculty,” “diversity of the human experience,” and “attributes of the major include its inclusivity.” Instances of more robust engagement had phrases like “challenging our own pedagogies and practices in order to make substantive changes that will support the efforts of antiracism,” and “delving into topics like gender and race theory in performance that will help … bring to life what’s next in theater and dance…” Around the issues of DEI and cultural awareness, moderate to robust statements had phrases like “intercultural experience” and “across cultures and perspectives,” and “dance as cultural expression.” Finally, for DEI values with a focus on social justice/global awareness, statements often mentioned “social and civil responsibility,” “search for justice and greater good,” and “social action and community building.” As noted, while only slightly more than half address some aspect of DEI in their promotional materials to students, all the investigated programs offer at least one course that reflects DEI values in their dance degree. This metric includes movement-based and theory courses, both required and elective. When distinguishing between movement and theory-based courses, we also found numerous ways diversity could appear. One possibility was experiential courses, required and elective, designated as either movement or theory-based. For example, an Afro-Caribbean dance and culture class was described as an “Introduction to Afro/Caribbean dances integrating movement, music, history, costume and drama. Exploration of Afro-Caribbean dances through a variety of influences from a diverse ethnological viewpoint.” Also noteworthy are crosslisted courses, such as “Dance Practices of the African Diaspora and the American Experience” as offered through the institution’s African Studies Program. In terms of courses that address DEI principles, we found that 16 programs (53.3%) required movement-based course(s) other than modern/­ballet; seven programs (23.3%) offered optional movement courses other than modern/ ballet; and eight programs (26.6%) offered movement courses other than modern/ballet to fulfill the elective credit requirement for technique.4 Of the 16 programs that require courses in movement practices beyond modern/ ballet, five specify jazz and/or tap as part of the core technique requirement. However, we wondered about such offerings, if taught without a relation to their cultural roots, should be credited as DEI courses. This question could not be fully resolved through catalog course descriptions. For the remaining 15 programs that offered required or optional electives, options greatly varied from program to program with possibilities including hip-hop, African

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Dance, Afro-Caribbean, Mexican Folkloric, and Middle Eastern dance, as well as multiple levels of ballet and modern. It is possible that in these elective categories, students could decide to take only ballet and modern and still fulfill their degree requirements. This needs to be a factor when reflecting upon how strongly DEI values are integrated into a program. And, with two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and two Hispanic-Serving Institutions being part of the focus group, we also wondered if countering the traditional White Euro-American paradigm at such institutions needed to be considered differently. When investigating theory-based courses outside the traditional White Euro-American tradition, we again found a range and degree of engagement with DEI. For instance, although six programs (20%) did not have a DEI theory-based course, required or optional, in their dance degree curricula, DEI tenets were present in the institution’s core general education requirements. One institution stated that the purpose of its arts component core curriculum requirement was “explor[ing] multiple ways the human experience can be expressed through creativity, including across different cultures and societies.” A similarly broad approach was found in nine programs (30%) with a theorybased course in their dance degree requirements. In many ways, such course content constitutes a survey approach, with descriptions such as “introduces the student to the diverse elements that make up the world of dance, including a broad historic overview, roles of the dancer, choreographer and audience, and the evolution of the major genres;” “Multiethnic approach to dance as a key to cultural understanding;” “investigates social conditions, political situations, religious customs, cultural traditions, and economic contexts for the development of dance forms across the world.” In contrast are courses illustrating a particular dimension of DEI. Course titles highlighting this strategy include “Reimagining Heritage in USA Concert Dance,” “The Artistic Power and Politics of the Dancing Body,” “Black Presence in Dance History,” and “Society and Social Dance.” Of the 13 programs (43.3%) offering this curriculum design, 11 (36.6%) required such classes, while also offering other options as electives within the degree. Lastly, despite the multiple variables in DEI course offerings, it is important to acknowledge that a student’s degree of exposure to DEI tenets is also influenced by their choices as well as the as the prescribed requirements. In this way, student agency is a component of engagement with DEI values. Interdisciplinarity

Overall, 11 out of 30 programs (37%) specifically mentioned interdisciplinary (or cross-disciplinary) study on their department webpages. For instance, one program boasts “… an integrative and cross-disciplinary approach to dance in which students make connections among disciplines.” Another states “… the

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dance program nurtures artistic independence, interdisciplinarity, and … a strong, supportive community.” A third program’s goals include: “To foster rigorous interdisciplinary research for integrated learning.” Many institutions that did not specifically use the terms “interdisciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary” used other language to convey a similar meaning. For instance, one department’s BFA “… lets you collaborate with other disciplines,” while another’s BS in Dance and Entrepreneurship states students “will make connections between dance, other disciplines, and daily life.” Six institutions (20%) had alternative ways of stating connections to other disciplines. Combined with the 11 programs that actually employed the terms “interdisciplinarity” or “cross-disciplinary,” 17 programs (56.7%) textually stressed dance’s connection to other disciplines, reflecting general trends in 21st-century learning. To determine the emphasis on interdisciplinary study within dance majors, we moved beyond the language used on the department/program webpages to examine the curriculum. We studied two different curricular indicators: The first was courses that used a non-dance or dance/other discipline prefix to indicate that a course was cross-disciplinary and/or generated from outside the dance program. For instance, a required music fundamentals course taken in the Music Department, or a pedagogy course taken in the Education Department would meet this criterion. The second indicator was dance theory courses that had dance in conversation with race, gender, culture, ecology, politics, or other relevant topics in 21st-century society. This type of course is interdisciplinary and often intersectional as well. For example, a core course in one program entitled “The Politics of Performance” notes that: “Students will approach the study of dance through the lens of sociocultural practice as a meaning-making activity that facilitates their understanding of race, class, body, gender, and sexuality.” Finally, while a few institutions that did not specifically use the words interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary or use alternative language to indicate dance’s connection to other disciplines, they nonetheless gave evidence of that value through their curriculum. For instance, one university’s BFA includes courses in marketing, musicianship, acting, and design. Three programs (10%) offered a bachelor’s in dance paired with a graduate degree in other fields such as education. Additionally, some dance majors required a minor in a different area, which is another form of interdisciplinarity education, although not within the major itself. Four degree programs (13.3%) required minors or equivalent credits outside dance in order to complete the dance major. One required a second major outside of dance. Some recommended (but did not require) a double major in particular fields. One suggested specific disciplines to complement dance, including exercise science, education, arts management, and communication. This reflects a practical trend toward preparing college students for specific careers and leadership positions (Jacob 2015).

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As an example of an interdisciplinary degree, one public institution offers a Dance Education BS degree called “Dance Education with Entrepreneurship.” It is a cross-disciplinary degree amongst dance, physical education, marketing, entrepreneurship, and exercise science, and prepares students to run their own businesses, as well as teach. Courses are in business areas such as marketing, advertising, and venture creations. The degree, offered through the Dance Education Program, is housed in the School of Education and Professional Studies. Career-focused degrees are evident in institutions regardless of size or public/­private status. Higher education institutions need to show that their graduates will be able to get jobs. One small private baccalaureate college website states: “Dance majors typically pursue careers in performance, teaching, choreography, dance therapy, physical therapy, and arts management.” Another example is a mid-size private doctoral university with two pre-professional, cross-disciplinary degrees: Dance Education and Dance Science. The Dance Education concentration prepares students to teach dance in the K–12 classroom, private studio, or community dance programs and offers students the option to complete a teaching certification within the four-year time frame. The Dance Science degree prepares students for further study in areas like dance medicine, physical therapy, or fitness. Summary

Overall, 26 of the 30 institutions (86.7%) in our study incorporated interdisciplinarity in their majors, to varying degrees, through curriculum structure and content, including two main criteria: (1) the requirement to take courses outside the department and/or cross-listed courses, or (2) the existence of individual courses that were interdisciplinary in themselves. Some departments used the words “interdisciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary” on their webpages to emphasize it as a positive attribute, while others implied it using different language. Two departments/programs did not mention those terms, use alternate language, or imply it through their curriculums. Finally, four had interdisciplinary courses available within the dance major, but not required, which meant that students might not experience an interdisciplinary course or curriculum during their four years of study. The range of differences in how interdisciplinarity was realized in this investigation was, in many ways, mirrored in our findings of how DEI was incorporated in major requirements. The scope of this range was even more evident when examining movement-based and theory-based courses as two categories. For instance, all 30 institutions offered some type of diversity course in their movement-based offerings, yet only 16 schools included such a course in its core technique requirement. In the remaining 14 programs, movement forms other than ballet and modern were provided as possible choices to complete the movement requirement or as electives within the overall dance requirements. In

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terms of theory courses, 22 programs required at least one theory course that included some elements of DEI. However, in the remaining eight programs, it is conceivable that a student might have a very limited exposure to DEI values. Discussion

Each dance program in our focus group illustrated characteristics of either DEI or interdisciplinarity, and/or both. Commonalities existed, yet the uniqueness of each program was also apparent. Most telling, however, was the extent of engagement with interdisciplinarity and DEI values. A few programs could be characterized as a passing nod, others revealed a modest approach, and some reflected a robust engagement. A similarity emerged among programs revealing a modest to robust engagement, one that centered on how curricular boundaries were being extended. This observation brought forward three questions: (1) What does a dance degree encompass? (2) Where and how does informal dance learning occur? (3) What values are engaged in a dance curriculum? Although interrelated, for the purposes of this discussion, we treat these questions independently in order to critically reflect upon the manner in which values of interdisciplinarity and DEI can take root. What Does a Dance Degree Encompass?

The “either/or” ideology of liberal arts versus professional degrees that once drove dance curriculum is now being stretched to include an interdisciplinary perspective. This is due to attitudinal shifts within institutions, as well as dance educators recognizing the importance to go beyond the traditional schism. Moreover, disrupting the traditional binary is also an acknowledgment that dance, as a field of study and career path is changing. For instance, the BFA degree, once considered to be indicative of a professional performance designation, is also found as a pathway to teaching through degrees such as BFA Dance Education. Whereas programs offering liberal arts degrees are claiming performance and choreography with degree designations such as BA Dance Performance and Choreography. Equally telling are those programs that explicitly acknowledge the interdisciplinarity of dance by including “Interdisciplinary Studies” in the degree name. As a “both/and” ideology continues to expand curricular options, the trend to frame a degree in terms of a career also continues to grow. This is particularly evident with cross-disciplinary curricula supporting career pathways in areas like health and wellness when offering a combined undergraduate/­graduate degree or certificate programs, even though administered by a non-dance unit. As significant as this trend is in preparing students for the complexities of the 21st century, we acknowledge that these students are often left to make their own connections within their cross-disciplinary studies.

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Examining what a dance degree is about also invites questions of who is welcomed to major in dance. With movement forms and theory courses outside the White Euro-American paradigm increasingly being added to the curriculum, a broader range of students can begin to see their lived experiences valued. The diverse backgrounds these students bring into the dance studio supports the growing trend to have statements pertaining to DEI on institutional websites. Where and How Does Informal Dance Learning Occur?

Curricula degree requirements, as dance scholar-educator Koff suggests, “represent not only what the experts in any discipline consider should be taught, but also the overall values of the community” (2021, 83). Yet alongside the explicit standards and policies associated with formal learning is what is hidden or not included: informal learning, as the case with many extra-curricular activities that are often less quantifiable even though potentially as consequential to a student’s education. For instance, we often found student-sponsored performance groups centered in movement forms outside a dance program’s offerings. Also notable were programs that brought students into their local communities to attend performances or to teach dance to underserved populations. These practices have the potential to enact the stated values of not just the dance program but also the larger institution in ways that the formal curriculum may not, underscoring the importance of community engagement and service to society. Through valuing informal learning of students ­“occurring in daily life… in communities and through activities of all individuals” (Koff 2021, 157), students begin to have more opportunities to “see” themselves. Activities associated with informal learning are not prescriptive and, as a result, students are encouraged to make choices and shape their own learning paths. Interdisciplinary centers, becoming more commonplace on campuses across the United States, further support expanded learning pathways, even when a center is not integral to the requirements for the dance major. This becomes especially evident when dance faculty involved in these centers engage in research that dissolves disciplinary boundaries to generate knowledge as real world issues are considered, galvanizing “issues or questions that hold significant crossover value to academia and civil society” (Rhoten et al. 2006, 8). In so doing, an array of possibilities become available to students for expanding ways of having dance in their lives after graduating. What Values Are Engaged in a Dance Curriculum?

We often found that a program’s engagement with DEI and interdisciplinarity was addressed in connection to its movement-based technique offerings. And

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although the modern/ballet paradigm has been losing its stronghold, there is still much to be done. Complex questions surrounding curricular inclusion of diverse forms remain, with questions such as: Are students required to participate in forms outside the traditional modern/ballet paradigm? How do diverse forms thread through the entire program? Is there parity in credit, levels offered, and overall access? Equally relevant are concerns about the pedagogical approaches used to teach diverse dance forms. For instance, a movement practice based in a call and response circle format that is taught with students in lines and the teacher being the sole leader might well be ignoring the practice’s cultural roots. If dance educators reify “methods with which we are most familiar or have accepted as most professionally amenable to student training and education” (Davis 2018, 121–2), we are not fundamentally honoring DEI tenets. The inclusion of diverse movement-based technique courses also brings to light accepted parameters of what defines technique. Course descriptions of African diaspora practices that we reviewed were often detailed, providing a socio-cultural perspective and, at times, teaching strategies. Acknowledging a form’s roots signals an interdisciplinarity sensibility. While some jazz course descriptions gave a nod to this sensibility, perhaps an indicator of a program’s embrace of DEI values, it was particularly notable that ballet and modern dance technique courses rarely incorporated a socio-cultural perspective. Those descriptions primarily focused on advancing skillsets, and thus the shift to remediating what defines technique is lost. This then begs the question of intent for including courses outside the traditional paradigm. Can such offerings showcase inclusion while also fostering understanding of diverse dance practices rooted in the world? This question became a backdrop to look at those programs embracing the juncture of DEI and interdisciplinary tenets through reimagining theorybased courses, including experiential and practice-based dance making classes. What is taught in such courses is occurring “in ways that would have been unlikely through single disciplinary means… a means to a purpose, not an end to itself” (Rhoten et al. 2006, 3). Mining dance through perspectives such as gender, race, and politics invites students to engage with dance as an interdisciplinary field, moving “outward into the world and its concerns” ­(Morris 2009, 94). And, through this process, students receive tools to become engaged citizens of the 21st century, an oft-repeated phrase in institutional mission statements. Looking to the Future

As the 20th century approached its conclusion, Hanstein charged dance educators: “… to situate the arts, humanities, and sciences in wider and overlapping contexts in education” (1990, 56). As we move forward into the 21st century,

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it appears that many institutions, in ways both practical and transformative, are embracing this concept. Although we found remnants of tensions between “The Wisconsin Idea” and “The Bennington Experience,” we also found a majority of programs ready to support their students in using dance as a vehicle to investigate the complex social issues facing the global world. Noted trends were broadening technique course offerings outside the traditional paradigm, restructuring theory courses to incorporate marginalized viewpoints, and expanding degree options to sustain a lifetime engagement with dance. As our findings revealed, the revitalizing of the dance major for the 21st century is happening; the “both/and” approach continues to gain traction. How such future changes will look is unknown, and there will certainly be no monolithic approach. Due to institutional variables (e.g., public or private, research university or baccalaureate college, the identity of its administrative home), dance programs in our focus group already held multiple approaches to reshaping curricular changes. The impacts of shifting demographics and an increasingly diverse student population heightens the urgency to broaden curricular offerings in movement forms relevant to those populations. Moreover, when technique practices outside the traditional paradigm are valued and socio-cultural practices are embraced as vital to the pedagogy, students begin to see themselves and their experiences as a key component of their dance education. It is then, as Kerr-Berry affirms, that “diversity becomes a reality, not an abstraction” (2012, 50). Such inclusion, be it through a course categorized as theory or movement practice, also becomes a springboard for a spectrum of career options. For as students traverse disciplinary boundaries, ranging from politics to neuroscience, and forge connections among historical, theoretical, and practical forms of knowledge, the dance field itself expands. This, too, is part of the future of dance in US postsecondary education. Yet as the history of dance in academe suggests, dance educators sometimes need to examine the ways in which their own attitudes deter change (Musil 2010). Educator and social activist hooks once contended, “Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply” (1994, 141). To meet this challenge, crucial questions must be posed: Who and what is being privileged amongst dance students and faculty? Does one non-Eurocentric course equate with diversity? Does the pedagogy support interdisciplinary learning, and, if so, how? Such questions underscore a fundamental query of how stakeholders define “diversity.” If, or how, the response transforms into action, ranging from mission statements and degree requirements to audition practices and performing groups, is equally central and as much about inclusion and equity as diversity. But, as history also suggests, dance educators must take action toward “decentering Western and historically privileged dance forms” (Amin 2016, 25), if dance as a field of study in academe is to remain viable.

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Institutions must find ways to revitalize programs by creating anti-racist and interdisciplinary curriculums so that they may continue to be relevant. The trajectory for the future of baccalaureate dance degrees is one of infinite possibilities, although often encumbered by challenges both philosophical and practical. Its potential, especially in relation to DEI and interdisciplinarity, also can revitalize the role of dance in postsecondary education, as educators hold the capacity to change the way students experience dance and their undergraduate education as a whole. Notes 1 The mission and vision of ACDA is to promote US dance programs in postsecondary institutions, an objective met through regional conferences that includes performances, workshops, and classes highlighting faculty and students (American College Dance Association 2022). 2 Examining websites to determine which institutions met our criteria occurred between February 24 and April 15, 2021. The selected focus group can be broken down as: 12 doctoral, 10 master’s, and 8 baccalaureate institutions; 16 public, 9 private, and 5 religious-affiliated institutions; 2 HBCUs, 2 Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and 2 Women’s Colleges. See Appendix 19.1 for the websites of individual institutions in our focus group. 3 Data collection occurred between June and August 2021. 4 Two programs needed to be counted twice due to differences in BA and BFA technique requirements. In each instance, a technique course other than ballet and modern was required to fulfill the BFA, but not the BA.

References American College Dance Association. 2022. “Welcome to the American College Dance Association.” https://www.acda.dance. Amin, Takiyah Nur. 2016. “Beyond Hierarchy.” The Black Scholar 46 (1): 15–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119634. Bannon, Fiona. 2010. “Dance: The Possibilities of a Discipline.” Research in Dance Education 11 (1): 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647890903568313. Bear, Ashley, and David Skorton. 2019. “The World Needs Students with Interdisciplinary Education.” Issues in Science and Technology 35 (2): 60–62. Bolwell, Jan. 1998. “Into the Light: An Expanding Vision of Dance Education.” In Dance, Power and Difference: Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Dance Education, edited by Sherry Shapiro, 75–95. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Davis, Crystal U. 2018. “Laying New Ground–Uprooting White Privilege and Planting Seeds of Equity and Inclusion.” Journal of Dance Education 18 (3): 120–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2018.1481965. Dils, Ann. 2007. “Social History and Dance as Education.” In International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, edited by Liora Bresler, 103–112. New York, NY: Springer. Exploratory Research: Definition and Characteristics. n.d. Accessed August 14, 2021. https://www.questionpro.com/blog/exploratory-research/.

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Frey, William. 2018. “The US Will Become Minority White in 2045, Census Projects.” https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-willbecome-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/. Hagood, Thomas. 2000. A History of Dance in American Higher Education. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Hanstein, Penelope. 1990. “Educating for the Future–A Post-Modern Paradigm for Dance Education.” Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance 61 (5): 56–58. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. New York, NY: Routledge. Jacob, James W. 2015. “Interdisciplinary Trends in Higher Education.” Palgrave Communications 1 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.1. Kerr-Berry, Julie. 2012. “Dance Education in an Era of Racial Backlash-Moving Forward as We Step Backwards.” Journal of Dance Education 12 (2): 48–53. https:// doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2011.653735. ———. 2017. “Reshaping Dance History by Deconstructing Whiteness.” In Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World, edited by Nyama McCarthy-Brown, 127–53. ­Jefferson: McFarland. Klassen, Renate G. 2018. “Interdisciplinary Education: A Case Study.” European Journal of Engineering Education 43 (6): 842–859. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03043797.2018.1442417. Koff, Susan R. 2021. Dance Education–A Redefinition. London, UK: Methuen Drama. Lunsford, Lindsey. 2022. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 2nd ed. Kansas City, MO: Extension Foundation. https://online.flippingbook.com/view/1049966584/. McCarthy-Brown, Nyama. 2014. “Decolonizing Dance Curriculum in Higher Education: One Credit at a Time.” Journal of Dance Education 14 (4): 125–129. https:// doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2014.887204. Morris, Gay. 2009. “Dance Studies/Cultural Studies.” Dance Research Journal 41 (1): 82–100. Musil, Pamela. 2010. “Perspectives on an Expansive Postsecondary Dance.” Journal of Dance Education 10 (4): 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2010. 529762. Rhoten, Diana, Veronica Boix Mansilla, Marc Chun, and Julie Thompson Klein. 2006. Interdisciplinary Education at Liberal Arts Institutions. New York, NY: Teagle Foundation White Paper. Risner, Doug. 2010. “Dance Education Matters: Rebuilding Postsecondary Dance Education for Twenty-First Century Relevance and Resonance.” Arts Education Policy Review 111 (4): 123–135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2010. 490761. Robinson, Danielle, and Eloisa Domenici. 2010. “From Inclusion to Integration: Intercultural Dialogue and Contemporary University Dance Education.” Research in Dance Education 11 (3): 213–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2010. 527324. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 2001. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Menlo Park, CA: Carnegie Publications. Tomko, Linda J. 2005. “Teaching Dance History: A Querying Stance as Millennial Lens.” In Teaching Dance Studies, edited by Judith Chazin-Bennahum, 91–113. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Appendix 19.1: Websites for Institutions in Focus Group

https://www.appstate.edu http://www.bsu.edu https://www.bates.edu https://www.bridgew.edu https://www.byu.edu https://www.ccsu.edu https://drexel.edu https://www.goucher.edu https://www.gonzaga.edu https://www.hws.edu https://www.hofstra.edu https://hope.edu https://www.humboldt.edu https://www.macalester.edu https://www.mtsu.edu https://www.muhlenberg.edu https://www.nmsu.edu https://www.northwestern.edu https://www.radford.edu https://savannahstate.edu https://www.scrippscollege.edu https://www.sru.edu https://semo.edu https://www.suu.edu https://www.spelman.edu https://www.tcu.edu https://www.ufl.edu https://www.usm.edu https://www.uvm.edu https://www.wisc.edu

20 INTERROGATING THE ACADEMY’S ROLE IN THE JOURNEY FROM ART MUSIC TO HEART MUSIC Fiona Evison

What does it mean to be a music composer in this world? Moreover, how are music composition students prepared for and supported for this role by their studies? These seemingly simple questions belie deeper interrogations into the essence of composition and whether it is only for expressing one’s creative voice and vision. How might composers enact care for others and function as catalysts for others’ creativity? More pointedly, do composers have community responsibilities, and, if so, what are those responsibilities? By extension, should educational institutions then prepare composers to fulfil these community obligations, and what would such preparation entail? Like other scholars in participatory arts fields, I have layers of interconnected questions—questions that I have pondered since entering community music (CM) graduate studies as a composer. Definitions and Positionality

I use art music in my writing to describe a traditional Eurocentric aesthetic framework, and I intend my phrase, from art music to heart music, to describe both a wide, contextual range of music arising from relational composition and also a shift from composition focused on personal vision to one focused on people. I do not mean to imply that art music and musicians lack heart. There are oft-discussed problems in defining CM and participatory arts (Veblen 2007, 2013; Kertz-Welzel 2016; Higgins and Willingham 2017; ­Matarraso 2019). Understandings vary geographically, leading to many potential forms of community music-making. For example, in North American contexts, CM might refer to amateur music-making separate from formal study, such as community groups led by highly trained conductors, involving DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-24

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participants with no say in musical decisions, and embracing repertoire, expectations, and goals from art music traditions. Other CM is rooted in participatory culture, which defines associated values, goals, types of activity, and participant roles. Turino (2008) reflects these elements in his distinct categories of participatory performance, which involves only participants and potential participants and the goal of participation, and presentational performance, in which performers prepare and provide music for a non-participating audience, with the goals of clarity and excellence. In Eurocentric cultures, presentational performance is well known while participatory performance exists in certain dance and music cultures. A prevalent CM philosophy found in the scholarly literature emerged from the 1960s United Kingdom (UK) counterculture, using politically motivated (Kershaw 1992; Higgins 2012; Balfour 2018) “bottom up” approaches in which music-making is considered vital to “social transformation, emancipation, empowerment, and cultural capital” (Higgins and Willingham 2017, 21). Rather than preserving and reproducing musical works, leaders focus on practical concerns of creating musical opportunities for people of all ages and abilities. This literature often uses intervention to describe CM leaders’ work, who are frequently labelled facilitators (Howell, Higgins, and Bartleet 2017; Ansdell et al. 2020; Currie, Gibson, and Lam 2020). Interventions refer to communal music-making processes that establish or restore lost or compromised music practices or well-being within community settings (Bartleet and Higgins 2018). I position myself as a Canadian community musician with decades of experience as both a CM participant and facilitator. My research places me inside interventionist scholarly circles, and my compositional endeavors are informed by CM values. I feel what Willingham and Carruthers (2018, 601) term a “call to serve”—an ethical and musical duty to facilitate others’ music-making to their benefit. In contrast, my composition training emphasizes the supreme value of novelty, exploration, creative vision, and the composer’s unique voice. Thus, I find myself in a fluid “inside-outside-upside-downside” place (Evison 2022b) with values, goals, and methodologies that often align more closely with democratic music education than with traditional art music principles. Yet, I also find broader CM definitions more useful in identifying what occurs musically within communities and the contexts in which I function. Relational Composition Research Methods and Terminology

Consequently, as a composer, I have wondered where I fit into interventionist CM and if others also wrestle with such issues. I use grounded theory methodology (Charmaz 2006), an inductive and flexible method that develops a theory to explain the studied phenomenon, and I interviewed 33 participants

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working in 11 countries—27 composers, ages late 20s–70s, and renowned CM leaders and scholars (who work with CM composers and/or may also compose). Participants were invited to the investigation through snowball sampling.1 They described their views, experiences, practices, and insights on composers’ roles in participatory music-making and provided audio recordings, scores, videos, as well as philosophical and practical writing, resulting in rich data that were coded into themes using recursive abstraction (Polkinghorne and Taylor 2022), utilizing systematic data paraphrasing. In discussing the findings, I distinguish my interviewees as research participants, which refers to both composers and leaders/scholars, and community composers, who are those specializing in composition. CM participants are community members who engage in music-making that is facilitated by a musical practitioner or leader, such as in an ensemble, a short-term project, or a single workshop. These are people of various ages and abilities with whom community composers with a social conscience work creatively on a spectrum of activity in diverse contexts for different purposes. Examples of compositional contexts include community youth orchestras in Brazil; incarcerated women in England; older adult band ensembles in the United States; intergenerational community operas in Canada; and singing projects with Japanese older adults in care homes, Hong Kong protesters, and Irish youth. Projects ranged from a single participatory encounter to months-long collaborative processes. CM participants’ musical backgrounds included those with little previous experience, enthusiastic amateurs, and groups with some professional musicians. Research participants’ goals included musical creativity and exploration, connection, well-being, and empowerment through activities that are astonishingly wide and deep, using what I term relational composition (Evison forthcoming). Notably, the breadth of activities extends beyond what is found in interventionist CM discourses, in which group composing is privileged and composers are rarely mentioned. Moreover, musical materials tend to not engage musicians with advanced skills (Smith 2013, 2021). Relational Composition

The adjective relational is not linked to any specific relational arts’ philosophy but highlights composers’ relationship-building purposes and processes, which are personal and often unmediated by publishers or conductors. Relational composition aligns with Small’s concept of musicking by seeking to establish “relationships that model the relationships of our world, not as they are but as we would wish them to be” (Small 1998, 50). Relational composition encompasses the values and methods of composers in CM settings in which they write and facilitate music-making to the benefit of communities—­balancing, or even prioritizing, the well-being of community members with the musical product. In contrast to the values associated with art music, relational composition is

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a continuum of compositional activities in which creative input and control are contextual. Somewhat controversially, this includes composition where composers have full creative control and provide scores that facilitate participatory music-making (e.g., for community opera or choirs), as well as more participatory group composition. Of relevance to this chapter, formal training can potentially strengthen the multi-skilled approaches and relationship-based compositional practices of such composers (Evison forthcoming). While I did not expand on this theme in my initial report (Evison forthcoming), many research participants suggested intriguing possibilities regarding composition pedagogy. Consequently, this chapter considers the responsibility of music composition, performance, and music education departments and professors toward students and their communities. It weaves together concerns around pedagogy, curricula, compositional practices, gatekeeping, cultural and academic norms, community education, accessibility, connections between the classroom and outside world, and my own academic experiences as a composer with a community practice. I invite readers to consider different pedagogical approaches where tertiary level composition students are encouraged to broaden their skills and where community music is celebrated, even facilitated, by the academy. This revisioning recognizes the vibrant and meaningful music-making enacted outside the walls of formal education, where CM participants—motivated by multiple reasons, including love of music, enhanced well-being, realization of musical goals, and desire for connection— regularly engage musically with other community members. Researchers have investigated the physical, mental, social, and spiritual benefits of CM activities (Clift, Hancox, and Morrison 2012). While composers and composition education have a vital role to play in these contexts, composition is a specialized musical field with an established framework and values. Additionally, as society becomes increasingly sensitive to social responsibilities and embraces civic roles for the arts, tertiary institutions are uniquely placed to develop democratic artists as community leaders. Such leaders can arise from within composition programs that adopt new approaches for community contexts. Shifting Paradigms and Incomplete Education

Composers, in the sense of past renowned, authoritative figures, are seldom mentioned in CM literature, and my interviewed community composers described their practices as diverging from common conceptions existing since the 19th century, in which composers are esteemed as almost divine geniuses working in solitude to produce highly demanding music for professional performers. Nettl notes that attributions of genius are usually confined to famous “classical” composers, with living composers described instead as talented (1995, 23). Yet, the composer-as-genius has a powerful hold on Western culture. Consequently, some community composers feel so strongly about

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distancing themselves from this concept that they no longer called themselves composers, even though that term describes their work. Furthermore, research participants often described their thinking about composing as diverging from what was developed in their schooling. It is not unusual for composers to have works used or commissioned by community groups—given diverse CM activity, though, these compositions do not necessarily reflect the relational philosophy described above. Furthermore, not all community work is rooted in altruism, but can arise from funding and policy demands (Laycock 2005; Winterson 2010; Rudland 2023), globalization, student expectations, inclusivity directives (Willingham and Carruthers 2018), and curricular outcomes. As research participants elaborated on paradigm shifts and alternative values, several composers specified that their training had not prepared them for their current work driven by values including equality, accessibility, love, care, service, and humility. They stated that these values seemed incompatible with what was learned in the academy where composers were respected as experts, musical products were prioritized, and they learned to compose for virtuosic musicians striving to perform their scores perfectly. Ethnomusicologists who study music conservatory culture have also noted such embedded values (e.g., Becker 1986; Kingsbury 1988; Nettl 1995). Research participants often held disparate, even incompatible, musical aesthetics to the aesthetics emphasized in their education. They contrasted past efforts to realize their own creative vision and write exacting music with now engaging with people at every level in order to create tailored music with more profound purposes, such as joy, well-being, satisfaction, and challenge with purpose. While composers are often taught that innovative style and content are “the main requisite of a successful compositional career, if not a successful composition” (Nettl 1995, 101), community composers in my study broadened their goals from creation and experimentation to include empowerment, connection, community development, and benefitting others through musical processes. This does not mean that composers’ creativity and skills are ­unimportant—participants declared the importance of what composers bring to projects and noted the creative satisfaction that they personally derive from their work. The wide activity spectrum of community composers involves collaboration and co-ownership, but also more solitary work. Turino’s (2008) theory regarding distinct music fields is relevant because these composers understand that different contexts require different goals and processes, and that “success” is contextual. Consequently, presentational approaches can potentially derail participatory music, and vice versa (Turino 2009, 102). For example, virtuosity, dramatic contrast, innovations, and extensive variations characterize presentational music and draw attention to individual contributions but are counterproductive to participatory traditions. Cultures prioritizing participation provide security to music-makers through repetition and blending

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individual voices or instruments (Turino 2008; 2009). These factors inspire people of all abilities to join in, but might bore or confuse non-participating audiences. Community composers in my research, however, find creative ways to provide security, sometimes including presentational elements, if that fits the context and group’s needs. Teaching Relational Composition

Undergirding relational composition is a commitment to people—who (radically) might even be considered more important than the music. Since traditional compositional instruction is normally situated within a conservatory system that tends to value music over people, many research participants acknowledge that alternative training is required to meet the unique compositional demands of inclusive, collaborative, participatory CM activities. Participant composers who study or work in tertiary institutions stated that composition programs rarely accommodate the “community” paradigm. Additionally, although some scholars have called for tertiary level CM courses and approaches (Turino 2009; Rohwer 2011; Willingham and Carruthers 2018), these discussions fail to address the role of composition programs or departments in this process. What might constitute a community-connected composition program that enacts relational composition? In addition to skills in facilitation and relationship-­building, research participants recognized a need for “hands-on” training that teaches both individual and collaborative composition skills for composer-driven works, fully collaborative projects, and everything in between. Research participants disagreed about whether such relational composition training should or could occur within the academy, but many proposed apprenticeships where students would learn composition and crucial community-­ related skills guided by CM facilitators or community-engaged graduate students. They could observe and analyze their supervisor’s approaches and experiment to see what works in various contexts. One composer emphasized, “The only way that you learn how to be a musician in that socially engaged context is to be in that socially engaged context” (D. Camlin, interview with author, May 21, 2019). Another said, “Get out there and get your hands dirty. And make mistakes” (J. Boyce-Tillman, interview with author, June 3, 2019). Community-engaged learning, an oft-stated value of educational institutions, could facilitate the development of relational composers, but research participants stressed that such programs must include relational facilitation and community development skills in areas such as empathy, communication, and dialogue. These leadership and interpersonal skills are essential since composers actively take part in the music-making and must ensure that all participants have a chance to be heard. Other research has also emphasized composers’ need for facilitation skills (Waddington-Jones, King, and Burnard 2019), even within

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art music contexts due to increased interest in audience participation (Calvin and Doffman 2017; Toelle and Sloboda 2021), but is such skill development possible within a tertiary environment? Yes, because other programs, such as education and social work, include similar curricular outcomes. In addition to coursework that emphasizes mastery of composition techniques, score analysis, and the study of others’ approaches, another composer participant states, “If you want to be a composer in the community, learn to be a composer. Write some music. Get good at your craft. At the same time, get good at your craft of community development work. You can do both of those through an academic context” (P. Moser, interview with author, May 8, 2019). Suggestions for academic assessment of community composition coursework include a pass/fail system instead of numerical marks; active feedback from CM participants with evidence of responding musically to feedback (multiple times over a project) and student reflexivity; and detailed research on a CM group’s makeup and musical needs, followed by creating appropriate music. These processes represent a distinct departure for programs intent on expanding harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and instrumentation boundaries. Tailoring assignments to students’ strengths and interests is also important since they may prefer to hold supportive roles, rather than leadership roles, which are equally vital in CM. Conflicting Values in the Academy

Current composition pedagogy emphasizes inventiveness, individualism, technological experimentation, computational resources, individual harmonic systems, and the development of new forms of musical expression (Behr, Mamedes, and Chueke 2020). While not inherently antithetical to community practice, these values are often at odds with community music-making that prioritizes skills like simplicity and repetition to support inclusive participation. One composer-music professor in the study asserted that studying composition within the traditional paradigm would be the worst path for a community composer because of imbedded institutional, cultural, and political norms. These challenges align with my own student experience. When judged by standards of novelty and experimentation, my compositions appeared deficient, yet my knowledge of the project-specific community musicians helped me to discern what supported or sabotaged their singing. My goal was participation, not innovation and virtuosity, and I devised ways to include experienced singers. From previous interactions, I also knew that composers’ understandings about simplicity can still be too complex for inclusive activities that welcome all, regardless of musical literacy or experience. Thus, I was also prepared to simplify the composition further, believing that my creativity served the musicians; they were not serving me. Despite careful thought and planning, however, my efforts were deemed deficient.

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Situations like this are further complicated by power differentials between professors and students. This power can be displayed in cruel and career-­ altering ways, such as a composer’s account of being in a trio of students who had submitted individual compositions to whom the professor announced, “You’re a composer. You’re not a composer, and you’re not a composer,” creating great distress. In addition, curricular outcomes are designed based on values that undermine music-making fields built on different values ­(Turino 2008). Academia’s practice of assessing prioritized, select knowledge also means that marks can be negatively affected, especially when professors are inexperienced in alternative fields and students have no formal opportunity to demonstrate how their composition meets unique CM needs. Since the master-apprentice model figures prominently in how composition is taught, expert composers convey their knowledge and feedback through individual student lessons (Barrett 2006; Behr et al. 2020). Thus, a mentor’s lack of understanding can hinder the development of community-minded students. Mentor models show students many different ways of being composers, but mentor inexperience can result from gaps in their own training, potentially perpetuating a detrimental ongoing cycle if those students become teachers. Several factors contribute to misunderstanding CM-related principles. First, writing for amateurs is often discouraged in higher education outside of preservice teacher education because it is considered inferior to composing for professional musicians (Andrews 2013; Wendzich and Andrews 2019). This perception has led to a dearth of teaching on how to accommodate developing musicians, leading to composers who do not know how to write appropriately for students and amateur musicians (Wendzich and Andrews 2019). Another issue is bias toward orchestral composition (Conte, Sametz, and Kyr 2014) that leads to other types of composition being seen as less prestigious, rigorous, and creative. For example, choral music—a common CM activity—can be viewed this way (Conte et al. 2014). Professors may not ask composition students to analyze, let alone compose, choral music, but Conte et al. (2014) propose countering this deficiency through teachers with choral experience who encourage student choral compositions. Some faculties employ experienced choral composers; however, does this experience extend to the challenge of writing for choirs with a mixture of music readers and non-readers, limited and wide ranges, and various ages and levels of experience? Additionally, teachers with limited experience in a subject area may lack confidence in teaching that topic, and subsequently avoid or minimize it. For example, discomfort and inexperience influence whether elementary and secondary school music educators include composition or improvisation in their curricula (Kaschub and Smith 2013). Conflicting compositional approaches and values affect more than musical content, as illustrated by students who struggle to represent relational and/ or collaborative work ethically in a thesis or report if required to focus on a single composer’s vision and voice. If forced to choose between satisfying

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conventions and equitable approaches, students may abandon their projects for something more “acceptable,” missing an opportunity to explore and represent the richness of relational composition. Such scenarios can frustrate and discourage students musically, academically, philosophically, emotionally, and spiritually. As with the trio described earlier, my student interactions over CM composition left me embarrassed, doubting my creativity and skill, and considering abandoning composition. Thus, there is potential to damage and derail students’ musical futures. Such outcomes are not necessarily intentional, and professors may want to accommodate students’ interests but feel restricted by program orthodoxies or their own inexperience. Alternatively, concerns about maintaining standards and cultural gatekeeping may also be present. I have mentioned that research participants often thought that composing and composition terminology requires adjustment, evidenced by some who avoid calling themselves composers or defining what they do as composition. Instead, they are facilitators of music creation who might overcome community members’ inhibitions by calling composing something else—e.g., experimenting, writing a song, improvising, or creating music. Changed terminology broadens who can be or call themselves composers, what activities are considered composition, who can train composers, and what that training entails. Consequently, one research participant teaches composition in a CM undergraduate program although he is not considered a composer nor defines himself as one. This situation confuses his composition colleagues, especially since the student CM compositions are creative and co-assessed well by the composition faculty. Another composer related that an administrator segregated composition and CM students, who had united for a course on improvisational and intuitive methods, to the dissatisfaction of both students and professor: I wanted to work with the [student] composers and many of them wanted to work with me, and they came to me anyway because they found that they were learning more rapidly and more creatively in my classes …. The ones who were doing the classical composing—in the view of the department of music, the “proper composers”—I never saw them again unless they came, which some of them did, to my classes. (R. Paton, interview with author, May 1, 2019) These examples reveal an underlying philosophy about who are considered composers and how they should be trained. People holding such enculturated views might resist change; however, broader definitions and understandings could benefit students’ creative development. For instance, community composers sometimes found that “serious” composition caused extreme stress as students, in contrast to freer approaches in community work. Playful composing and improvising can be the door to “uncharted but immensely creative territory” (Kanellopoulos 2021, 97), which is why community composers

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often value sound play (Waddington-Jones et al. 2019). Furthermore, music education research has found that composing within specific parameters can benefit students (Mayo 2018). The restrictions inherent in community composition, then, might contribute to composer well-being, and the personal rewards of community composition might help overcome students’ dissatisfaction with their composition studies. For example, UK composer Barber (2015) left his program before completion but found his way back to composition through rewarding community opera work. Barber’s story illustrates how composers working along the art music to community music spectrum can find the most meaning and satisfaction from community or collaborative projects, even discovering remarkable creative opportunities surpassing work with professionals. Contrary to assumptions, community practice is not “forsaking your own artistic life but thriving in work … completely connected to your artistic practice” (J. Barber, interview with author, December 12, 2021). Adapting Current Pedagogy

How could incorporating a community focus create new pedagogical spaces? The prevalent ways of teaching composition are through individual lessons, courses, and workshops (Biró 2020) that develop skills and understanding of professional culture (Love and Barrett 2019). Workshops could be adapted to provide guided opportunities to practice community workshop skills among students first, and then with community groups. Learning to be a community composer happens best within a community because composers find out within that context what people can and cannot do. The process shapes and improves the music because it works better for that community, even though the result can differ greatly from the original piece. An example of an evolving composition based on community feedback is one composed by Johnathan Kana for a combined prison-community choir affiliated with the University of Iowa. The conductor appreciated Kana’s flexibility in approving simplifications, even though the result was a very different composition from the original complex vision. He embraced the new version, but this experience contrasted with his training: “It just isn’t the way composition is taught” (J. Kana, interview with author, June 4, 2019). Relational composition requires humility and flexibility but can lead composers and performers into fulfilling music-making. Like others in my study, I treasure this approach and am unsatisfied by arms-length composing interactions. Ethical and Civic Responsibilities

My research discovered composers with a conviction that composing is not just for, or by, experts and this chapter has explored training that might facilitate this philosophy. Where does the issue of responsibility fit? Music programs

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have a responsibility to prepare their graduates for future employment, and on a practical level, informed community work fits into multi-portfolio careers that are the norm for musicians (Carruthers 2008; Mantie et al. 2017). When considering the civic responsibilities of composition programs, the discussion intersects with discourses on the civic role of the arts, supported by arguments about human rights, social justice, neutrality, and ethical duty (Doeser and Vona 2016). For example, Elliott and Silverman frame artistic citizenship as artists leading “a productive, meaningful, ethical, and community-oriented way of life that benefits themselves and others” (2016, 89). Relational composition reflects such thinking since community composers feel an ethical, and sometimes spiritual (Evison 2022a), duty to use their education and experience to enable community music-making, yet their own creativity is not neglected in the process. Convictions that the arts have a civic role and that artists have an ethical duty to others are not new. Historically, artists have been concerned about accessibility and outreach, and, over time, broader aims have resulted in diverse activities facilitated by committed leaders (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK n.d.). These leaders try to foster excellence and creativity in people––and place-centered practices in which “developing relationships and strong connections are central” (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK n.d., 15). These goals align with my research participants’ views and suggest that music-making is a social practice. From this perspective, creation is not enough in composition education. Students should be prepared to use their creativity for the good of others, including considering social justice issues, caring for their communities, and developing an awareness of the arts’ power to move, bond, heal, and motivate. The purpose of arts education thus changes to being more outwardly focused than the realization of personal artistic imaginings—a reorientation that stems from “re-visioning what art making, and arts education can and should aim to do” (Elliott and Silverman 2016, 101). How might this revisioning affect tertiary education? Montaño (2000) suggests that it redefines being musically educated to include participatory skills and understanding music as culturally situated. It also entails developing students who envision themselves using their skills and education to enable others’ music-making, then doing so. In other words, music education can prepare students for social responsibilities, and it represents a unique opportunity to shape students who are more than musical “creators, recreators, and consumers” (Montaño 2000, 43). Montaño recognized that this was a shift in thinking about music education and activity, but he proposed that such mission re-evaluation would be a catalyst for community music-making. My research findings confirm Montaño’s predictions: as community composers revised their thinking on what it means to be a composer, their composition activity became relational and expanded into the community to enable others’ music-making.

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I am not implying that tertiary educational institutions, composers, and professors are uninterested in social issues, ethics, or civic responsibility, or that community members do not derive pleasure and benefit from more passive musical engagements; however, music schools—all departments—could benefit from re-evaluating their degree curricula, thinking about music culturally and sociologically, and realizing its “immense potential for engagement and the public good” (Montaño 2009, 61). Moreover, universities and colleges have massive resources of people, materials, funding, knowledge, and research that can be mobilized for social benefit, including through composition programs that develop graduates versed in participatory community engagement. Naturally, students have their own ideas and values related to their future careers; compositional interests that might include popular genres, film music, soundscapes, or other inclinations; and individual relational comfort levels. They cannot be forced to care about community and civic responsibilities, but educators can model compositional practices grounded in compassion and design courses and curricular outcomes that reflect care and community connections. Doing so could profoundly influence the next generation of composers. Thus, there is potential for reinvigorating music in the community through the impact of composition graduates, contributing to the rediscovery of lost or forgotten heart-centered musical roles for composers within society (Evison 2021). Collaborative composition is a common practitioner-led interventionist CM activity (Higgins and Willingham 2017) and primary/secondary school activity (Kaschub and Smith 2013). There has also been growing interest among creators regarding distributed creative practices involving collaboration and audience-performer interactions (Calvin and Doffman 2017; Toelle and ­Sloboda 2021). In schools with CM and music education courses, tertiary students often learn how to facilitate such processes. In cases where CM study is excluded or minimized, scholars argue for formal curricular support for community engagement (Rohwer 2011; Willingham and Carruthers 2018). Nevertheless, these engagements might still be alien to key actors within higher education—moving beyond bringing “musical excellence” to the community by inviting them to attend concerts featuring the faculty’s highly trained performers or offering free music lectures. Furthermore, conservatory culture, which aims to produce “world-class musicians” (Perkins 2013, 207), with its embedded traditions of artistic individualism, talent, competition, perfection, eminence, and hierarchy (Kingsbury 1988), does not translate well to participatory spaces. Thus, another ethical consideration is ensuring that those facilitating campus-community encounters have the experience and training to work in equitable ways and to recognize alternative values within community spaces. Cole warns that institutions should not function as “a travel agent, placing students in conveniently packaged settings” (2011, 86), but should embrace and develop committed and close collaboration with community

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partners. Moreover, consultation and mentorship by those with experience and understanding of the differences in goals and approaches is vital. Toward New Dialogue

This study reaffirms the vital role and presence of composers in CM and counters assumptions that all community composition work must be collaborative and participant-generated. The field would benefit from more focus on these relational composition findings, further research and theorizing, and broader discourses. The chapter is grounded in the narratives of research participants highly committed to both people and music-making, who find their work creative and satisfying. Participants highlighted issues with their training and offered changes that would facilitate tertiary level community composition pedagogy. Although the community composers’ ages ranged from 20s–70s, many were older than 40 years old, so perhaps their experiences do not reflect current composition pedagogy. This is an area to be further investigated. Additionally, my own CM commitments, which lead me to advocate for community-engaged curricula, possibly bias my findings, even though research participants reviewed and approved my interpretations and theory. I have purposely avoided making specific recommendations for pedagogical change but presented ideas that could be examined through future research. This may frustrate some readers, but sweeping changes may not be possible, desirable, or even necessary in every context. My hope is for open dialogue that facilitates dreaming together about new pedagogical possibilities. What needs to happen to realize community-engaged opportunities and partnerships, guided by composers versed in diverse CM music-­making, who understand its social and musical nuances? Likewise, how might academic conventions adjust for work that honors relational compositional approaches? I invite responses that explore challenges and recount existing revisioning. Academia does not accommodate change easily, but contemplating roles and responsibilities could prompt discussion about what changes are beneficial, achievable, and supportive of established mandates. For example, the institution overseeing my doctoral studies describes success that is not just academic, but moral, social, and innovative; it recognizes its role in engaging the local community and enhancing society (Gibbons 2022). If other universities hold similar commitments, there could be rich discussions of how music departments can take part in “a broad, community vision for music” (Rohwer 2011, 125). Within the composition department, embracing broader visions for composition study could enable students and faculty to serve communities in musically diverse and innovative ways that surpass conservatory-influenced community engagements in which only the experts perform and compose.

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I included some personal narrative in this chapter to better position myself as a researcher and relational composer. My own initially disheartening experience ended positively. Invigorated by my research, I continued to compose, finding my own niche. Support and affirmation from CM organizations and musicians have provided a contrasting perspective that causes me to reflect more deeply about my interactions as a teacher and composer. For example, in the fall of 2020, I used a “deficient” piece, subsequently chosen then performed through an international call for scores, to teach undergraduates how to arrange and compose for community choirs. Students composed in small groups and wrote descriptions of their imagined choirs and how students’ compositional choices served their group. We were under COVID-19 restrictions, so including community groups was not possible. In so doing, I have intentionally broken a cycle of problematic pedagogy and pointed students toward relational composition. It is a world that can include both art music and heart music (i.e., community music), refined under educators with a vision for community-academy partnerships. It is one way to create a space that inspires composition students to think beyond a virtuosity that demands professional training—a space where community connections and service are encouraged and celebrated. Note 1 This research received university research ethics board approval. Research participants were offered deidentification; published scholars chose to be identified.

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Music, edited by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Lee Higgins, 1–20. New York, NY: Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190219505.001.0001. Becker, Judith. 1986. “Is Western Art Music Superior?” The Musical Quarterly 72 (3): 341–59. Behr, Yuri, Clayton Mamedes, and Isaac Chueke. 2020. “Discussing the Teaching of Composition at the University.” Revista Vórtex 8 (1): 1–17. https://periodicos. unespar.edu.br/index.php/vortex/article/view/3450. Biró, Dániel. 2020. “The Practice of Teaching Composition.” Revista Vórtex 8 (1): 1–11. https://periodicos.unespar.edu.br/index.php/vortex/article/view/3384. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK. n.d. Inquiry into the Civic Role of Arts Organisations Phase 1 Executive Summary. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK. Accessed September 7, 2021. http://civicroleartsinquiry.gulbenkian.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2017/07/Civic-Role-of-Arts-Phase-1-REPORT-SINGLE-PAGES-57-17.pdf. Calvin, Jean-Philippe, and Mark Doffman. 2017. “Contemporary Music in Action: Performer-Composer Interaction within the Conservatoire.” In Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, edited by Mark Doffman and Eric F. Clarke, 184–98. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, Glen. 2008. “Educating Professional Musicians: Lessons Learned from School Music.” International Journal of Music Education 26 (2): 127–35. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0255761407088487. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. London, UK: SAGE Publications. Clift, Stephen, Grenville Hancox, and Ian Morrison. 2012. “Singing, Wellbeing and Gender.” In Perspectives on Males and Singing, edited by Scott D. Harrison, Graham F. Welch, and Adam Adler, 233–56. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2660-4_15. Cole, Bruce. 2011. “Community Music and Higher Education: A Marriage of Convenience.” International Journal of Community Music 4 (2): 79–89. https://doi. org/10.1386/ijcm.4.2.79_1. Conte, David, Steven Sametz, and Robert Kyr. 2014. “Toward a Choral Pedagogy for Composers.” The Choral Journal 55 (1): 8–26. Currie, Ruth, Jo Gibson, and Chi Ying Lam. 2020. “Community Music as Intervention: Three Doctoral Researchers Consider Intervention from Their Different Contexts.” International Journal of Community Music 13 (2): 187–206. https://doi. org/10.1386/ijcm_00019_1. Doeser, James, and Viktoria Vona. 2016. “The Civic Role of Arts Organisations: A Literature Review for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.” London: King’s College London, UK. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/resources/reports/cgf-civic-roleliterature-review-final.pdf. Elliott, David J., and Marissa Silverman. 2016. “Arts Education as/for Artistic Citizenship.” In Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, edited by Wayne D. Bowman, David J. Elliott, and Marissa Silverman, 82–104. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Evison, Fiona. 2021. “The Social and Cultural Impacts of Heart-Centred Composers in Community Music.” Paper presented at the Social Impact on Music Making (SIMM) Symposium, the Philharmonie de Paris, Paris, France, November 2–3, 2021.

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———. 2022a. “Art, Heart, and Soul Music: Spiritual Values and Implications of Relational Composition Within Community Music.” Religions 13 (11): 1025. https:// doi.org/10.3390/rel13111025. ———. 2022b. “Inside, Outside, Upside, Downside: Navigating Positionality as a Composer in Community Music.” Transform 4. ———. Forthcoming. “The Place of the Composer in Community Singing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing, edited by Kay Norton and Esther M. Morgan-Ellis, Chapter 47. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gibbons, Keith. 2022. “A Message from The Board Chair.” Public Accountability, Western University. https://www.uwo.ca/ipb/publicaccountability//index.html. Higgins, Lee. 2012. “The Community within Community Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, edited by Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, 103–19. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199928019.013.0008. Higgins, Lee, and Lee Willingham. 2017. Engaging in Community Music: An Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637952. Howell, Gillian, Lee Higgins, and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet. 2017. “Community Music Practice: Intervention through Facilitation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, edited by Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith, 602–18. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780190244705.013.26. Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis A. 2021. “Studious Play as an Archê of Creative MusicMaking: Repositing ‘the Scandal of Democracy’ in Music Education.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 20 (2): 79–109. https://doi.org/ doi:10.22176/act20.2.79. Kaschub, Michele, and Janice Smith. 2013. Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199832286.001.0001. Kershaw, Baz. 1992. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203412282. Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. 2016. “Daring to Question: A Philosophical Critique of Community Music.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 24 (2): 113–30. https:// doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.24.2.01. Kingsbury, Henry. 1988. Music Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Laycock, Jolyon. 2005. A Changing Role for the Composer in Society: A Study of the Historical Background and Current Methodologies of Creative Music-Making. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. Love, Karlin G., and Margaret S. Barrett. 2019. “Signature Pedagogies for Musical Practice: A Case Study of Creativity Development in an Orchestral Composers’ Workshop.” Psychology of Music 47 (4): 551–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0305735618765317. Mantie, Roger, Sarah Gulish, Greg McCandless, Ted Solis, and David Williams. 2017. “Creating Music Curricula of the Future.” College Music Symposium 57. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26574457. Matarraso, Francois. 2019. A Restless Art: How Participation Won and Why It Matters. London, UK: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. https://arestlessart.files.wordpress. com/2019/03/2019-a-restless-art.pdf.

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Mayo, Whitney. 2018. “The Effect of Parameters on Composition Anxiety.” Texas Music Education Research, 18–31. Montaño, David R. 2000. “Musicians as Enablers and the Valuing of Music Education.” In Proceedings of “Music of the Spheres,” the 24th World Conference of the International Society for Music Education, edited by Marlene Taylor and Barbara Gregory, 271–289. Regina, Canada: University of Regina. ———. 2009. “Academic Citizenship and Schools of Music in Twenty-First-Century ‘Engaged’ Universities Dedicated to the Public Good.” College Music Symposium 49/50: 59–64. Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Perkins, Rosie. 2013. “Hierarchies and Learning in the Conservatoire: Exploring What Students Learn through the Lens of Bourdieu.” Research Studies in Music Education 35 (2): 197–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X13508060. Polkinghorne, Martyn, and Julia Taylor. 2022. “Recursive Abstraction Method for Analysing Qualitative Data.” In Encyclopaedia of Tourism Management and Marketing, edited by Dimitrios Buhalis, 636–638. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. https//:doi.org/10.4337/9781800377486.recursive.abstraction.method. Rohwer, Debbie. 2011. “Community Music as a Part of Higher Education: Decisions from a Department Chair/Researcher.” International Journal of Community Music 4 (2): 121–31. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm.4.2.121_1. Rudland, Oliver. 2023. “‘Reaching Out’ or Institutional Virtue-Signalling? The Role of Community Opera Projects in UK Opera Houses Today.” TEMPO 77 (304): 62–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298222001103. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Smith, Rob. 2013. “Wonderbrass: Creating a Community Through Music.” Doctoral dissertation, Pontypridd, UK: University of Glamorgan. https://www.proquest. com/docview/2384226748/abstract/C07D53406B5F407BPQ/1. ———. 2021. “What Can the Welsh School Music Sector Learn from the Community Music Movement?” Journal of Popular Music Education 5 (1): 55–70. https://doi. org/10.1386/jpme_00043_1. Toelle, Jutta, and John A. Sloboda. 2021. “The Audience as Artist? The Audience’s Experience of Participatory Music.” Musicae Scientiae 25 (1): 67–91. https://doi. org/10.1177/1029864919844804. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. “Four Fields of Music Making and Sustainable Living.” The World of Music 51 (1): 95–117. Veblen, Kari K. 2007. “The Many Ways of Community Music.” International Journal of Community Music 1 (1): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm.1.1.5_1. ———. 2013. “The Tapestry: Introducing Community Music.” In Community Music Today, edited by Kari K. Veblen, Stephen J. Messenger, Marissa Silverman, and ­David J. Elliott, 9–17. Lanham, MD: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Waddington-Jones, Caroline, Andrew King, and Pamela Burnard. 2019. “Exploring Wellbeing and Creativity Through Collaborative Composition as Part of Hull 2017 City of Culture.” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (March): 548.1–548.10. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00548.

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Wendzich, Tessandra, and Bernard W Andrews. 2019. “Composing Together: The Development of Musical Ideas with Students and Teachers.” Visions of Research in Music Education 34: 1. Willingham, Lee, and Glen Carruthers. 2018. “Community Music in Higher Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Community Music, edited by Brydie-Leigh ­Bartleet and Lee Higgins, 595–616. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190219505.013.9. Winterson, Julia. 2010. “So What’s New? A Survey of the Educational Policies of ­Orchestras and Opera Companies.” International Journal of Community Music 3 (3): 355–363. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm.3.3.355_1.

21 TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF CARE Well-Being, Grief, and Community-based Theatre’s Role in Higher Education Rivka Eckert

Theatre artists and educators cannot help but be influenced by the context of their lived experience. Often, artists, culture-makers, and educators provide opportunities for others to connect and reconnect with communities so that they may better understand complex crises from multiple perspectives (Cziboly and Bethlenfalvy 2020). The unique challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly as they relate to performing arts and higher education, meant that for a period both educators and students, experienced theatremakers and novices, were all forced to pause, reflect, and adapt. On March 13, 2020, my campus asked all faculty to shift to online learning or remote/ distance options. Theaters and performance venues were shuttered as artists moved their craft to virtual spaces. I stopped rehearsals for a play I had been writing, developing, memorizing, and moving toward performance for three years. We were scheduled to open in three weeks. There was a lot of grief in these losses—compounded by the grief related to proximity to sickness and death. At the same time, these disruptions, and the uncertainty and instability associated with them, granted performance makers in higher education an opportunity for reflection and analysis. Having spent almost 15 years teaching theatre in-person, with an emphasis on time and place-bound dialogic creative exchange, I had little experience and many questions about the effectiveness of teaching performing arts virtually. No matter the modality, the foundational touchstones of critical pedagogy, praxis, equity, reciprocal knowledge exchange, and community engagement were non-negotiable. Beyond those touchstones, I knew that I must prioritize three main objectives in my students’ learning experiences: (1) To offer fundamental knowledges about theatre and theatre-making that are applicable to the end goals of each student, (2) to enrich students’ critical self-awareness DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-25

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and strengthen engagement in society, and (3) to create spaces for community cultural development through artistic practice. However, I did not know exactly what this would look like in the virtual teaching and performance world I suddenly found myself within. This chapter evaluates how a pedagogical framework based on care, influenced by the forced move to a virtual community, can help achieve and centralize these goals in theatre curricula. The pedagogical framework I discuss manifested within the 2020 Plays Across the Walls (PATW) new play festival— a community-based, ten-minute playwriting theatre festival. Throughout the festival, grief emerged as a theme in many plays. In reflecting on the emergent, pedagogical practice of intentional care-building and through analyzing the content of the plays, much can be deduced about shared experiences around grief and community for festival participants. These findings invite questions about the ability of theatre productions and community-engaged programs to engage in the deep and necessary work of care and healing, as well as their sustainability. Baraka suggests that only when art is an integrated and essential part of the community can culture be wholly inclusive: “Art is supposed to be a part of the whole life of the community… It’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it… It’s supposed to be as essential as the grocery store” (1994, 30). In the interest of making essential art, higher education must make a vested commitment to community-based performing arts practice rooted in the cultivation of well-being and the prioritization of spaces for emergence, imagination, and growth. Community Cultural Development in Higher Education

Culture, based on an anthropological definition, includes everything created by humans—including material creations (buildings, books, and bombs) and immaterial creations (ideas, languages, and concepts). Community, as an immaterial creation of culture, shapes the way social capital1 functions. Communities transform as their context, and the language to describe them, changes. For example, some communities are strictly defined by geographical boundaries, and others have expanded to include digital and/or virtual spaces. However, for my purposes, it is most useful to define community as an entity bound by shared aims. Although definitions of community and culture are not fixed, theatre-making communities are bound by social commitments. Bogart argues that theatre’s distinguishing element of community-building is that “theater is the only art form that is always about social systems. Every play asks: Can we get along? Can we get along as a society? Can we get along in this room? How might we get along better?” (Bogart 2014, 126). Within a community-based context, the purpose of working together needs to be stated and upheld through mindful actions.

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Community cultural development, based on Goldbard’s mapping, emphasizes collaboration between artists and other community members, indicates a generous concept of culture, and “suggests the dynamic nature of cultural action, with its ambitions in conscientization2 and empowerment” often linked to self-development and larger social change movements (2006, 21). To achieve this, community theatre projects must stem from the shared or overlapping interests or needs of all stakeholders (organizations, partners, and participants) and allow ample time for relationships to develop between stakeholders. However, when associated with or facilitated through a university, community cultural development theatre projects often inhabit a space of tension as students and community members may have different motivations for participation. Many institutions of higher education operate under definitional frameworks of community and culture that treat education as a knowledge system, and do not move as nimbly to the diverse experiences and needs of students, staff, and faculty as they could. As such, students and faculty are brought together from a variety of geographic, educational, and social backgrounds into a transitory community defined by a loosely shared purpose. Even among students, it may be challenging to find common aims. For example, in a theatre class, one student may dream of becoming a wilderness first responder and another of becoming a professional actor. A student may have financial support from their parents while another may have been saving their own money for a decade. Beyond the challenges of finding a shared intention among students are the time constraints for creative projects to fit within the parameters of courses that usually last for one semester. The limited time engagement can accelerate the need for immediate partnership and quick agreement. Community participants, on the other hand, are not bound by the same rules—and consequences—as college students. They are free to drop without economic penalty or delay to their course of study. As such, their autotelic involvement sets a standard for students earning credit. Community participants complete a project because they see their work as having value and gain benefit from their participation. They participate because they care. The future of education and the performing arts demands care for, collaboration with, and artistic capacity-development with an expansively defined community. Well-Being in Theatre

From the intense competition of auditions and the likelihood of frequent rejection to the focus on and strict training toward aesthetics, the traditional processes of making theatre can be detrimental to well-being. Alternatively, at its best, theatre cultivates well-being by creating collaborative communities, deep personal connections with the emotional landscape, and supporting the conditions for authenticity and vulnerability. Well-being, as described by Dahl, Wilson-Mendenhall, and Davidson (2020), can be categorized into

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four pillars: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. These pillars function as categories for skill sets which can be manifested, cultivated, and trained through practice. Dahl, et al. define connection as “a subjective sense of care and kinship toward other people that promotes supportive relationships and caring interactions” (2020, 32219). Purpose is “a sense of clarity concerning personally meaningful aims and values that one is able to apply in daily life” (Dahl et al. 2020, 322201). Within the educational and artistic practice of community-play building, connection and purpose guide creative practice and community-making. Connection and purpose are not common goals in educational programs that emphasize traditional conservatory theatre training practices, which comes at great cost to students. Connection and purpose are found in the practices of appreciation for shared humanity and the embodiment of selfperception. When the practices of well-being are assumed and not practiced or taught intentionally, it can be detrimental and harmful. In other words, educators’ failure to prioritize theatre-makers’ well-being can have a deeply negative impact on students and participants. The Australian Actors’ Well-Being Study (AAWS), written by Maxwell, Seton, and Szabó (2015), cites that while general health is given a high level of attention, more than half of actors (59.6%) do not receive training in psychological well-being during their studies. Of the 600 working actors in the sample size, 74.9% offered detailed reports on the effects of work-related stress on their psychological and/or physical well-being. Additionally, actors in the sample scored twice as high as the general population on the depression scale of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale. Certainly, more analysis needs to be done regarding well-being within theatre-making and performance training, but the AAWS’s primary recommendation bears repeating: Actor training should systematically address aspects of actors’ well-being, including the maintenance of psychological health, and the imbedding of skills and techniques not only in warming-up for performance—something that appears to be well established in the field—but for cooling down and debriefing after performance. (Maxwell, Seton, and Szabó 2015, 110) While the AAWS does not specifically look at playwrights, it is possible to extend their proposal to all theatre-makers. Like many actor training programs in higher education, most playwrights do not spend a significant portion of their studies learning strategies for prioritizing well-being or care. If well-being became the bedrock of all theatre-making training, what might happen to the dangerous stereotype of the tortured artist? The PATW project tenders insight as to what an emphasis on well-being skills can provide students and playwright participants.

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Plays Across the Walls

PATW began in 2017 when the drama group at Riverview Correctional Facility in Ogdensburg, New York, suggested ways their theatre-making might be able to reach a larger audience. Incrementally, the festival has grown by increasing the numbers of venues where plays are performed and the number of plays included. Since its beginning, PATW has reached hundreds of artists locally and globally. Each spring, I offer a playwriting workshop then produce, direct, and record the live performances on SUNY Potsdam’s campus and in the surrounding community. In the fall, I teach Theater and Community, an upper-division theatre course that supports the production of the festival while mentoring students in acting, directing, stage management, audience engagement, marketing, and promotion strategies. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 playwriting workshop changed from in-person instruction at Riverview Correctional Facility to an online format.3 I transferred the play development process to the virtual platforms using Zoom, Google Classrooms, and Facebook Groups. The 2020 PATW Festival featured new ten-minute plays written by 16 playwrights from across the United States and performed virtually by actors from across three colleges. This type of geographical barrier-breaking would not have been possible if the festival needed to be in person, as in years prior. After a period of revision, auditions, and rehearsals, the plays were recorded, edited, and livestreamed via Facebook. Each evening of pre-recorded performance featured a live talk-back with actors, playwrights, directors, and the production support team. While the adjustment to a virtual format refocused PATW’s performance framework, my pedagogical approach shifted as well. Pedagogically, PATW fits within the definitional framework of community cultural development, although, throughout this chapter I also refer to it as a community-engaged project and as community-based practice. By building individual mastery through teaching skills in playwriting, building collective cultural capacity through developing a new play festival, and contributing to positive social change, PATW cultivates community cultural development practices. Given the geographic distance between the 16 playwrights and almost 100 artistic participants involved in PATW, I emphasized that how we worked with one another was as important as what we worked to create. Since the group did not have pre-existing relationships or a sense of community with one another, creating shared goals and having clear, consistent communication were essential. To begin, we created a private Facebook group for the playwrights with the following goals: 1) Supportive creative exchange with the purpose of writing a ten-minute play; 2) Social healing and belonging through the act of creative process and reflection; 3) Diversifying networks of inspiration. All playwright participants agreed to the goals and values of the PATW playwriting group and demonstrated their commitment through engagement with

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one another via Facebook, on Google Classroom comment threads, and in the virtual feedback and support sessions on Zoom. An Emergent Pedagogy of Intentional Care: Practices and Reflections

During the process of facilitating the festival, a series of questions emerged from the collective pause brought by the conditions of the pandemic: How could this project teach students how to promote self-care and well-being? How do digital platforms change definitions of belonging in community? What happens to a production model within higher education when rest, space for processing, and care are prioritized? These questions guided my choices around the type of experiences offered as well as methods to evaluate the success of the project. Ultimately, it illuminated the ways in which practices of care influence community well-being within the playwriting process. Practices of Care

Definitions of care have many facets, but as a pedagogical consideration, I base my definition on the directionality of care, care as an action, and the collective responsibility for a community of care. Care flows in different directions. The most familiar trajectory is the caring for/cared for binary; for example, a teacher (caring-for) attends to a student (cared-for). Noddings emphasizes the importance of listening to the “expressed needs of the cared-for, not simply the needs assumed by the school as an institution and the curriculum as a prescribed course of study” (1984, 772, emphasis in original). In PATW, beyond the shared goals and agreements of the group, playwrights set their own intentions for the workshop. Goals range from the specific aim of historical accuracy for a particular historical figure to the broad objective to write a comedy. In this way, playwrights practice their autonomy and express needs by working towards individual aims. Within the PATW playwright community, the energetic flow of care switches directions on an emergent scale in response to members’ needs. In an ideal ensemble, care becomes a collective responsibility as participants and students learn to care with one another. Gumbs posits that the work of care on the collective level demands we engage in “learning and re-learning how to honor each other, how to go deep, how to take turns, how to find nourishing light again and again” (2020, 56). It is only through continual negotiation and shared acts of responsibility and vulnerability that care can be given and received. Part of the value of community-based playwriting is the development of an extended artistic community for support and encouragement. These are not coincidental features of the workshop model approach. In the first recorded workshop session, I guided participants through a somatic body scan followed by box breathing meant to engage the skills of awareness and purpose. Through this centering and grounding practice, I prioritized social

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healing and belonging (embodied healing and finding space, place, and responsibility together). Care as Accountability

hooks describes the ingredients of love as: “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (2001, 5). Both the processes of learning and creating artistically contain a mixture of the same various ingredients that constitute healthy communities and relationships. Care within creative practice is both an action and a choice. From the standpoint of an ethic of care, the process of creating a new play, receiving feedback, developing the play, and seeing it performed by an ensemble of actors necessitates these ingredients. Participants learn, then, what it means to be held accountable by and for one another. They commit to extended feedback sessions where they ask and answer their own tough questions to drive the work forward. They contribute resources to shared virtual drive for inspiration and research. They meet online with one another across time zones. By engaging in PATW and the goals of the project, playwrights chose to care for one another. Vulnerability and Trust

I was first introduced to the idea of cultivating trust through community ritual by DeMuelenaere’s (2012) six components of the initial framework for a pedagogy of trust. Trust, at least within a creative community, comes from routine, or ritual, ways of experimenting without aesthetic limit or expectation. As Covey (2008) writes, change moves at the speed of trust. The vulnerability for change or experimentation is predicated on direct experiences with others who demonstrate the vulnerability that trust requires. To provide this experience and model vulnerability with participants, I led a theme-based drawing exercise during a private Facebook livestream. In the session, I guided 28 participants through a short ritual (lighting a candle and centering breathwork) followed by a brainstorming discussion in which participants considered a central idea or theme that drove their artistic practice.4 Then, I led participants in “structured” doodling and experimenting with line/shape/form as it related to their theme. In the culminating activity, participants used materials from the doodling, brainstorms, and layering in text to create a final collage. In this way, I modeled free expression without the expectation of finely tuned craft. Throughout the exercise, I demonstrated my own imperfect attempts, and, as my anxieties around making “bad art” came up, I shared the language I use to continue to work through and commit to the process.5 Throughout the exercise, participants offered feedback through the chat function. I concluded the ritual by blowing out my candle and inviting participants to post pictures of their final collages to the Facebook private group. After reading through

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feedback from participant responses, many appreciated the departure from writing and the opportunity to explore the ideas in their plays through an alternative artform. Feedback as a Care Practice

As a feedback tool, Lerman’s Critical Response Process (CRP) (Lerman and Borstel 2003) cultivates communities of care and responsibility. In CRP, a facilitator guides artists and their audiences or respondents through a feedback session in which all voices equitably share opinions and questions. This effectively decenters the traditional, singular voice of an “expert” who is external to the artistic process. CRP centers feedback around the artist’s questions, in this case the emerging playwright. Training playwrights, actors, and artistic partners in this process empowers emerging playwrights to determine the kinds of feedback they want to receive based on how and where they want to develop their craft. Of the 15 feedback forms I received from playwrights, the session on CRP was ranked as the second most valuable.6 While the plays were in different stages of development, from fully conceptualized to staged readings, CRP met participants where they were and helped them make progress toward their own definitions of excellence. Because of this philosophy, we were able to celebrate final performances of plays that showed a variety of creative capital,7 despite the absence of pre-existing community, lack of shared location, the challenges of learning/meeting virtually, and the short timeframe for rehearsals. Emergence of Grief in Plays: Possibilities for Well-Being

Since emotional awareness is foundational to experiences of well-being, expressions of grief and sorrow intrinsically connect these foundations as well. There is no future in theatre-making or education without a capacity to reckon with the tangle of joy and grief that emerges as part of the creative and educational process. In his 2019 collection of essays on delight, Gay describes an exchange with his student Bethany and her desire to create a holistic educational pedagogy that allowed for a meeting, or joining, of students and teachers’ inner “wildernesses.” Gay calls these uncharted wildernesses, “the densest wild in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers,” where individual and profound personal sorrow live. Gay (2019, 14) wonders: Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

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The full expression of human experience is possible when the “wildernesses” of grief and sorrow find space for emergence and support. If healing involves developing capacities to access and express feelings with more dimension, then cultivating healing through theatre-making, expression, language, and community is a practice of becoming more deeply human with one another. This is the practice of living more freely and with more complexity in community. Throughout the playwriting process, we prioritized healing and well-being as evidenced by the full range of human experiences that emerged in the ten-minute plays that were produced. Utilizing a healing centered approach, as defined by Ginwright (2018), involves the embrace of cultures, spirituality, civic action, and collective healing. While I did not explicitly ask playwrights to address grief or sorrow in their plays, by emphasizing our belonging and implementing carecentered teaching, collective expressions of grief naturally emerged. The emphasis on healing-centered engagement invited playwrights to interact in ways that allowed for a natural emergence of interdependence, flow, and possibility. brown’s (2017) work with emergence explores the ways in which human interactions can create a complex system of patterns that force change and encourage authentic relationships. Feeling and expressing grief, which brown (2015) calls “the time traveling emotion,” allows for healing, resiliency, and for full presence leading toward liberation. While much of this work is private and personal, collective expressions of grief share common indicators and can be measured. Reflecting on the Languages of Grief

From a clinical perspective, grief is often described as a “normal, healthy, healing and ultimately transforming response to a significant loss that usually does not require professional help, although it does require ways to heal the broken strands of life and to affirm existing ones” (Schneider 2000, 7). Corless et al. (2014) describes four modes of expression (verbal responses, nonverbal responses, physical responses, and physical activities), and four subsets of language (narrative, symbolism, metaphor, and analysis) that provide a framework for exploring the complexity of grief. I found that all 16 plays explored one or more of these aspects of grief. I consider these representations of grief as hooks (1990) frames them, not simply as spaces of pain, but as spaces of radical insight. In the tradition of reading grief as a complex space of radical insight, brown offers a series of propositions on grief that link with concepts of emotional well-being, expression, and allowing. brown (2017, 110) proposes:

• That the broken heart can cover more territory. • That perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. • That grief is gratitude. • That water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.

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• That your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. • That you are excellent at loving. Verbal Responses

Verbal responses were the most frequently represented within the plays, occurring in 14 (87.5%) of the plays. Some verbal expressions were indirect but spoke to much deeper experiences. For example, one character offers another comfort about mishearing/misremembering a line of music and offers the consolation: “You didn’t mishear the line. You rewrote it for your need. Especially after your father died.”8 The line suggests that grief has shaped the character’s interpretation and has colored the way in which they hear and perceive the world. Participant Monica Cross’s play, The Cage Which Holds a Heart, follows the story of Gabriel, an older man coping with the death of his wife. Gabriel describes his (failed) attempts to manage his grief through somatic/physical restriction: When she got sick, I wanted to be able to put on a brave face, and being a welder, I figured I could fashion a hoop to hold down emotions. But when she was hospitalized, I couldn’t hold my head upright, I just lay in a heap in the bed. So, I added a second hoop to attach to my rib cage so that I wouldn’t topple over. And when she died, I fashioned a third hoop directly over my heart to keep the grief locked away. And I hid her photos so that I can keep thoughts of what I’ve lost, thoughts of her, in check; so, I can keep going through my day. But you have come in here and dredge it all back up. My contraption can’t hold it all in. You bring her out, force me to talk about things that I can never change. This stark physical representation of grief is heightened by the description of the “harsh metallic sound” that the cage that encases Gabriel’s chest makes, suggesting that it acts like “another character in the play.” Such a complex rendering of the layers of grief, both spoken and physically experienced, is evidence of theatre and performance’s ability to convey a nuanced perspective on complex phenomena. Metaphors for Grief

Expressions of grief that incorporated metaphor were represented in six (37.5%) of the plays. Some of the metaphors for grief include: dandelions turned to “puffy wisps that float beyond the grasp,”9 thunder and lightning “booming in the future and echoing and flashing across the setting,”10 and the skull of a deer on a pristine beach.11 These metaphors for grief evoke a range of images, from

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a sense of an unreachable, airy flight to the foreboding nature of disconnection and pain that can take over an entire sky. The differing expressions of grief within the plays demonstrate the playwrights’ adeptness at translating experience into embodiment. The conditions that allowed for these emergences— the prioritization of care and space within the creative process for the tangle of emotions to be processed—can be replicated in the playwriting process. In fact, the representations of grief in these plays suggest that theatre-making can a vital role in cultivating the essential qualities of well-being. Conclusion: Imagining a Future Where Theatre Is Essential

During my time facilitating PATW during COVID-19, I discovered the benefits of prioritizing well-being in theatrical practices and curriculum for myself as well as for participants. The community cultural development practices that brought students and community members with disparate experiences and interests together required that I center well-being, care, and community building through each experience of the festival. Theatre programs in higher education increasingly require that instructors address the holistic needs of students; this paradigm switch has the potential to develop healthier theatre-makers and communities that value theatre as essential. By practicing pedagogies of intentional care and emphasizing well-being, PATW created communities with a sense of connection, purpose, and belonging where selfcare and well-being were promoted without sacrificing artistry. This project demonstrates an alternative production model where rest, space for processing, and care are prioritized. With that in mind, I suggest that programs adopt the following approaches to shape community-based theatre-making in higher education as a space for true flourishing:

• All craft-driven trainings (those for actors, playwrights, technicians, direc-

tors, etc.) should implement pedagogies of care, healing-centered engagement, and practices of well-being. Playwriting, in particular, should be further explored for its potential to promote healing and well-being. The various expressions of grief signal playwrights’ desire to process grief wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The plays also serve as a data point for the power of playwriting as a tool for collective healing. Studies, such as the AAWS and Thomson and Jaque (2012), assert that actors have a heightened sensitivity to their psychological and emotional well-being and carry that weight even after the role has closed. However, few studies explore the dynamics of well-being in playwrights. More study in this area is needed, as my own small sample size shows that playwrights may be both more vulnerable and more adept at processing and interpreting trauma and loss-related experiences than the general population.

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• Higher education programs should shift from an emphasis on the final pro-

duction to make space for evaluating experimentation within process and goal-specific frameworks. Diverse creative products of performances disrupt traditional notions of what “deserves” to be on-stage. Diversity as a social asset is one of the unifying principles of community cultural development (Goldbard 2006). There should not be just one way of seeing and assessing value in theatre. Using traditional forms of aesthetic critique for community-based art can lead to anxieties around artistic value. Kuftinec, in her exploration of the community-based theatre company Cornerstone, offers that “criticism of the process and/or product should emerge from within, from practitioners rather than critics” (2003, 15). This provides a necessary and pressing challenge to the evaluative framework of theatre-making in higher education, which currently uses the Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theater Festival’s (KCACTF) guidelines. The KCACTF (2022) guidelines, listed on their website, require for all productions be “fully produced.” If community-based theatre is to flourish in higher education, the parameters for assessment need to expand to allow for process-specific evaluation. • Further development of an assessment tool for community-based theatre projects in higher education is needed. In terms of assessment, I find myself returning again and again to the question: What will people walk away with and how will THAT shape the values of our communities? The outcomes of theatre-making need to extend beyond the theatre-product to address its impact on our ways of being together. There are challenges and limitations of prioritizing care and wellbeing within community-­based theatre practices in higher education, but PATW’s success shows that a pedagogy of care is both a right and a responsibility for the future of artists and scholars in higher education and in the extended community. PATW is a one example of the ways that the full complexity of the human experience can be nourished, rather than compartmentalized, through a mindful community theatre-making experience. As Baraka (1994) imagines, we can live in a world where theatre is essential: where super-market cashiers serve beauty alongside receipts; where space and time for play, delight, sorrow, and celebration are wrapped up in the essential work of surviving. Community-based theatre asks us to reclaim those spaces in public and in our own bodies. I ask that we demand those practices for a brighter future in higher education. Notes 1 According to Helen Gould, “social capital is the wealth of the community measured not in economic but in human terms. Its currency is relationships, networks and local partnerships. Each transaction is an investment which, over time, yields trust,

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reciprocity and sustainable improvements to quality of life” (cited in ­Goldbard 2006, 69). 2 Conscientization is a term from Brazilian educator Freire (2017) that names the process by which a learner moves toward critical consciousness—the heart of liberatory education. 3 Because of the change in instructional modality and lack of internet access/support within NYS prisons, the playwrights (who were several weeks into the play development process at Riverview Correctional Facility) were unable to complete their plays for the festival. The playwriting workshop was offered again at RCF in 2021, but all except one of the playwrights from the previous year’s cohort had been released. 4 This was loosely based on Zeder’s (2005) exercise on clustering. 5 These anxieties, connected to the expectation of perfection, even when doing something for the first time, relate to Okun’s (1999) work on White supremacy culture. Within the drama education context, a teacher making mistakes and showing imperfections can nourish a culture of curiosity and experimentation, while simultaneously leveling hierarchical classroom power dynamics. The harm of perfectionism as a standard in spaces of learning does harm in that it personalizes mistakes by conflating making a mistake with being a mistake. 6 The most valuable session scored by playwright participants addressed play structure, outlining, and creating action. 7 Creative capital defined as “aesthetic structures and creative abilities, adaptive reuse, creative expression, and capacity for creative problem solving along with divergent thinking patterns” (Woodson 2015, 50). 8 The Pulse of Eden, by Chuck Lipsig. 9 Love and Dandelions in the Time of Coronavirus, by Jeanna Matthews. 10 The Eyez in the Walls, by Aaron Moore. 11 Broken Shell, by Dance Aoki.

References Baraka, Amiri. 1994. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Bogart, Anne. 2014. What’s the Story: Essays About Art, Theater, and Storytelling. New York, NY: Routledge. brown, adrienne maree. 2015. “a time traveling emotion.” adrienne maree brown (blog). March 18, 2015. http://adriennemareebrown.net/2015/03/18/a-timetraveling-emotion/. ———. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press. Corless, Inge B., Rana Limbo, Regina Szylit Bousso, Robert L. Wrenn, David Head, Norelle Lickiss, and Hannelore Wass. 2014. “Languages of Grief: A Model for Understanding the Expressions of the Bereaved.” Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine 2 (1): 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/21642850.2013.879041. Covey, Stephen M.R. 2008. The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. New York, NY: Free Press. Cziboly, Adam, and Adam Bethlenfalvy. 2020. “Response to COVID-19 Zooming in on Online Process Drama.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theater and Performance 25 (4): 645–651. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783. 2020.1816818. Dahl, Cortland J., Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall, and Richard J. Davidson. 2020. “The Plasticity of Well-Being: A Training-Based Framework for the Cultivation of

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Human Flourishing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (51): 32197–32206. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2014859117. DeMeulenaere, Eric. 2012. “Toward a Pedagogy of Trust.” In High-Expectations Curricula: Helping All Students Succeed with Powerful Learning, edited by Curt ­Dudley-Manning and Sarah Michaels, 28–42. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Freire, Paulo. 2017. Pedagogy of the Opressed. 50th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gay, Ross. 2019. The Book of Delights. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Ginwright, Shawn. 2018. “The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement.” Medium. https://ginwright.medium.com/ the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centeredengagement-634f557ce69c. Goldbard, Arlene. 2006. New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2020. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico, CA: AK Press. hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. ———. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. n. d. The Kennedy Center. Accessed April 15, 2022. https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/opportunitiesfor-artists/pre-professional-artist-training/kcactf. Kuftinec, S. 2003. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Lerman, Liz, and John Borstel. 2003. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. Tacoma Park, MD: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Maxwell, Ian, Mark Seton, and Marianna Szabó. 2015. “The Australian Actors’ WellBeing Study: A Preliminary Report.” About Performance 13: 69–113. Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2012. “The Caring Relation in Teaching.” Oxford Review of Education 38 (6): 771–781. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2012.745047. Okun, Tema. 1999. “White Supremacy Culture.” https://www.whitesupremacyculture. info/. Schneider, J. M. 2000. The Overdiagnosis of Depression: Recognizing Grief and Its Transformative Potentials. Traverse City, MI: Seasons Press. Thomson, Paula, and S. Victoria Jaque. 2012. “Holding a Mirror Up to Nature: Psychological Vulnerability in Actors.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6 (4): 361–369. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028911. Woodson, Stephani Etheridge. 2015. Theater for Youth Third Space: Performance, Democracy, and Community Cultural Development. Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, Ltd. Zeder, Suzan. 2005. Spaces of Creation: The Creative Process of Playwriting. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

22 ARTS EDUCATION IN COMMUNITY COLLEGES A Critical Connection Amy C. Parks

Since the early 1980s, access to arts education in American public education has been in precipitous decline, especially for students of color (Rabkin and Hedberg 2011). In approximately the same time period, the costs of college attendance have risen by over 160% (Carnevale, Gulish, and Campbell 2021). Together, these developments have created large-scale inequities in access to collegiate arts programs and experiences for American students. Under these circumstances, community college arts programs play a critical role in supporting the arts, for their students and the communities they serve. The arts in community college settings are under researched, and literature on the subject is limited. This chapter seeks to address that gap and to examine the function of community college arts programs within higher education, as well as the larger arts ecosystem. I will draw upon my research on the lived experiences of community college arts students that shows that these programs provide critical opportunities for engagement with the arts, particularly for populations who would otherwise not have access to these experiences. Community colleges fill a key need within the framework of American tertiary education, and their arts programs are an integral part of that function. As society emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, community college arts programs will play an important role in sustaining arts activities and opportunities throughout the United States. Awareness and support of these programs at this historic juncture will be critical to maintaining arts access for large segments of the American population.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-26

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Background

Most community colleges’ mission statements express a strong commitment to serving the needs of their local communities. Their typical characteristics—­ open access policies, convenient locations, strong connections with the public—­situate these institutions to support public engagement with the arts.

Community College Overview

While many types of two-year higher education institutions exist, the term “community college” generally refers to public colleges with the primary function of granting degrees at the associate’s level. Community colleges also confer a wide variety of short-term certificates and some award baccalaureates in technical fields. Although “junior colleges” existed as early as the 19th century, community colleges experienced exponential growth after the passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, in 1944. Today, there are more than 1,000 community colleges in the United States (American Association of Community Colleges 2022). Most community colleges are “open access,” meaning that they do not utilize selective admissions, and instead accept all student applicants. Their tuition is typically among the lowest of higher education institutions. Geographic proximity is a fundamental element of student access. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the American population lives within about 25 miles of a community college, and the median distance between a student’s home and their campus is ten miles (Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker 2014). Community colleges serve a very diverse student population. Thirty-nine percent of all US undergraduates attend community college, including large proportions of students of color. Forty percent of all Black undergraduate students in America, 50% of Latinx undergraduates, 53% of Native American undergraduates, and 36% of Asian/Pacific Islander undergraduates attend community colleges. The average age of a community college student is 27, and 15% are single parents. Sixty-five percent attend school part-time, and more than 60% work either full- or part-time. Twenty-nine percent are firstgeneration college students, and 56% receive financial aid (American Association of Community Colleges 2022). Academic offerings at community colleges are as varied as the students they serve. Typically, curricular functions fall into several categories: preparation for transfer to a baccalaureate program, occupational training, continuing education for adults, remedial education, and general community service (Cohen et al. 2014). Community colleges must support these goals with very limited financial resources. Public and private universities spend two to five times as much per student as community colleges do (The Century Foundation Working Group on Community College Financial Resources 2019). Community

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colleges receive significant federal and state funding to support workforce development programs, and more than 50% of their conferred credentials prepare students for entry-level employment (Cohen et al. 2014). In addition to their academic offerings, community colleges also provide non-curricular services for the general betterment of their communities, such as workshops, recreational activities, and social support offices. Due to the wide range of programs and services that they offer, community colleges have a positive impact on their service areas in many ways, and often enjoy deep connections within their communities. As a result, community colleges are uniquely positioned to cultivate public participation in arts activities and events. The Role of the Community College in Access to Arts Education

During the period between 2002 and 2017, public participation in most art forms saw a net decline (National Endowment for the Arts 2018). Much of this decline was attributable to a parallel reduction in school-based arts education, dating back to before 1985 and most profoundly affecting students of color (Rabkin and Hedberg 2011). The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA 2001) brought a focus on accountability and high-stakes testing to public education. While the arts were included as “core academic subjects” in the language of the law, in practice, schools were evaluated by their performance on assessments in reading and mathematics (Heilig, Cole, and Aguilar 2010). A shift in focus and resources toward these subjects, and away from the arts, naturally followed. By 2009, teachers were more likely to report cuts in arts instruction at schools identified as needing improvement under the NCLBA, and at schools with higher percentages of minority students, than teachers at other schools (United States Government Accountability Office 2009). In 2011, fewer than one-third of states had required arts assessments (President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities 2011), suggesting a widespread lack of focus on high-quality arts education. The NCLBA was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. The ESSA supplanted the “core academic subjects” with a “well-rounded education” provision. Music and arts were included (separately) in a greatly expanded list of topics, which ended with the phrase “and any other subject, as determined by the State or local educational agency[…]” (ESSA 2015). Funding sources were identified to support evidence-based school programs, in the arts and other subjects, that improve student outcomes (Wan, Ludwig, and Boyle 2018). But the testing requirements—for math, reading, science, and no other subjects—remained the same as they did under the NCLBA (Kos 2018). Community colleges serve many of the same population groups that have been affected by the decrease in arts education in public schools. These institutions provide access to arts education and activities to many who otherwise would not have it (Cohen et al. 2014; Parks 2020). At some community

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colleges, non-credit continuing education programs are available in arts disciplines. Historically, community college arts programs have also supported auditing students in credit-bearing arts classes (Cohen and Brawer 1989). Some of these students take these courses repeatedly and become an integral part of their community college’s arts activities. At the collegiate level, arts courses are a fundamental part of the community college curriculum. Comprehensive research on these offerings is limited, and dates from the late 1980s. In 1987, a large-scale study by the Ford Foundation revealed that more than 80% of randomly selected community colleges offered music and art courses. More than half offered theater or film courses, and one-third offered courses in dance. At that time, one in six community college students took an arts course, and more than half of these students took a second-level arts course (Cohen and Brawer 1989). In 1991, arts courses represented 5.42% of the community college curriculum, with larger institutions more likely to offer advanced arts studies (Cohen and Ignash 1994). These curricula were often designed to support students who wish to pursue arts degrees at four-year institutions, and many of the credits are transferrable (Cohen and Brawer 1989). Community Colleges as Centers for the Arts

Community colleges offer many arts experiences for the communities they serve. Their performances and exhibits are open to the public, often for free or at low cost. These events feature the work of students, faculty, and members of the local arts community. For example, Sinclair College offers concerts, theatrical productions, and art exhibits for their students, staff and the greater community in Dayton, Ohio (Sinclair College n.d.). Its theater program has remained active in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re grateful for this opportunity to forge ahead and are ready to tackle whatever is sent our way, to preserve the essential role of the arts in society,” says Gina Neuerer, chair of music, theatre, and dance (Sinclair College n.d., n.p.). Community colleges also partner with local arts organizations and agencies to offer arts experiences. The institutions collaborate on arts programming, and the community colleges often provide facilities, publicity, and related support (Lynch 2005–2006). ArtsKC, a regional arts council based in Jackson County, Missouri, is a supporter of the Midwest Trust Center at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) in nearby Overland Park, Kansas. The Midwest Trust Center hosts a full schedule of events in music, theatre, and dance for members of the JCCC community and the general public (Johnson County Community College n.d.). The performance schedule features a wide variety of artists and styles, designed to appeal to broad audiences. In geographic areas without many arts resources, particularly those that are rural, community colleges can be the sole conduit for arts experiences for the

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local population (Cohen and Brawer 1989). For example, Central Wyoming College (CWC) houses the Robert A. Peck Arts Center on its campus in Riverton, Wyoming. In addition to hosting concerts, theater productions, and art exhibits by CWC artists, the center brings touring groups and visiting artists to the area for special events (Central Wyoming College n.d.). Considering the breadth of the populations they serve, community colleges are inherently well suited to support artists from marginalized groups. They provide important venues to share the work of underrepresented artists, thus elevating their presence in the broader artistic landscape. Such work can be powerful and serve as a critical vehicle for communication and connection. During the pandemic, the theater program at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, presented online performances of Privilege, a docudrama examining the implications of privilege through the perspectives of diverse participants. They also hosted an online festival of student-directed one-act plays featuring playwrights who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) (Valencia College 2021). Some artists from underrepresented groups find their first performing or exhibiting experiences at community colleges; examples from student experiences are included later in the chapter. Community colleges’ regular and consistent connection with the community can counter perceived elitism surrounding arts events, and the artistic content itself often embraces the experiences of diverse populations. The public’s general familiarity with the local community college helps to make its campus feel welcoming and approachable. Offering low-cost, quality arts experiences in this setting provides a highly effective gateway to the arts for a broad range of people, many of whom may be disinclined to participate in a less accessible location. Methodology

The value of community college arts programs is supported by my research, which investigated the lived experience of arts students in community college settings. I performed this research at a large urban community college in the American Midwest. The study was qualitative and utilized phenomenology as a research methodology. I engaged a purposively selected pool of seven participants who were taking college-level “studio” courses, in which they actively performed or created art. The participants were diversified by age, artistic discipline, gender, and the locations in which they pursued their creative work. Participants’ artistic pursuits included music, visual art, theater, and dance, as these are the arts programs most commonly found in community colleges (Cohen and Brawer 1989). Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews and analyzed using the approach described in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith,

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Flowers, and Larkin 2009). The study focused on how community college students experienced their study of the arts. This research project received IRB approval from the institution at which it was performed, and participants are cited by pseudonym in this chapter. Findings

When talking about their arts experiences at community college, research participants described intense intellectual, emotional, and social rewards for their studies. Not only did they improve their artistic skills, they often expanded their understanding of the art form itself and found more potential in themselves than they had previously thought possible. Participants associated highly positive emotions with their artmaking and flourished within the arts communities they found. The community college provided these students with crucial access to arts activities, and their instructors gave them the support they needed to thrive as artists. These experiences underscore the value of arts programs in community college settings, which offer access to anyone with an interest in the arts. Motivation to Learn and Improve

Participants described widely varied reasons for coming to community college arts programs, which were unique to each individual. But regardless of their prior experience or ultimate ambitions, the desire to improve their work was a central motivation for their studies. While beginning students often focused on the fundamentals of their art form, more experienced students sought to enhance their technique, sometimes by learning how to use new and relevant technologies. Regardless of their starting point, these community college arts students placed great importance on creating high-quality work, and welcomed feedback from their instructors and peers as inspiration for improvement. Art student Jonita enthusiastically received input from class critiques: I love it cause I, I don’t look at it as criticism… I look at it like, a different eye… So, I love that part about it. Cause I be like, “What you see?” You know? “‘All right, I need to tone that part down. What color you think?” I’m thinking an orange. You’re like, “Um, orange-ish red.” Ooh, that would make it pop. Teamwork! (personal communication, June 20, 2018) Many were surprised to find that their understanding of the art form expanded with their studies, which in turn widened their perspectives for their own work. Joyce initially undertook her community college courses to upskill on technology, but her studies ended up “…opening up [her] vision of what

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photography is about” (as cited in Parks 2020, 8). Max left his initial studies with a whole new view of the theater world: I have such a greater respect for it now. And it’s funny, how it just, how much things have turned. Because getting a chance to really learn from the people that I have, and hearing all the things that they’ve done. It just makes me, just have such a greater respect for it… Of all arts. Cause it’s like, it’s not easy. (personal communication, May 23, 2018) It is worth noting that of the seven participants in this study, five had little to no arts training or experience before coming to community college. These programs offered them their first chance to truly study the arts. The participants embraced this opportunity, and the potential for their own development as artists. Emotional Rewards

The most powerful student accounts focused on the emotions associated with their artmaking. Participants described their experiences using words such as “exciting,” “fulfilling,” “rewarding,” “joy,” “limitless,” and “fun.” Some struggled to verbalize their experience, and instead shared it through metaphor, photos, mementos, or demonstration. Jonita described it this way: “It’s like, uh, the best way I can explain it, it’s like, it’s like this little rose right here [gestures in center of chest] and it’s slowly blooming open” (as cited in Parks 2020, 9). For some participants, the arts experience stretched beyond momentary feelings and brought about more transcendent emotional responses. Students described losing their sense of time, relinquishing their own identity to that of a character, and surrendering their individualism to the collective effort of many performers. Even among beginning arts students, most at some point achieved the sense of relaxed, enjoyable, and focused attention known as flow (Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi 2014). Two participants were facing significant personal challenges, and their arts practices gave them a way to channel the intense emotions they were experiencing. In both cases, the arts gave them the means to keep going through the most difficult of times (Parks 2020). Since many research participants depended upon their community college for access to artmaking, they would have been unlikely to have such experiences if it were not for these arts programs. Arts Community

Community colleges foster strong social networks among arts students, as well as artists in their local communities. Participants cited engagements with

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their fellow artists as one of the things they liked best about studying the arts at community college. They welcomed the feedback and support that they received, and recognized how these connections furthered their development as artists. Some placed particular value on the variety of people with whom they learned and worked. Max described it this way: I would say what I like best would be … the community … Feeling like, you know, I’m a part of something that is made up of so many different walks of life. So many. But when we’re here, in this environment, and we’re doing this, whether it’s a performance or rehearsal, or a class under the art umbrella, we’re together. (personal communication, May 23, 2018) Many participants placed great value on the neutral and equitable nature of their community college arts settings. They described an environment that eschewed competition, and instead supported all artists, regardless of prior experience or accomplishments. In the words of Gretchen, a music student, “No one’s better than anyone else” (as cited in Parks 2020, 10). Participants felt welcomed and accepted in their community college arts programs, and made deep and lasting connections with other artists in their fields. Community College as a Gateway to the Arts

For many research participants, their community college provided their only opportunity to participate in the arts. Some described lifelong or latent interests in the arts, that went untapped until they became engaged in their community college arts programs. These students were then able to pursue their artistic ambitions, regardless of their lack of opportunity earlier in life. Sally, who audited visual arts courses for many years, had virtually no arts training before coming to her local community college. “I always kind of liked to draw,” she said. “But nothing where I went to school for it. It’s just—it’s come about through [the community college], through the teachers” (as cited in Parks 2020, 11). The community colleges and their programs provided a home-base for arts learning, creation, and sharing with fellow artists. For several participants, the community college provided the setting they needed to continue their artistic practices. For example, the music students utilized the community college’s facilities and instruments for daily practice and rehearsals, and for their concerts. Similarly, the theater students depended upon classes and stage productions for opportunities to act. For some participants, the community college was the only safe option for artmaking. Jonita, a single mother grappling with housing insecurity and poverty, shared her reasons why she couldn’t create at home the way

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she did at school: “the energy I feel in my house, I’m not comfortable with …. And my mind gotta be clear, it can’t be cloudy. And I can’t, I can’t focus there, cause I always feeling some presence around me” (as cited in Parks 2020, 11). Community college performances and exhibits can provide beginning artists with the very first public viewing of their work. For some students, these experiences stretch them beyond their own self-perceived capacities as artists, and redefine their expectations going forward. After performing as a soloist with a local orchestra, Gretchen had a new perspective on her musical potential: “I felt it was really amazing, and I was like, if I did this like my second year of singing, just think about what I have … it made me excited thinking about the future” (personal communication, June 21, 2018). Jonita, a student from an underrepresented group, had not considered her work as worthy of exhibiting until her teacher persuaded her otherwise: I’m like so proud of myself, and I really have to thank [my instructor], cause [she] pushed me. Cause I wasn’t gonna do it. I didn’t feel like my art was good enough. I didn’t, honestly I did not, I didn’t have that confidence in myself. So me getting selected, and getting an award? [clapping] (as cited in Parks 2020, 9) For Jonita and many students like her, exhibiting and performing opportunities are often out of reach. Community college arts programs make these arts experiences possible, which otherwise would never be open to them. Connection with Faculty

Above all, the most critical connection for these students was with the community college arts faculty. Instructors provided not only training, but support, inspiration, and one-on-one tutelage as needed to help arts students achieve their goals. Gretchen, who was new to music, expressed gratitude to her teacher for all her help: And I was really overwhelmed and—but [my teacher] was there for me. She was willing to work with me one-on-one …. I decided, you know, I just need to put my head down and work hard and I can do this … I started out, I was like, “What the heck am I doing?,” and then, “I don’t want to sing,” to end up leading the choir. (personal communication, June 21, 2018) Students consistently spoke highly of their community college arts teachers, expressing appreciation for both their high professional standards and their genuine caring for arts students. Jackson, an advanced music student who was

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taking college music courses while still in high school, was highly impressed with his teachers’ expertise: Every class that I’ve had with [teacher 1] and [teacher 2] has just been so inspiring. They know so much information, they’re so talented … And just the idea that someone can be that knowledgeable about music, but also that humble, because [teacher 1 is] a very nice guy. (personal communication, May 25, 2018) Max, who discovered his love of theater at community college, also had high praise for his teachers: “I’ve had three different teachers throughout the [community college] experience. Each one different… they really, just done a really good job. And teaching what the material is, and really understanding that this is serious” (personal communication, May 23, 2018). Gretchen staunchly defended her community college experiences against biases about quality: And I’ll fight for [my community college]. I hate when people say [derisive joke mocking the institution]. It’s like people don’t understand what [this community college] has to offer … I’ve been blown away by all of the experiences I’ve had here. (personal communication, June 21, 2018) High-quality instruction at community colleges not only prepares students for the next steps in their artistic endeavors; it can also challenge their assumptions about what it means to work in the arts. It also calls into question preconceptions about a community college education as an inferior option. For many students, particularly those who have not had extensive arts opportunities earlier in their lives, community colleges offer a supportive environment in which they can develop their skills, regardless of their initial experience level. Arts Practices as a Holistic Endeavor

It is also noteworthy that while some participants planned to pursue arts as a career, others did not. Their motivations included simple enjoyment, sharing art with others, or a potential retirement business, as well as professional aspirations. Regardless of their plans, study participants integrated their art seamlessly into the broader context of their lives. Several participants planned to pursue arts practices indefinitely as avocational pursuits. Gretchen shared her musical gifts at her church as a personal expression of her faith. She also planned to become a music therapist and further apply her love of music in helping others. Max saw a connection between theater improvisation and his

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intended profession of psychology. He hoped to blend the two in working with children: So, it blew my mind that, I originally wanted to be [in] psych, and then here’s this theater thing and there’s this tie-in now. So, it pretty much put me to where, like, okay, I can do both, and then in a weird way, they’re hand in hand. (personal communication, May 23, 2018) Such a synthesis of an arts practice into a balanced, well-rounded life—rather than considering the arts as an esoteric pursuit for a talented, privileged few— provides an ideal model for arts engagement with the general population, which community colleges are especially well positioned to provide. As arts education opportunities have dwindled for many Americans, community college arts programs are taking steps to fill the void. Students with an interest in the arts can find suitable options there, regardless of prior experience or long-term ambitions. As educational disparities persist across the United States, community college arts programs will be critical to ensuring that arts training remains available to all who seek it. Community College Arts Programs and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic wrought widespread, severe damage to the arts in the United States. The economic sector of arts, entertainment, and recreation lost over half of its jobs in the first two months of the pandemic (R. Cohen 2022). As of September 2020, professional performing artists were experiencing higher unemployment rates than workers in other hard-hit sectors, such as restaurants and retail (P. Cohen 2020). As of December 2021, the percentage of job losses at nonprofit arts organizations was still over three times that of the average across all nonprofits. Ninety-nine percent of arts presenting organizations cancelled events during the pandemic, and, as of July 2021, the losses to American arts and culture organizations were estimated at nearly $18 billion. Sixty-three percent of working artists experienced unemployment during the pandemic, and 95% lost at least some arts-related income (R. Cohen 2022). Higher education likewise suffered greatly during the COVID-19 crisis. Colleges and universities were simultaneously hit with new pandemic-related costs and declining revenue from tuition, auxiliary operations, and state subsidies (Kelderman 2020). In the first year of the pandemic, academe shed over 430,000 jobs, the highest number since the 1960s (Baumann 2022). As of fall 2021, enrollment remains below pre-pandemic levels, especially at community colleges, where the losses are above 20% (Nadworny 2021). Colleges rapidly shifted to online course delivery as business operations shut down and stayat-home orders were issued nationwide. This change undoubtedly impacted

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arts classes, in which hands-on, in-person instruction is the traditional mode of learning. As of this writing, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is over three years past, and both the arts and higher education are still recovering. Clearly, both the professional arts sector and collegiate arts programs will take time to rebuild. But such a crisis also presents a potential opportunity. As the arts move forward from this devastating time, community colleges can provide a valuable conduit in America’s fractured arts education pipeline. Discussion

During this period of restoration, community colleges present a largely untapped resource that can benefit the entire arts ecosystem. They offer the capacity to re-establish thriving arts practices, and to support their communities with welcoming and inclusive arts events. An ideal future for community college arts programs would fully utilize their unique connections with practicing artists and the public, to strengthen the arts at a fundamental, local level. Access

Within the tertiary arts education landscape, the most important contribution of community college arts programs is one of access. As gaps in educational opportunity continue to widen, community colleges remain the most accessible option for many aspiring college students. These institutions serve nearly 40% of America’s undergraduates. This large segment of the student population must be included in any discussion of American arts education, if such a consideration is to be truly inclusive. For community college arts students, their institutions offer critical connections to arts education. Due to persistent disparities in arts education at the primary and secondary levels, many of these students have not had access to arts opportunities earlier in life. Community colleges make up for the lost time in several important ways. They accept all students regardless of prior experience, offer coursework and support for beginning students, and provide performance and exhibiting opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Equity

Community colleges’ student bodies include many students of color and those with limited financial means. These are the same populations that have borne the brunt of the reductions in K–12 arts access (Rabkin and Hedberg 2011). For many students, the community college presents their first opportunity to explore an artistic interest. These institutions therefore help to rectify the inequities in access to the arts across the United States.

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As institutions that serve highly diverse populations, community colleges are uniquely positioned to support artists from underrepresented groups. They offer performing and exhibiting opportunities that ensure that these students’ work is seen and heard within the larger arts environment. Community colleges provide many of these artists with their first chance to share their creative endeavors publicly. These events can in turn inspire other underrepresented artists to pursue their artistic ambitions—and provide a venue for them to do so. Emotional Rewards and Mental Health

The study participants described rich emotional benefits from their arts practices, such as excitement, fulfillment, and joy. In some cases, the arts saw them through the most challenging times in their lives. These experiences underscore the value of the arts in maintaining emotional well-being, even outside clinical applications such as music or art therapy practices. As American society grapples with mental health crises in the wake of the pandemic (Wan 2020), this aspect of the arts experience has never been more important. As driven as the study participants were to improve as artists, the rewards of their studies reached well beyond technical achievement. These students expanded their perspectives and expectations, about the arts and about themselves. They developed confidence in their artistic abilities, and achieved things they hadn’t imagined they could do. Without community college arts programs, these students and many others like them would be denied these transformative life experiences. Building Community

Community colleges provide an ideal setting in which to engage arts students, audiences, and avocational practitioners alike. Their welcoming and supportive climate provides an optimal environment for connecting artists and arts lovers from all segments of our populations. Developing grass-roots arts communities in this way will support and sustain arts practices throughout our nation, and for the long term. Another key function of these arts programs is the cultivation of a welcoming and sustaining arts network. Community college arts students thrive on the support they find among their instructors and fellow artists. Regardless of their arts background or future plans, the study participants placed tremendous value on the communities they found in their arts programs. These connections and relationships became important parts of their lives, personally and professionally. On a larger scale, community college arts programs foster strong communities by engaging the public in a wide variety of arts experiences. They function

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as arts centers in their localities by hosting performances and exhibits, cultivating partnerships, and supporting artists from all segments of the populations that they serve. The open nature of the community college makes it an ideal setting to welcome a broad range of people into arts experiences at every level. Implications

As the arts move toward a post-pandemic future, community college arts programs can play an integral role in this process, by capitalizing on their unique positioning within the arts education continuum. They are well situated to support aspiring arts majors, as well as local arts communities, as the arts rebuild. Collegiate Arts Students

There is much to be gained from stronger relationships and understandings between community college arts programs and those in four-year colleges and universities. The most typical connections between these institutions are through transfer agreements, by which students may begin their baccalaureate degrees at the community college, then complete them at a four-year institution. While community college arts credits are intended to transfer to four-year arts programs, in reality, this process can be fraught with difficulty (Goldrick-Rab 2010). In response, many state boards of higher education have mandated transfer agreements for public colleges and universities. Even so, students can face challenges at the departmental level when transferring subject-specific credits (Cohen et al. 2014). More flexibility and transparency in this process is needed, so that community college students are not unduly penalized when transferring to a four-year arts program. To meet their own goals of inclusivity, four-year arts schools would do well to welcome community college arts graduates as transfer students to their baccalaureate programs. These students hold tremendous potential for transfer into the four-year environment. That said, continued disparities in educational access mean that traditional primary and secondary arts training programs have long been inaccessible to many American students. Some variation in artistic achievement and experience level among community college arts students is therefore not surprising. Community colleges meet students where they are and develop their creative potential from whatever starting point is needed. Inexperienced and even beginning students can flourish in attentive and supporting community college arts programs, after which they are well positioned for success at a four-year college or university. Large proportions of undergraduates in underrepresented groups study at community colleges. These students’ life experiences, as expressed through their creative work, can enrich and diversify the arts programs at receiving

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institutions. But this opportunity also presents a potential challenge. To be genuinely inclusive, receiving arts programs must welcome and embrace the differences that these students bring with them. It will be critical that their unique contributions as arts students are sincerely valued, not just by the institution, but by faculty, staff, and fellow students as well. The nature of arts programs in community colleges, and the widely varied populations that they serve, fosters an open approach to arts education that may be instructive to collegiate programs more broadly. Considering the mixed skill levels of arts students without early training, technical mastery is not a primary concern for incoming students. Community college programs instead focus considerable attention on the creative content of students’ current work, and their potential for artistic growth. As some study participants noted, the environment is intentionally non-competitive, in favor of nurturing each student’s unique talents. Arts Communities

Nearly 100 years ago, Dewey (1934, 84) identified the arts as a central facet of community: Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and to a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity. Thanks to their broad reach among many populations—college students, practicing artists, and local residents—community colleges are well situated to re-establish the arts as a focal point within the communities they serve. In doing so, they can help restore relationships among people throughout their localities who create and appreciate art. By building communities around arts practices, community colleges can strengthen many human connections that were damaged by the pandemic. The community-focused culture of arts programs in community colleges also offers a different perspective on what the arts can be. As these programs bring together artists from all over their regions, they cultivate a grass-roots ecosystem that sustains arts practices throughout their communities. This approach eschews a view of the arts as exclusionary based on technical prowess, in favor of an all-encompassing, inclusionary umbrella. As the arts consistently struggle for support in American society, the latter approach is more likely to benefit creative endeavors at all levels.

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Conclusion

The capacity of community colleges to reach broad audiences and to engage artists of all backgrounds and interests will be a tremendous asset as the arts recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. As arts programs start the arduous task of rebuilding after the devastation of this time, it will be critical to strengthen their connections with the communities they serve. Community college arts programs are readily situated to support this work. As research participants noted, their arts experiences had significant, intrinsic value. Regardless of their ultimate artistic aspirations, the developmental, emotional, and social rewards of their arts practices were invaluable for them. As society emerges from the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic, arts experiences present the potential for recovery and healing—for all people. Of course, many challenges remain. Due to their broad, service-oriented missions, community colleges often manage many competing priorities. They can face intense pressure to channel their scarce resources on workforce development, at the expense of liberal arts programs (Hanson 2010). Steep enrollment losses during the pandemic are exacerbating the need to cut costs (Anderson 2021). Even within this context, community college arts programs play a crucial role in serving their communities. Administrators should be wary of reducing funding to these programs, just when they are needed the most. The arts courses and events offered at community colleges are critical to maintaining a healthy and equitable arts ecosystem, which is well connected to the local arts community and the public at large. As one considers the responsibilities of arts programs in tertiary education, programs at community colleges are an essential part of this landscape. References American Association of Community Colleges. 2022. “Fast Facts 2022.” https:// www.aacc.nche.edu/research-trends/fast-facts/. Anderson, Nick. 2021. “Community Colleges Continue Major Enrollment Decline.” Washington Post, December 28, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ education/2021/12/28/community-college-enrollment-drops/. Baumann, Dan. 2022. “Higher Ed’s Labor Force Is Nearly Back to Full Strength. Thank the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2022. https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-labor-force-is-nearly-backto-full-strength-thank-the-bureau-of-labor-statistics. Carnevale, Anthony P., Artem Gulish, and Kathryn Peltier Campbell. 2021. “If Not Now, When? The Urgent Need for an All-One-System Approach to Youth Policy.” Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/allonesystem/. Central Wyoming College. n.d. “Visual and Performing Arts Center.” Accessed May 29, 2022. https://www.cwc.edu/artscenter/.

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Cohen, Patricia. 2020.“A ‘Great Cultural Depression’ Looms for Legions of Unemployed Performers.” New York Times, December 26, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/12/26/arts/unemployed-performer-theatre-arts.html. Cohen, Randy. 2022. “COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on the Arts Research Update: May  12, 2022.” Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts. https://www.­ americansforthearts.org/node/103614. Cohen, Arthur M., and Florence B. Brawer. 1989. “Trends in the Fine and Performing Arts.” AACJC Journal (June/July): 35–40. Cohen, Arthur M., Florence B. Brawer, and Carrie B. Kisker. 2014. The American Community College. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Cohen, Arthur M., and Jan M. Ignash. 1994. “An Overview of the Total Credit Curriculum.” New Directions for Community Colleges 86 (Summer): 13–29. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York, NY: The Berkley Publishing Group. Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). 2015. P.L. 114-95, 20 U.S.C. § 6316 (2015). Goldrick-Rab, Sara. 2010. “Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Community College Student Success.” Review of Educational Research 80 (3): 437–469. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654310370163. Hanson, Chad. 2010. The Community College and the Good Society: How the Liberal Arts Were Undermined and What We Can Do to Bring Them Back. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Heilig, Julian Vasquez, Heather Cole, and Angélica Aguilar. 2010. “From Dewey to No Child Left Behind: The Evolution and Devolution of Public Arts Education.” Arts Education Policy Review 111 (4): 136–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10632913.2010.490776. Johnson County Community College. n.d. “Midwest Trust Center.” Accessed May 29, 2022. https://www.jccc.edu/midwest-trust-center/. Kelderman, Eric. 2020. “Major Cost-Cutting Begins in Response to Covid-19, With Faculty and Staff Furloughs and Pay Cuts.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/major-cost-cutting-begins-in-responseto-covid-19-with-faculty-and-staff-furloughs-and-pay-cuts/. Kos, Ronald P. Jr. 2018. “Music Education and the Well-Rounded Education Provision of the Every Student Succeeds Act: A Critical Policy Analysis.” Arts Education Policy Review 119 (4): 204–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2017. 1327383. Lynch, Robert. 2005–2006. “Arts and Community Colleges: Vital Partnerships for Creative Communities.” Community College Journal (December-January): 42–45. Nadworny, Elissa. 2021. “College Enrollment Plummeted During the Pandemic. This Fall, It’s Even Worse.” NPR, October 26, 2021. https://www.npr. org/2021/10/26/1048955023/college-enrollment-down-pandemic-economy. Nakamura, Jeanne, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. 2014. “The Concept of Flow.” In Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihályi Csíkszentmihályi, edited by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, 239–263. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9088-8. National Endowment for the Arts. 2018. “U. S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading: 2002–2017.” Washington, DC. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/ files/2017-sppapreviewREV-sept2018.pdf. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA ). 2001. P.L. 107-110, 20 U.S.C. § 6301 (2002).

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Parks, Amy C. 2020. “The Arts Experience at Community College: A Phenomenological Study.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice: 1–18. https://doi. org/10.1080/10668926.2020.1725688. President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities. 2011. “Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools.” Washington, DC. https://www.arts.gov/about/publications/reinvesting-arts-education-winningamericas-future-through-creative-schools. Rabkin, Nick, and E.C. Hedberg. 2011. “Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation.” Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/impact/research/publications/arts-education-americawhat-declines-mean-arts-participation. Sinclair College. n.d. “Arts and Culture.” Accessed May 29, 2022. https://www.­ sinclair.edu/student-life/arts-culture/. Sinclair College. n.d. “Theatre Department Productions.” Accessed November 14, 2021. https://www.sinclair.edu/student-life/arts-culture/theatre-productions/. Smith, Jonathan A., Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin. 2009. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. The Century Foundation Working Group on Community College Financial Resources. 2019. “Recommendations for Providing Community Colleges with the Resources They Need.” https://tcf.org/content/report/recommendationsproviding-community-colleges-resources-need/. United States Government Accountability Office. 2009. “Access to Arts Education: Inclusion of Additional Questions in Education’s Planned Research Would Help Explain Why Instruction Time Has Decreased for Some Students.” Washington, DC. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09286.pdf. Valencia College. 2021. “Valencia College Theater.” Facebook, November 26, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/ValenciaCollegeTheater/videos. Wan, William. 2020. “The coronavirus pandemic is pushing America into a mental health crisis.” Washington Post, May 4, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ health/2020/05/04/mental-health-coronavirus/. Wan, Yinmei, Meredith J. Ludwig, and Andrea Boyle. 2018. “Review of Evidence: Arts Education Through the Lens of ESSA.” Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/reviewof-evidence-arts-education-research-essa.aspx.

23 PEDAGOGIES OF CRITICAL EMBODIMENT Activating Submerged Histories, Moving Toward Anti-Racist Futures Dasha A. Chapman

History, Memory, Performance, Place

How might body-based pedagogies and performance studies methodologies contribute to necessary racial and historical reckoning efforts foundational to more equitable and just futures? This driving question guided my development of a course called “History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating ­Davidson’s Submerged Histories” (HMPP), in which I employed a multimodal pedagogy of “critical embodiment” to charge the space of my classroom at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college 20 miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina. The “submerged histories” referenced in the course title date back to ­Davidson College’s establishment in 1837 by white settlers on the ancestral lands of the Catawba Indian Nation as an institution physically built by the labor of enslaved African Americans (Davidson College n.d.a). For over 130 years, Davidson admitted only white Presbyterian males; the college began admitting male students of African descent in the 1960s, white women in the early 1970s, and Black women in 1973 (Davidson College 2015; 2023). Colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are enshrined into the college’s campus. Both architectures and institutional arrangements crystallize the ­continuity between the oppressive circumstances on which Davidson was constructed and its contemporary standing as a highly selective liberal arts college. Prior to my arrival as Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance in 2019, there were several well-funded campus initiatives aimed at addressing these legacies, including a Commission on Race and Slavery (Davidson College n.d.a), as well as curricular and extracurricular projects. Interested in contributing to this work, I devised HMPP, which I taught Spring 2020 and Spring 2021. I am a white, Jewish, anti-racist, feminist educator and interdisciplinary DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-27

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artist-scholar who traverses multiple modalities and draws from diverse fields of knowledge to spark student awareness of positionality, instill understandings of intersectionality and critical embodiment, and inspire toward the potential in performance for social change. At Davidson, I brought together my training in African diaspora dance and performance studies, my coalitional antiracist commitments, my body-based pedagogical approaches, as well as my space on the institutional margins to explore with students how performance/­ performance studies might amplify the work of campus reckoning while also provoking critical engagement with such initiatives. Could practice-based research participate in Davidson’s collective reckoning with the past, in the present, ultimately building toward other futures? The premise of HMPP was to mobilize dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies as strategies for attending to the living legacies of white supremacy on Davidson’s campus. To do so, this class brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. These multiple entry points aided in our examination of the ways racism, as well as gendered/sexual, religious, and class-based exclusions are encoded in the structural foundations of Davidson, the public narratives Davidson College and Davidson town circulate, and the current campus climate. Launching from these varied engagements, students devised campus-specific research-based creative projects. This chapter outlines my hybrid, process-oriented, body-based, anti-racist pedagogy for HMPP by discussing course intentions, approaches, and key aspects of student learning and creative development. I examine the promises, achievements, pitfalls, and missed opportunities of this multi-modal collaborative performance studies course within the twinned pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, sharing a model educators might find useful to adapt in their respective contexts. At Davidson, my class sizes were small and our work emphasized process rather than product—this luxury of intimacy is clearly not replicable everywhere. I offer this narrative of my teaching as advocacy for braiding performing arts pedagogies toward situated place-based and bodybased learning to support students becoming critically embodied and invested in the immediate worlds through which they move. Notes on Positionality, Intersections, and Gaps

My pedagogy values the ways performance and/as critical embodiment can activate submerged histories, reorient place-based knowledge, and potentially ignite coalitional change. This perspective emerges from my experiences as a white child of Jewish South African parents, an interdisciplinary dancer-scholar, and a collaborative performance maker who has long worked with and studied alongside Haitian and Black/African Diaspora artist-activists. My teaching is inspired by strategies I have crafted through place-based performance work

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with artists in Haiti and the US South. Although new to Davidson, I had previously lived in nearby Durham, North Carolina, where in the summer of 2017, I co-developed with Aya Shabu a research-based community-oriented performance project about histories and memories of the Black neighborhood Hayti central to Durham’s historic thriving. Additionally, I regularly convene with other white people and also participate in multi-racial collectives to practice undoing racism on personal, interpersonal, and professional levels, and in our pedagogies. At Davidson, as contingent faculty on the relative margins of the institution, I was called to activate my social location to foster space in my classrooms for students to reflect on their own positionalities to confront race, racism, and white supremacy in ways that mobilize rather than paralyze. While my graduate training oriented me in performance studies, my training in multiple African diaspora dance techniques and dance ethnographic research with Haitian dancer-activists instilled in me understandings of embodied knowledge and positionality as lived in and through the body.1 Study and relationship-building with diverse artist-practitioners taught me how history, ancestry, and vital knowledge are transmitted and enlivened through embodied practices, and how the undoing of white supremacy must start with a reconfiguration of not just worldview, but of worldsense. Complimentary training in yoga therapeutics with Bo Forbes, who as a trained psychologist yokes yoga philosophy and practice with neuroscientific and somatic understandings of physiology as a social phenomenon, provided a conception of embodiment as socio-politically habituated, an understanding potentialized by intentional embodiment practices. I am also inspired by recent work with practitioner-educators who tilt somatics and movement/dance toward antiracist practice and undoing white supremacy on internal levels. Together, these multiple approaches ground my conceptions of body, embodiment, movement, and practice. Such intersections have honed my awareness of the gaps perpetuated in a number of scholarly fields. Whereas dance education and performance practice offer an incredible potential for fostering embodied knowledge and collectivity, collegiate dance has historically perpetuated whiteness and a supposedly neutral body (Gottschild 1996, 1997; McCarthy-Brown 2017; Chaleff 2018; Davis and Phillips-Fein 2018; McCarthy-Brown and Schupp 2021) within entrenched exclusionary structures (McCarthy-Brown and Schupp 2021). Black Studies, on the other hand, foregrounds the worldmaking contributions of African-descended peoples as the field disobediently crosses disciplinary formations and often emphasizes anti-racist community-engaged knowledge production. However, as confirmed by my interactions with Africana Studies majors at Davidson, dance and performance are often noted symbolically rather than taken up as urgent axes of study and practice. Performance Studies carries progressive inclinations, even as the field continues to grapple with its Euro-American centricity, as well as its relationship to de/colonization and

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anti-racism. Inspiringly, Performance Studies provokes the interrogation and reordering of knowledge from points of action. From the field’s capacious purview of “performance,” we can begin to attend to the ongoing effects of structural oppression as lived, felt, and meted out across the body. For change will not take place by declaration alone (Ahmed 2006). Nor will we transform if we stay in the realm of abstract theory, or if we perform without reflection and a notion of the ongoingness of the work. It is from these overlapping gaps as well as potentials that I devise a body-based and multi-disciplinary pedagogy aimed to cultivate “critical embodiment.” Methodologies for Critical Embodiment

On our second day of class, I guide students through a warmup that awakens their senses: first independently seated or standing, then through movement in relation to space. How do different sense-based hierarchies shape how—and what—we perceive the world (Cohen Bull 1997)? How do situated cultural contexts emphasize particular senses over others, and ultimately inform how you physiologically and conceptually relate to your surroundings? I then move the students through the word prompts that guide our course: History, Memory, Performance, Place, Davidson. As they let each word-concept inform the way their body feels, articulates, and traverses space, I encourage them to be their full selves, in all their differing social identities. How do these words land in and on you? What qualities of movement, emotion, and thought arise from each? What memories or associations arise? We gather to reflect on the practice. Students share stories derived from lived experiences that speak to how the course keyword-concepts exist as forces exerted on and felt through the body. We learn from each other about social values, knowledge production, social surveillance, places of dis/comfort, physical ability, personality types, and personal relationships to location and the institution of Davidson. Critical embodiment is a framework that yokes the “critical” in critical thinking to the “critical” in critical theory to the “critical” in urgent action ­(Martin 1998). In contrast to Euro-American concert dance, which promotes a notion of the body as a neutral vessel of decontextualized expression, critical embodiment enables the full self to unfurl through practices that entwine mindbody-spirit-society; critical reflection, exploratory movement, and imagination; physical practice, theoretical inquiry, and group dialogue; performance and social change. As the above exercise shows, centering critical forms of embodiment tilt movement practices and self-reflection toward social concepts, identity positions, histories, and personal and group relationships to campus. Critical embodiment also underlies investing movement, dance, and performance in social engagement—whether that be in excavating one’s personal positionality, visibilizing or decentering whiteness, igniting non-Western decolonial perspectives, or engaging others in the work of education, reflection, and change.

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At its heart, HMPP engaged and extended ongoing campus initiatives. I created assignments early in the semester that facilitated student exploration of campus projects: Davidson College’s Commission on Race and Slavery and the related archives project; Sarah HD Mellin’s (2020) senior thesis on white supremacy at Davidson, Beneath the Bricks; the accompanying Disorienting Davidson tour that Mellin developed with fellow student Tian Yi in collaboration with archivists and faculty; the Davidson Microaggressions Project (2023); and Inclusive Histories of Davidson College (Davidson College n.d.b). Knowing these initiatives are only as effective as the change they instigate, and firmly believing that the bridge between the “disciplined and creative minds” and “humane instincts” touted in Davidson’s mission is that mesh of the lived body, HMPP took critical embodiment as starting point for addressing the gap between knowledge and action. I was committed to bringing forward the potential of performance, and its necessary corollary body-based reflective practices, to challenge static colonial notions of History while further extending campus anti-racist initiatives. To ground our studies, we read scholars who write at the intersections of performance, embodiment, and history/memory: Gordon’s notion of “haunting” as a sociological phenomenon that registers the affective persistence of unresolved pasts in the present (1997); Daniel’s concept of embodied knowledge as principal foundation in African diaspora danced rituals, as well as understandings of the sacred and of trans-generational collectivity (2005); Taylor’s influential theorizations of the archive and the repertoire, and the role performance plays in maintaining a community’s counter-colonial histories (2003); Trouillot’s analysis of the workings of power as central to the production of History (1995); Hartman’s encounter with the absences of Black life in the archive and her subsequent speculative grappling with the violences ingrained in the colonial archive and produced by encounters with archival documents (2008); and Conquergood’s radically engaged perspective on performance studies research as civic intervention through humble participatory witnessing in acts that performatively bridge domains of power and knowledge (2002). Body-based practices accompanied by critical reflection and analysis connect experiential, psychosomatic, structural, and social frames. Thus, neither “movement” nor “body” are ever empty vessels in my classrooms. For example, when instructing students in Haitian dance techniques, I do not erase our different identities. Instead, using Daniel’s notion of “embodied knowledge,” we maintain differences as we craft new modes of relation. I teach Haitian techniques as a body-based learning activity. Directing students away from habits of appropriative consumption, I ask: What do we learn, from our own situated selves, in the physical learning of this integrated embodied philosophy? How can such movement practice offer us new forms of understanding ourselves and others, rather than new moves to incorporate into choreography or share on social media? It is my hope that tuning into one’s own felt sense of

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embodiment in relation to hx/story2 and the present can furnish a necessary starting point for anti-racist work, practice, and change. Submerged Histories

HMPP was a Dance course cross-listed in Africana Studies and Anthropology, and fulfilled Davidson’s Justice, Equality, Community curriculum requirement (Davidson College n.d.c). As a new interdisciplinary course taught by a visiting professor, both iterations of HMPP were small. In 2020, my two students were both white from the US South and already engaged in campus activism—one passionate about politics and education, the other invested in queer community and history. Our shared whiteness and commitments allowed the classroom to function as an affinity space where we could work things out amongst us as white people. In 2021, the group of three comprised a Black Anthropology major/Dance minor from Texas, a white Art History major/ Dance minor from northeast United States, and an international student from Italy studying Psychology and Digital Studies. Enrollment had no prerequisites, and I worked to create a dynamically inclusive environment for all to enter theory and practice from exactly where they were. I developed this class to provide a container for activating place and hx/ stories at Davidson, but knew it was imperative to foster student self-reflection on their own positionalities and relationship to this work before launching into the research and creation process. This also required that we destabilize hegemonic understandings of knowledge production. In addition to the activity already described, we read a short chapter by James (2013) that exposes the violence of Eurocentric value systems embedded within dominant understandings of “theory.” James uplifts the active forms of theorizing that Black people do; inherently holistic African and indigenous philosophies that integrate forms of knowledge, living, and becoming through action. Stemming from James and the opening improvisation practice, we address what matters to us, the issues we care about, where on campus and in larger society we feel belonging and non-belonging—topics we revisit throughout the semester. We create classroom agreements, a few tenets of which emphasize the importance of being process-oriented and in a sometimes-uncomfortable space of learning and growth. In tandem with these early discussions, students listen to/think through two aesthetic projects that address the submerged past: The 1619 podcast series (The New York Times 2020) and Rhiannon Giddens’s “Tiny Desk concert” (NPR Music 2019). Both expose creative methods for excavating and sharing silenced histories—the first through Nikole Hannah Jones’s collaged, personalized, and aural approach to place-based storytelling that pinpoints the Virginia landing of a ship carrying African people as the under-acknowledged commencement of institutionalized slavery in English-speaking North America,

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subsequently making possible the immense capital accumulation that built present-day United States; the second an intimate concert by a North Carolina-born musician highlighting the Africanist histories of the banjo and Appalachian music. As Jones brings us to waters’ edge to feel into silenced histories, Giddens shows how through banjo performance she “[finds] a way to access [her] ancestors” (NPR Music 2019). These projects illuminate what Gottschild refers to as cultural “intertexts.” Known in dance studies for her path-carving illuminations of the indelible yet invisibilized Africanist presence in American culture, in “Some Thoughts on Choreographing History,” Gottschild (1997) offers an incisive reading of perceptual bias and the ways cultural complexes work to produce one another. Encouraging interrelation rather than binaries, Gottschild provokes: What would happen if we start to recognize our own and others’ biases, bringing such patterns to the foreground but also investigating the potential of reversals and inversions? To accompany our discussion, I guide a movement exercise for physically examining one’s own movement habits—which necessarily inform habits of perception—and explore honing attention anew to such habituated patterns. When online in their own rooms, I had students repeatedly traverse a familiar pathway, first in a quotidian way, then attending to speed, posture, gaze, intention. Through guided prompts, students play with shifts in tempo, orientation, and repetition. This then informs our approach to a well-loved memory-filled object the student locates in their space. First encountering an object and letting it speak to and through embodiment in memory; then in dance, students place the object in a new context and reorient it through different physical-spatial relationships. This activity readies us for studying the ways personal bias and ingrained value systems have undergirded knowledge production personally, broadly, and in relation to Davidson College’s own history. Davidson College

Scholars and researchers of Davidson’s histories also grounded early class sessions. A session with the College’s Justice, Equality, and Community archivist Jessica Cottle, special collections archivist DebbieLee Landi, and research librarian Cara Evanston, taught basic research methods and illuminated archival findings of interest. We met with Dr. Hilary Green, a historian who was in residence at Davidson conducting archival research in support of the College’s Commission on Race and Slavery. Green’s (2021) work recovers Black life and labor as foundational to academic institutions, insisting on naming, humanizing, and uplifting joy in the lives of African American people she traces. Emphasizing the ethical dimensions of such work, Green introduced students to archival methods and specific strategies for searching for traces of Black life, modeling the intricacies of historical

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research. These meetings instilled a sense of cautious care and creativity necessary for approaching absences produced by the often violent coloniality of the archive. Mellin, author of the impactful senior thesis Beneath the Bricks: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Slavery, and White Supremacy at Davidson College (2020), and co-creator of the Disorienting Davidson tour and project (Disorienting & Reorienting 2019), became a primary interlocutor. Students read portions of Mellin’s thesis and took the alternative campus tour.3 Most striking in Mellin’s accounting are the instances of racialized performance on campus—including blackface minstrel performances, a mock lynching staged and photographed for the 1920 yearbook, and a 1960 screening of Birth of a Nation in the student union (2020). Mellin highlights how such iterations of confederate nostalgia and racial violence “remain” (Schneider 2001) in the present through the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and value systems, structural inequities, interpersonal micro-aggressions, and historical erasure— all of which define campus climate, particularly for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people. Mellin is a white, queer person who was very clear about their positionality and how they are positioned to take on the burden of certain kinds of work—namely, exposing and dismantling institutional and interpersonal white supremacy—yet always in consultation with others, and in acknowledgement of all the people and labor that came before. Across writing and dialogue, Mellin stressed the importance of collaboration and cited the long history of campus activism many community constituents have ushered forward. No doubt, Mellin’s peer status kindled students’ imaginations toward what could be possible for themselves. People on campus have been doing this work for many decades, and students saw their own research as potentially contributing through acknowledging, sharing, and building on such precedents. Integrating Theory and Practice: Intersectional Perspectives

Informed by Black feminist theorists who embrace difference as foundation for crafting a “beloved community”—a collective formation in which each person can be situated in their full-bodied, culturally-rich selves (hooks 1996; James 2013)—we learn from one another’s situatedness, yet the onus is not placed on minoritized students to educate others. Rather, I offer resources for students to feel affirmed, challenged, or called in to share relative to their social positioning. This means that those who exist at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities—Black women, queer and trans, poor- and working-class—are invited to contribute from their experiences in a stance of confirmation, while students who exist in realms of accrued privilege—white, male, middle-to-upper-class, highly-educated—move toward a growing edge

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to confront and analyze the impact of such advantages. Students examine personal positionality as groundwork for socially engaged study/practice. Critical interrogations of race and its intersections with personal experience and social positioning (Baldwin [1984] 2010; Lorde 1984) ready students to fill out the “Power Flower,” a worksheet that visualizes different identity categories and their proximity to power and privilege.4 Since the purpose of the “Power Flower” worksheet is to encourage self-reflection, students have agency to determine how much they disclose about their identities. Then, we use this self-reflection to inform a group discussion about personal i­dentities— how one perceives oneself—versus public identities—how one is “seen” and “read” by others in social contexts. The activity reveals how social identity categories intersect and are contingent upon one another, and how the power or privilege of one’s identities are in fact dependent on context. My goal with this exercise is to renew student awareness of the complexity of their own and their peers’ social identities beyond physiognomy, while also considering the varied responsibilities each of us might be charged with due to our own situated proximities to power and privilege. Relatedly, to help students recognize their own layered embodiments, I guide an exercise mapping personal histories in relation body and place, which also helps students get to know one another. When in person, students “mapped” personal emplacements by arranging Post-it notes in the studio space and moving in relationship to them while sharing stories through voice and dance. One student placed sticky notes on specific body parts and related stories of pleasure, pain, and nostalgia. The other student deconstructed the squares and gathered them in piles representative of institutions that, as she shared through voice and dynamic movement, shaped her corporeal senseof-self in ways that now were being illuminated, challenged, and rearranged. When online, students’ bodily senses of self and of place were rearticulated in relationship to indigenous Catawba ways of knowing. Local Guest Artists: Attuning to Resonance-in-Relation

Davidson College occupies the stolen lands of the Catawba Indian Nation, and Catawba Indian Nation citizen, activist, and queer performer DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren5 visited HMPP both semesters. In 2021, George-­ Warren began with the question, “What is your water?” Catawba means “people of the water,” evoking the land’s major river. His opening guided a beautiful sharing in which we learned about each person’s “home” waterway and how these relationships situated us across geographies but connected us at the same time. George-Warren shifted our perspectives by introducing the Catawba relational worldview that does not linguistically or conceptually distinguish humans from environment; all form one symbiotic, interdependent kin network—a stark divergence from Western hegemonic colonial perceptions

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that separate “man” from “nature/wilderness.” He also discussed how artistic performance, language revitalization, indigenous food sovereignty, and cultural transmission are integrated and necessary parts of his social practice. Following George-Warren’s visit, I continued our thinking with his prompt, “What is your water?” That next class session, I facilitated an embodied activity that allowed students to revisit their water-places and craft movement sequences in relation to sensory qualities and memories. I invited them to feel into the following prompts as guides for movement and imagination: What is your water? Where is it and how do you know it? Why are you there? What does it feel like, how does it move? What memories does it bring forward for you? What knowledge does it carry? Are there any rituals or events you have experienced or know about in relation to this water? What lessons does this element teach you? While George-Warren instructed us in new orientations to the living, sacred energies of place, Durham-based performer, educator, and embodied storyteller Aya Shabu shared her approach to crafting and performing local hx/ stories. Shabu’s Whistle Stop Tours performs stories of African Americans in Durham neighborhoods through multifaceted “memorable” experiences of local hx/stories-in-their-midst.6 That Shabu “wished not to reenact history” but rather develop an approach of “re-entering the past through a present lens” instilled, as one student wrote in a reflection post, a way to “think about the tours as [immersive] opportunities for the audience to have memories of the place, and the use of performance to facilitate the creation of memories.” Sharing her active approach to memory, Shabu led us through a grounding meditation for visiting a memory with a chosen person or a place. This practice opened a remarkable intimacy amongst us, a new way of resonating with each other’s moments of re-membered connection. One student learned something about memory itself: “I love the language of visiting a memory; it feels active, intentional, and as if we are going back in time. Memory is a complex being, and can occur subconsciously, but the language used today brought about an active, reflective practice with our own memories.” Charlotte-based choreographer, dancer, educator, and researcher Tamara Williams shared her performance research on African American and African diaspora dance histories and techniques. During her visits, Williams (2018) illuminated her approach to recovering and “reconstructing” the Ring Shout—a form of traditional dance practiced by African descendants during enslavement in the US South that serves as basis for much of American performance today. Williams’s methods for attending to this “undocumented” practice includes visits to plantation archives, oral and embodied histories, as well as performance creation and a recent screendance.7 Her understanding of embodied knowledge is powerful method for telling stories unknown or suppressed by dominant narratives. Students were struck by the Ring Shout’s embodiment of ancestral histories, evidenced by the counterclockwise direction of motion,

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bodies bent at the waist, feet flat connected to the ground keeping time, and interconnectivity generated between clapping, singing, and gestures that enact daily activities. Participating in Williams’s on-campus dance workshop in March 2020, a white Southern queer male student spent time reflecting on what it meant for him to participate in learning Ring Shout. He described his apprehensions engaging in such a spiritually and politically potent practice as a white person: “Derived from resistance and spirituality, how could I respectfully perform these movements that weren’t and will never be mine to perform? That were derived from experiences I will never know?” As a dance oriented toward Black resistance struggles and their ongoing pertinence in the present, learning about, with, and through Ring Shout offered him a practice toward viscerally-felt self-reflection: “I became aware of my positionality in a literal, spatial way.” Drawing a connection to Trouillot’s notion of the past as “a position” (1995, 15) this student concluded: “I think that the setting of the dance in a classroom space gave me the ability to step back and ethically understand how the position of the past manifests in embodied experiences and practices (that are not my own).” Participation in physical practice with knowledge of the histories from which it derived bolstered the container for learning and instructed in forms of critical embodiment. Pedagogical contexts can facilitate new, albeit uncomfortable, insights into contexts outside the classroom. Feeling into one’s own growing edge can serve as a crucial element for reckoning with ingrained relationships to race, racism, and accountability, and for creating new embodied understandings of who one is and what is to be done. The above-noted student continued to think through the experience of dancing the Ring Shout with Williams in his post-course reflection written early May 2020. In the wake of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, this student, a runner, “felt [his] whiteness in [his] strides” just as he had physically confronted his whiteness when dancing Ring Shout. While this opened a visceral sense of privilege, it also provided insight into surface-level social media campaigns like the “Run for Ahmaud.” What does white allyship truly entail? he asked. “I don’t think we should confront our privilege and complicity in white supremacy only concerning black deaths and blatant racism. I have to recognize and celebrate black folx when they’re alive, not just when they’re killed by cops or racists.” Reflexive and critically engaged embodied practice, when coupled with academic study, self-reflection, and dialogic engagement, powerfully affected embodied understandings of positionality and knowledge of the past. Student Projects

Each semester culminated with student final projects that highlighted the potential of creativity, performance, and body-based reflection to bring

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marginalized experiences into the present and illuminated how they might potentially inspire ongoing work. Students took seriously how small incremental change on the ground, within each individual, can add up toward a culture shift (Solnit 2019). Many focused on first steps toward accountability and healing. Ultimately, they devised projects with the intention of fostering ongoing engagement, reflection, embodied research, and hx/story-sharing amongst their peers. The white, queer, male student referenced earlier created an epistolary exchange between himself and past/present/future queer Davidson students to register the lived experiences of queer students and write back against the insufficiency of Davidson’s archive, which consisted of one paltry folder labeled “homosexuality at Davidson.” His project activated the memory/hx/ story of queer ancestor Zac Lacy, a former Davidson student from the 1990s and an important LGBTQ leader who died by suicide on campus. Responding to pandemic circumstances, this student wrote a collection of letters that interwove remnants of the archive with his queer experiences in the present, generating imaginative engagements with the past directed toward desire for queer futures at Davidson. A white female student from West Virginia explored the history of the Ada Jenkins Center, a community organization adjacent to the College where she regularly taught in the after school program. She discovered that the building originally housed the only school for African American students in the town of Davidson before integration in 1966. Forced to close due to integration, it was transformed into the Ada Jenkins Center. Inspired by an online platform that Shabu introduced us to, she created an interactive educational game that guided Ada Jenkins students through activities about the school/building’s history and connected it to broader issues of school desegregation and schooling in North Carolina. Additionally, this student maintained a personal blog reflecting on her own often uncomfortable learnings about whiteness in the model of letters to her former self and to friends who resisted reflecting on white privilege, as well as notes on moments of personal discomfort produced by noticing her own white identity. An international student from Italy was moved by the exchange with George-Warren to create an interactive resource guide about contemporary Native American and indigenous cultures. With links to podcasts, art, readings, films, and activist initiatives, the site led people to an abundance of indigenous artists, activists, authors, and culture workers. People navigate the site through prompts that ask for preferences and interests and then provides resources based on these answers. A Black female student from Texas facilitated a conversation and movement session for other Black women students to discuss, process, and move through experiences at Davidson. Throughout the semester, this student was attentive to the regularity by which her fellow Black women students across campus

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took leaves of absence due to strains on mental health and lack of support structures. She was struck by findings in the archive that repeatedly confirmed this was a historically entrenched reality at the college. She learned that even Janet Stovall had to take a leave. Stovall is a much-lauded campus leader of Project ’87, the Black student campaign launched in the mid-1980s that called for racial equity at the College—action points Davidson still works to achieve. This confirmed for the students the need for spaces on campus that centered Black women’s wellness and safety. As a senior transitioning out of the college, HMPP provided an opportunity for this student to implement the movementconversation workshop on a small scale, as she made space for Black women students to share testimonies of exhaustion and isolation, as well as accounts of survival and expressions of mutual support. In addition to a written essay where she reflected on her learnings as they connected to Davidson’s history and present, she also compiled a list of local Black-owned businesses in the area to share with Black students. A white female student from Connecticut created a reflective embodied campus tour that moved alongside key sites in Mellin and Yi’s Disorienting Davidson tour. As she explained in her accompanying essay, “I am drawn to the land, to the peaceful tranquility that is felt underneath the shaded greenery. However, the colonial undertone of crafting a landscape with imported trees infringes upon the ability to appreciate the land as land. This confliction rests at the foundation of my tour; I offer a mix of practices, walking, and histories to get at the unsettling, distracting feeling.” She crafted a self-guided experience for participants to witness and process sensations of disorientation away from the laudatory-and-incomplete campus narratives through an audiorecorded place-based meditation, written movement prompts, and a video of her improvising in the original part of campus. Notably, this student reflected on the unfinished nature of the work: “In the making of this project, and throughout the semester, I have realized there is much of Davidson’s history that I have yet to uncover. Furthermore, there is much of the school’s history that the community has yet to uncover and reckon with. […] The physicality of such an embodied engagement feels more holistic and impactful and is something I can continually engage with as I traverse through campus.” Moving Toward

My teaching at Davidson was collaborative, intersectional, experimental, and marginal on multiple productive levels (hooks 1989). I drew together differing methodologies and approaches to elucidate multi-modal approaches to change-making, knowledge production, and performance on campus. Our process-oriented, unspectacular classwork diverged from—but, in my estimation, complimented—the highly visible Theater Department’s collaborative production “Unveiled and Unvarnished: Original Stories of Racism and

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Intolerance Amongst Us,” performed at the Duke Family Performance Hall on Davidson’s campus, March 2021.8 Staged theater can be a deeply generative, and, as “Stories (Yet) to be Told” program director and performer Maurice J. Norman noted to me, “cathartic” experience for those involved. With HMPP, I was getting at something else: the unfinished and thus necessarily ongoing nature of Davidson College’s—and each one of our own—journeys toward accountability. The work was imperfect. Teaching in the first semester interrupted by COVID-19, and then our third pandemic semester online, I dedicated ample class time to checking in with and managing student well-being. Projects ended up being more conceptual than actualized due to our remote status and students’ limited energy. In future iterations, I would devote more class time for devising and workshopping projects. What I believe was most successful, and, perhaps most needed for our moment, was the transmission of the ethos and methods of the course. I aspired to generate heightened intellectual and somatic awareness of the past and present and to emphasize the role critical embodiment can play in changing the status quo. Students were urged to carry lessons fostered through performance research and embodiment practices into their personal lives and communities, informing conceptions of and developing fortitude for the ongoing work of attending to systemic inequity as it manifests in the everyday. These approaches have the potential to reorient body-based practices toward building new futures through addressing the past to transform the present in meaningful and sustained ways. Since the conclusion of my appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson, I am now teaching undergraduate dance students in a large state institution. As I make this shift, I am considering how to translate the intimate experimental pedagogies I developed in a small liberal arts setting for this new context. Although at Davidson my student cohort was relatively small, the groups were diverse with widely varying commitments to and experiences with the performing arts, critical theory, and anti-racism, I do believe the pedagogical framework outlined in this chapter is adaptable and portable. A foundational component that I would encourage all educators in the performing arts to work toward is de-neutralizing any body-based work. In improvisational exercises, acknowledgement of and attention to the ways social identities manifest and inform expression can serve as touchstone. Anti-racism demands ongoing work that must ignite from the inside out, thus educators themselves can nurture such practices for themselves as well. Another way HMPP might inspire educators across contexts is to use their performing arts skills—embodied listening, improvisation, creative inquiry, imagination, rehearsal, community-gathering tactics—to start the process of recognizing and attending to the many histories that buzz all around them. BIPOC folks on campus might be living with keen awareness of the present-day

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effects of these historical legacies, while white folks might be coasting through their institutions oblivious to the haunting ghosts of white supremacy that undergird parameters set in curricula, juries, auditions, casting, interpersonal relations, spatial demarcations, and overarching value systems in the arts and beyond. How might any of these structures in which you are involved be reproducing exclusions, hierarchies, and inequities? Could the performance season, composition courses, special topics or research methods class dis/­orient the status quo, and tilt toward excavating, confronting, and redirecting campus or local historical legacies? If your institution at large is not spearheading this work, performing arts departments are potent domains for catalyzing such reckoning work precisely because of our fields’ integration of theory and practice, words and deeds. Our boundless energy for artistic expression, embodied practice, gathering and creating, performing and witnessing, can serve to ignite change toward more equitable, more just, and more historically aware full-bodied futures. Notes 1 Some of these teacher-colleagues include Jean Appolon, Lena Blou, Yonel Charles, Rujeko Dumbutshena, Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire, Peniel Guerrier, Yanique Hume, Dieufel Lamisere, Lahens Louis, and Rosangela Silvestre. 2 I use “hx/story” here to indicate the ways stories (and thus memory and transmission) are essential to “history,” and I use the “x” instead of an “I” to decenter patriarchy (“his”) and make space for queer and women’s experiences. 3 You can view the tour on the PocketSights App, “Davidson Disorientation Tour Parts 1, 2, 3” at https://pocketsights.com/tours/location/United-States/NorthCarolina/Davidson. 4 Two workshops informed my approach to the “Power Flower” worksheet: a session at the Fall 2020 National Dance Educators Organization conference facilitated by Frederic Curry, Charné Furcron, Angela Grayson, Ebony Nichols, Alina Hinton, Stephan Reynolds, and Melody Gamba; and “Race and Resilience: Working Across Difference” at the 2021 Embodied Social Justice Summit, facilitated by Michelle C Johnson and Kerri Kelly. 5 Roo’s website: http://www.delesslin.com/. I thank Dr. Rose Stremlau for the introduction. 6 To learn more about Aya Shabu and Whistle Stop Tours, visit https://hayti.org/ programming/tours/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4nhv_bYlyk. 7 “Remembrance,” Williams’s dance film created with Marlon Morrison features Ring Shout performances she choreographed with UNCC dance students on historic sites: the Catawba River, a Jim Crow-era school for African American children, and the only remaining slave dwelling in Mecklenburg County. For more on the project watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KihzkdXuVjg. 8 The collaboratively devised performance featured vignettes centered on experiences of discrimination and harm. Unveiled and Unvarnished: Original Stories of Racism and Intolerance Amongst Us, directed by Davidson Theater professor Ann Marie Costa, local Charlotte director Jeremy DeCarlos, and Davidson alum Olanike Oyedepo, and collaboratively devised with Davidson students, faculty and staff, Duke Family Performance Hall, Davidson, NC, March 25–28, 2021.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7 (1): 104–126. Baldwin, James. [1984] 2010. “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, 135–138. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. [Originally published in Essence (April 1984.)] Chaleff, Rebecca. 2018. “Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance.” Dance Research Journal 50 (3): 71–84. https://www. muse.jhu.edu/article/715529. Cohen Bull, Cynthia Jean. 1997. “Sense, Meaning and Perception in Three Dance Cultures.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane Desmond, 269–287. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review 46 (2): 145–154. Daniel, Yvonne. 2005. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, ­Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Davidson College. 2015. Always Part of the Fabric: A Documentary Look at the History of African-American Contributions to Davidson. https://davidsonarchivesand specialcollections.org/archives/always-part-of-the-fabric. ———. n.d.a. Commission on Race and Slavery. Accessed May 1, 2023. https://www. davidson.edu/about/commission-race-and-slavery. ———. n.d.b. Inclusive Histories at Davidson College https://digitalprojects.­davidson. edu/inclusivestories/all-stories-2/. ———. n.d.c. “Justice, Equality, Community” Initiative. Accessed May 1, 2023. https://www.davidson.edu/offices-and-services/registrar/graduation-requirements/ justice-equality-and-community. ———. 2023. Active and Benevolent Ladies: A Short History of Women at Davidson College. https://library.davidson.edu/archives/women/ Davidson Microaggressions Project 2023. What are Microaggressions? https://­ davidsonmicroaggressionsproject.org. Davis, Crystal U., and Jesse Phillips-Fein. 2018. “Tendus and Tenancy: Black Dancers and the White Landscape of Dance Education.” In The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education, edited by Amelia M. Kraehe, B. Stephen Carpenter, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, 571–583. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Disorienting & Reorienting. 2019. Disorienting & Reorienting: Recovering and Analyzing Legacies of Colonialism, Slavery, and White Supremacy at Davidson College. http://disorientingdavidson.com/. Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1996. “Performance, Power, & the Politics of the Minstrel Stage.” In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, 81–125. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ——— 1997. “Some Thoughts on Choreographing History.” In Meaning in Motion, edited by Jane Desmond, 167–175. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Green, Hilary. 2021. “Reconciling Davidson College’s Slave Past.” Public lecture, Davidson College, February 22, 2021. https://hgreen.people.ua.edu/hallowedgrounds-project.html; and public lecture “Reconciling Davidson College’s Slave

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Past,” Davidson College, February 22, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=LFvuSUotpS4. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (12): 1–14.14 ———. 1989. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36: 15–23. hooks, bell. 1996. Killing Rage, Ending Racism. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co. James, Joy. 2013. Seeking the Beloved Community. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lorde, Audre. [1984] 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCarthy-Brown, Nyama. 2017. Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World. New York, NY: McFarland & Co. McCarthy-Brown, Nyama, and Karen Schupp. 2021. “Gatekeepers to Gateway-­makers: Reimagining Partnerships, Collaborations, and Celebrations of the Many Movers of University Campuses.” Research in Dance Education: 1–16. https://www.­ tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14647893.2021.1932793. Mellin, Sarah HD. 2020. “Beneath the Bricks: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Slavery, and White Supremacy at Davidson College.” Honors Thesis, Davidson College. NPR Music. 2019. “Rhiannon Giddens, NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert,” YouTube video, 17:38, September 23, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= q0fIdFx3pbY. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. “Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6 (2): 100–108. Solnit, Rebecca. 2019. “How Change Happens.” Literary Hub, September 3. https:// lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-progress-is-not-inevitable-it-takes-work/. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The New York Times. 2020. “1619 Project, Podcast Episodes 1–3” https://www. nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Williams, Tamara. 2018. “Reviving Culture Through Ring Shout.” The Dancer Citizen 6 (May). http://dancercitizen.org/issue-6/tamara-williams/.

24 THE PERFORMING ARTS IN THE NEXT AMERICA Preparing Students for Their Future Peter Witte

First-time college students starting school in 2025 retire in 2072. Higher education’s job is to prepare these students for their future, a future that will be significantly different from our past. How? Artistically and culturally, what will change? What will stay the same? Demographic Change

According to Taylor in collaboration with the Pew Research Center, “Our population is becoming majority non-White at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era” (2014, n.p.). We have already seen these shifts emerge in America’s higher education performing arts units, according to enrollment data reported by institutions participating in the Higher Education Arts Data Services (HEADS) Survey. Initiated in 1982, HEADS, as stated in their website, is “a joint effort of the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM), the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), the National Association of Schools of Theatre (NAST), and the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD). The HEADS Project is designed to provide comprehensive management data on the arts in higher education” (Higher Education Arts Data Services 2022). In 1989, 14% of music students at HEADS institutions identified as students of color. In 2020, student musicians of color were at least 27%, and perhaps near 39%, of all students in HEADS schools. As a group, music students are much more diverse today than they had been just 35 years ago. US Census Bureau data makes clear that these shifts will continue through 2060. DOI: 10.4324/9781003316107-28

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Changing Cultures

For many Americans, the arts are no longer part of a formal education. The Los Angeles Times reported the following from a 2008 US Census survey of 18- to 24-year-olds: “among children of a college graduate, 27% said they had never taken even one arts class, compared with 12% in 1982. For children of high school graduates, the number who’d never had any arts study rose from 30% nearly [40] years ago to 66% in 2008” (Boehm 2011, n.p.). Do these US Census findings imply that students today are less prepared for lives in the arts, or is it that students today are differently prepared? Many in higher education are challenging previous expectations that students should adapt to majority contexts, those rooted in Western canonical senses of the past. How might institutions better learn to reevaluate these and other histories and prepare students for a constantly evolving future? It is past time to reexamine many prior assumptions and habits in the arts. Next: America’s $1T Creative-Sector Economy

Especially considering rising college costs, institutions recognize that we must prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s economies. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reports that the creative sector contributed $1.016T to US economic output in 2021, or 4.4% of gross domestic product (2023). The arts in America are part of a trillion-dollar industry. Do our performing arts institutions prepare our students to talk about, earn, and manage money, to grasp what it takes for their non-profits, startups, arts therapy, and arts education programs to grow in ways that balance possibilities with resources? The arts drive America’s 21st century economy. Do we educate performing arts students to take their place in it? Next-generation arts and academic leaders recognize our responsibilities to expand opportunity, equity, and inclusion in and through the performing arts. Trends reported by established US demographers echo enrollment trends in American performing arts programs. Given our responsibility to prepare students for their futures, given the deeply powerful ways in which the arts allow us to tell truths and reveal stories, given the recent recognition of the enormous size of the American creative-sector economy, there are clear paths forward, and people leading us to them. The following comes from my own experiences and observations from 1996 to 2022 as a performing musician, educator, and administrator in a wide range of American higher education performing arts units. These observations include those drawn from my review of the often-visionary work among more than 630 member institutions in the National Association of Schools of Music, and the curricular advances those institutions create to serve approximately

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100,000 students through music in American higher education. While the examples that follow derive mostly from the fields of music, it is hoped that the broader principles may apply to other arts programs in higher education in the United States and beyond. Demographic Change

Demographers know a lot about the changes ahead in the United States:

• The United States is getting older at the same time the nation is getting

more diverse. 2013 was the last year in which there was a majority White population among American public-school children. • In an era when the cost of higher education is increasingly borne by students, we know that since 2015, most children in America’s public schools are low-income students. • In a review of American higher education in the coming years, Grawe (2018, 2021) shares that there will be wide variability in the demand for a given college depending upon several key factors about students, families, and institutions. • Among HEADS institutions, we know that aggregate music enrollment more than doubled from 56,998 in 1990 to 116,206 in 2011, and that since 2011, enrollment in HEADS schools declined by 17,401 to 98,085 in 2020 (HEADS 2022). • Within HEADS institutions, music students are much more diverse relative to 1990 and full-time music faculty are somewhat more diverse than we were in 1990. • And we can infer that based upon current trends, music enrollment in HEADS schools may become majority minority near 2040. Let us review these changes with an eye toward the shifts they will create in the arts. In The Next America, Taylor provides context about America’s concurrent demographic shifts, stating prophetically “the fact that both are unfolding simultaneously creates big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families […] and social cohesion” (2014, n.p.). Pew Research Center continues with helpful context, describing: […] what demographers call an “age pyramid.” Each bar [in an age pyramid] represents a five-year age cohort; with those ages 0-4 on the bottom and those ages 85 and older on the top. In every society since the start of history, whenever you broke down any population this way, you’d get a pyramid. From 1960 to 2060, our pyramid will turn into a rectangle. We’ll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5. This is the

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result of longer life spans and lower birthrates. It’s uncharted territory, not just for us, but for all of humanity. (Taylor 2014, n.p.) Taylor also shares a projection of the changing demographic landscape in America through the year 2060. In 1960, America was 85% White. In 2060, it will be 43% White. Of course, national demographic shifts are seen most quickly among those first groups in the age pyramid, for our purposes, children in America’s schools. So, who are public-school students today, those students we hope to recruit to our colleges and universities tomorrow? America’s public schools are already majority-minority, becoming so in 2014, according to reports from the Washington Post’s Strauss (2014). According to the National Center of Education Statistics (2022), approximately 54% of students in American public schools identified as students of color in 2020 (see Figure 24.1). In 2020, six states, California, Texas, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Hawaii, and Washington DC, reported no majority population. For institutions in these regions and many others, the descriptions in this chapter describe the present (Jensen et al. 2021).

FIGURE 24.1  Student

Ethnicities in American Public Schools in 2020, from the National Center of Education Statistics.

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Economist Grawe (2018; 2021) shows how demand for a given institution will vary based upon several factors: region, proximity to metropolitan hubs within regions, the type of student, the type of institution, perceived reputation, and, notably, parental educational attainment. This last point is important. Grawe reminds us that there are more children of college-educated parents today than ever before, children very likely to pursue college themselves. For institutions seeking to grow enrollments, this proportionally growing group of children of college graduates helps mitigate a national decline in the total number of college aged students. In the discipline of music, the largest performing arts discipline by enrollment in American higher education, the enrollment trends since 1990 are equally instructive (see Figure 24.2).

FIGURE 24.2 

HEADS Grand Total Music Enrollment, 1990–2020.

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FIGURE 24.3 HEADS

Institutions Participating and Average Enrollment Per Institution, 1990–2020.

• From 1990 to 2020, total music student enrollment in HEADS institutions grew 172%.

• From 1990 to 2020, music institutions reporting to HEADS grew 137% from 444 to 607 (see Figure 24.3).

• During the same period, average enrollment per HEADS music institution grew 26% from 128 to 162 (see Figure 24.3).

From 1990 to 2020, music student enrollment at HEADS reporting institutions grew within every ethnic subgroup (see Figure 24.4):

• • • • • •

Hispanic music student enrollment grew 638% from 1,928 to 12,292. Indigenous American music student enrollment grew 343% from 160 to 549. Asian music student enrollment grew 230% from 2,332 to 5,365. Black music student enrollment grew 219% from 3,644 to 7,972. White music student enrollment grew 123% from 48,934 to 60,148. Total enrollment of music students identifying as members of under-represented ethnic and cultural heritages (URECH) grew 329% from 8,064 to 26,496.

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FIGURE 24.4 

HEADS URECH Music Students by Ethnicity, 1990–2020.

Because HEADS groups those identifying as two or more ethnicities with those for whom ethnicities are unknown, it is possible that music enrollment is more diverse than the above indicates. Including students for whom demographic information is unknown or differently identified along with all URECH students, the total enrollment of URECH identifying students including those whose may identify as two or more ethnicities may have grown as much as 470% from 8,064 to 37,937 (see Figure 24.5). Broadly, HEADS appears to show the following trends:

• From 1990 to 2011, music enrollment in HEADS institutions more than

doubled from 56,998 students (512 reporting institutions) to 116,206 students (636 reporting institutions). • Since 2011, enrollment of 116,206 (636 reporting institutions) HEADS music enrollment has declined to 98,085 in 2020 (605 reporting institutions). • In 1990, 14% of music students at HEADS participating institutions identified as URECH. In 2020, as many as 39% of music students at HEADS institutions may identify as URECH (see Figure 24.6).

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URECH Music Students and URECH + “Other/Unknown,” HEADS, 1990–2020.

FIGURE 24.5  All

Should HEADS music student enrollment demographic trends continue their current trajectories, it appears that HEADS music units may become majority minority near 2040, 26 years after America’s public-school students passed that milestone. During this same period, 1990–2020, demographic change among fulltime faculty at HEADS institutions is a much slower story.

• In 1990, 8% of full-time faculty in HEADS music institutions identified as

URECH. Five percent were men of color and 2% were women of color. • In 2020, 15% of full-time faculty at HEADS institutions identified as URECH. Nine percent were men, and 6% were women. From 1990 to 2020, full-time music faculty at HEADS reporting institutions grew within every ethnic subgroup:

• Asian full-time music faculty grew 540% from 108 to 588. • Hispanic full-time music faculty grew 461% from 92 to 425. • Indigenous American full-time music faculty grew 250% from 10 to 25. • Black full-time music faculty grew 130% from 395 to 515. • White full-time faculty grew 18% from 7,144 to 8,470. • Total full-time faculty identifying as URECH grew 261% from 605 to 1,582.

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Enrollment, URECH Enrollment, and URECH + “Other/ Unknown,” HEADS 1990–2020.

FIGURE 24.6 White

Again, because HEADS groups those identifying as two or more ethnicities with those for whom ethnicities are unknown, it is possible that full-time music faculty are more diverse than the above indicates. Including faculty for whom demographic information is unknown or differently identified along with all URECH faculty, the total number of URECH identifying faculty including those who may identify as two or more ethnicities may have grown as much as 293% from 605 to 1,777. In secondary and tertiary school settings, students are much more diverse than their teachers today. Information from Taylor, Grawe, and the US Census indicate that that trend will continue through 2060. These facts open entire conversations about whose art, literature, and histories we center, and why. While art is a human necessity, works of art are cultural utterances, revealing histories and beliefs that are often intentionally

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illustrative of power dynamics among and within regions and communities. These contexts evolve continuously as does reevaluation of them. The shifts in demographics Taylor (2014) and Grawe (2018, 2021) share correlate with the shifts so many in the arts propose in how we reframe oft repeated histories, theories, pedagogies, and repertoires in the arts. Many arts educators model creative approaches, guiding their students and their fields to a clearer understanding of the past while expanding the artistic skills, histories, and repertoires they center. That these arts educators’ examples are notable may speak to a commonality of approach, even down to textbooks, ensembles, and repertoires, familiar in many, if not most collegiate performing arts institutions. Changing Cultures and Assumptions: Teaching and Learning

In 2015, and for the first time in at least 50 years, most students in US public schools come from low-income families, according to the Southern Education Foundation (2022). Still, we often expect prospective performing arts students entering higher education to have studied in a school system that at least offered, if not supported, arts education. To this day, performing arts programs in higher education actively recruit and privilege students with access to an instrument, pointe shoes, weekly lessons, and experience in pre-collegiate summer festivals in the performing arts. To feel truly prepared for an audition into a vibrant collegiate performing arts program today, a family may have spent $100,000 in equipment, instruments, and lessons, over 13 years. Assume that a fortunate and soon to be promising string player begins at age five. In 2022 a $75 expense for weekly lessons and/or travel to them is not uncommon in major American cities. Eight months of lessons would be $2,400. Thirteen years of lessons (assuming the rates and/or teachers stay constant): $31,200. A quality starter string instrument and bow may be had at $3,000. Soon, a middle school student’s teacher and parent realize that an intermediate instrument and bow is a necessity for fundamental skill development: $10,000. And when things get truly serious in high school? A collegiate/early professional level instrument and bow can quickly reach $25,000 or more. New strings, re-haired bows, sheet music, cases, tuners, metronomes, and recently, microphones and a camera, another $1,000 a year? And, of course, key connections with aspirational collegiate faculty are made through repeated attendance at nationally and internationally recognized summer programs in middle school and high school years, the most august of which can easily cost $8,000 per summer, more with travel. Four years of such activities: $32,000. From a financial perspective alone, we’d do well to remember that most students in America’s public schools have never been able to afford these experiences. Will legacy performing arts cultures in higher education change to meet this reality?

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To the extent that higher education sustains and perpetuates such privileges as the norm, forecasts may sound familiar to some longer serving arts executives. As a percentage of the total (and declining) college attending population, there may be fewer such students to recruit. Performing arts programs built upon the expectation that these are the students and cultures the institution was designed to serve may diverge in the ways that Grawe (2018; 2021) described for the higher education sector as a whole: the most well-heeled institutions with national reputations, reach, facilities, and robust endowments may be able to continue their existing glidepath. What awaits their graduates, however, will be a constant conversation. Regionally committed institutions with more moderate resources, facilities, and smaller enrollments—most institutions in America, by far—who choose to recruit these same kinds of students may feel the pressure to discount tuition more and more as they see fewer and fewer applicants for their traditional degree programs. The impact of any such discounting practices on net tuition revenue, increasingly the coin of the realm for institutional leadership, may be discussed weekly with the performing arts executive in administrative and admissions meetings. In faculty meetings the more common threads may be that we need to do whatever it takes, revenue be damned, to enroll the requisite number of oboists, male dancers, jazz trombonists, and tenors for the big show. Those students who are privileged with enough resources and experiences to gain admission into legacy institutions with traditional offerings will graduate and seek a career in a nation less and less familiar with the subcultures in which these students may have been educated. Either explicitly or implicitly the subtext for such students may be expressed: find, or stick to, the regions that emulate your own background, that’s where your opportunities may still be. A kind of aesthetic and thus cultural segregation can easily perpetuate itself, recalling the strains on social cohesion Taylor augured in 2014. Meanwhile, millions are, have always been, creating new art in new ways, art and context that may be more communal, more financially attainable, more heterogenous, diverse, flexible, and adaptive, and often much more pervasive. These artforms and cultures emerge, become monetized, institutionalized, and/or appropriated. Perhaps 50 years after the emergence of the most widely celebrated of these now mature artforms, degrees in these fields may arise in higher education. Reflect on the emergence of jazz degrees in the 1960s; musical theatre degrees in the 1980s; “popular” music programs in the 2000s; and media, production, technology, and hip hop offerings in performing arts fields today. Even in these newer scenarios, these new degree paths are often most available to those with resources of time, money, and familial mindsets to pursue them. Intentionally adventurous institutions, often leaner, newer, and more agile, open their doors first. Quick growth may ensue, word of which spreads, catnip

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for revenue-challenged institutions. For the more open-minded established institutions these new students may be seen as both revitalizing and a way to increase revenue. Explicitly or not, the realization comes that these new students may help offset the increasing discounts for students in the older degrees the institution considers core to its identity. Those legacy degrees may be dear to the majority at the institution (and to alumni) and are often considered untouchable. Perhaps, whispers the stressed arts executive, these new areas will help balance the books. The overly simplified scenario above is a cautionary riff about extraction; it is a tale that privileges one aesthetic, discipline, or student over another, employing the new program to pay for the prior one. Still, versions of these discussions are not uncommon in higher education arts units today. To be clear, expansions into new growth areas are essential, often these expansions are the most energizing work for an institution. If those expansions are seen solely as ways to pay the bills for existing programs, rather than as an invitation to new students, artists, and scholars as equal citizens in the academy, citizens provided resources appropriate to their studies too, then the tensions ahead will be as predictable as they are inevitable. Increasingly, faculty, often those close in age and/or lived experience to current and future students, are reevaluating pedagogy and challenging assumptions. Hip hop scholar and music education professor Kruse (2016) asks whose music are we making, and why, and reminds us that when we focus on one culture—one range of repertoires—the deficits are within our schools. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank reminds us of the limits of Western notation and encourages the appointment of a team of arts educators who welcome and can serve non-traditionally prepared artists. Doing so, as Frank shared in her 2021 keynote to the National Association of Schools of Music, is a way to express a “reverence for the future.” These voices guide students who may value being creative as much or more than being re-creative. These newer students, and those who recruited them, may have stronger abilities to work by ear or improvise movement than many traditionally educated students who have been taught to read notation or memorize balletic choreography. Often, these students, and the faculty who champion them, have skills with more recent technological instruments that many current faculty and students may not have. Here is opportunity. Some institutions choose to continue current paths. Some choose missions of continuous innovation. Others may blend their approach, a kind of “both and,” to quote recent NEA Chair Jane Chu (NEA 2014). Such choices of mission and approach are each institution’s to make and refresh, consciously. We do so, hopefully, with eyes up. Too often, in the words of Mark Wait, Dean Emeritus of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, “everyone’s version of utopia is a mild variant of where they went to school” (personal communication, January 19, 2022). It is not written

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that music history courses must travel chronologically through 420 years in the West over four semesters, (a brisk 105 years per semester, that). Robin and colleagues at the University of Maryland created an approach that forgoes the myth of coverage to make time for an introductory course of music as global culture, to provide a second course centered on select music prior to 1900, a third course centering select music since 1900, and then an elective for students to choose the histories and contexts that fits their interests considering what they’ve learned in the three preceding courses (Robin n.d.; University of Maryland 2022–23). It is not written that undergraduate musicianship must center harmony and roman numeral analysis over other approaches, of which there are many. Lavengood and colleagues at George Mason University outline a modular music theory approach that supports a range of student career paths and interest, building their undergraduate sequence around specific repertoires of interest to students including jazz, folk, and pop, and being intentional about how musicianship informs performance (Lavengood 2019). To those with ears to listen, Ewell (2020) identified and communicated the clear homogeneity of approach to undergraduate musicianship sequences common in American music schools. An advocate for an examination of pitch, rhythm, meter, and scale as pan-theoretical tools to understand musics, plural, across cultures and eras, plural, Ewell will soon publish The Engaged Musician: Theory and Analysis for the Twenty-First Century, co-authored with Abrahams, Grant, and Palfy (Ewell et al. forthcoming). It is not written that genres in performing arts programs must flow from 20th century school-music-based norms. During Michael Alexander’s time as Director of the School of Music at University of Northern Colorado (he presently serves as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay), UNC launched bluegrass concentrations for fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, and bass players (Lawless 2016). Texas State University (2022) offers a Bachelor of Music in Music Education degree with a specific concentration in Mariachi music, one of several institutions in America to create such concentrations. There will be more. Degrees and options for music technologists, and degree offerings for students seeking undergraduate degrees in music fields that do not require previous pre-collegiate school-music experience, the ability to read notation, nor an audition, are increasingly common at forward looking institutions. Each of these expansions are imaginative, responsive to the past and to the future, each is an evolution of existing approaches. We can make different choices. The scholars and institutions listed in the preceding paragraphs are innovators, yet many describe themselves as institutionalists. They should be celebrated for their insight and courage, their willingness to bring their fields and their institutions along. That has not always been the case. Fifty-four percent of school children in America today identify as students of color, and that percentage will continue to grow through 2060. Are the

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art and cultures we study, the people we hire, and the skills we develop as diverse as America today? Are we preparing students for our past, or for the next America? Our current curricular structures offer far more flexibility than performing arts units have historically chosen to exercise. The building blocks we hold dear, lecture, lab, rehearsal, lessons; the floor plans we manage annually, general education core, major courses, supportive courses; and that most promising space of all, electives; these tools are lasting because they are flexible, they open to new repertoires, new histories, new skills, new experiences. These frames remain constant so that newer approaches may evolve. Next: America’s $1T Creative Sector Economy

I suggest two reasons we should speak about money more in performing arts education. First, higher education is increasingly expensive for our students. Second, we know much more about the creative-sector economy since 2013, thanks to the NEA, and that information is powerful. In Declining by Degrees, Hersch and Merrow (2005) make the point that higher education was far more affordable for students when it was commonly regarded as a public good rather than as a private benefit. Historically, the United States also differentiated higher education from vocational training, the latter intended for specific trades. As more and more of the expense for a college degree falls upon students to pay, an expectation for something now commonly characterized as a private benefit, it’s almost a given that college be justified by the recipient’s future return on investment. Today the pressure to describe an undergraduate degree as a job ticket, a means to a particular vocation, is immense. After all, there are loans to repay. The musicologist and Americanist Crawford (2001) provides a clear frame for speaking about money in the arts. He argues that over centuries Western musicians made their money through six principal career paths, often navigating between two or more over the arc of their lives (a vital point, this). Those careers were composing, performing, teaching, distributing (or publishing), writing about music, and manufacturing musical wares. Refer to the Los Angeles Times findings mentioned previously from the US Census: in 2008 66% of children of high school graduates had never had any arts study (Bohem 2011). Performing arts graduates will engage increasingly with audiences and communities that do not have previous arts instruction. The ability to share about one’s craft and about the context of various musics, either in the boardroom, from the front of the stage, or in the classroom, is already vital. It will become more so. Eventually, and often when either constraints or opportunities are on the agenda, people in the creative sector are called upon to explain why or how their craft is important. In short, every performing arts graduate will likely teach at some point. To Crawford’s six categories we might add at least a seventh today, one informed at least in part by the demographic shifts Taylor (2014) and others

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illuminate: healing. Here, I mean arts therapies and related fields of cognition research intended to help individuals in clinical and medical settings. The National Institutes of Health (2019) have already invested significantly in the discipline’s promise, as has the Department of Defense through their Creative Forces initiative (NEA n.d.). As the number of Americans 85 years of age and older rises through the year 2060, as we explore the connection between song, movement, and memory, as we recognize the value of arts therapies for those with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other injuries, the demand for art therapies will likely grow. Again, we know a lot about the arts and the economy thanks to the work of Iyengar and others at the NEA (2021) as quantified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Just as Crawford (2001) helps us to quantify the types of careers that musicians often moved between during their careers, the NEA (2023) helped Americans learn that career options in the creative sector are enormous, accounting for $1.016 trillion, or 4.4% of the gross domestic product in 2021. As defined by BLS, the American creative sector is larger than each of the following sectors: construction, transportation and warehousing, travel and tourism, and agriculture. Only two sectors were larger in 2019: healthcare and social assistance, and retail. Not until roughly 2013 did federal agencies start to look at the sector in this way. Principal among the shifts was a rethinking of the categorization of creative work common to both the for-profit and not-for-profit industries. Today, for example, BLS considers revenues associated with the blockbuster Hamilton in one creative sector bucket. In prior years, BLS would have counted the resources associated with its development and debut at The Public Theatre in a non-profit bucket, and all the resources it subsequently gathered on Broadway and beyond in a second for-profit bucket. The current BLS accounting recognizes that Hamilton is one title, that one set of creative sector professionals created it in one place, The Public, and monetized it in others, Broadway, then cities world-wide, and then on screens. The prior BLS accounting method divided the creative sector story, artificially. Their new lateral orientation to the creative sector makes plain the power of the arts, globally, nationally, and regionally. Quantitative decision makers resonate with the big numbers NEA and BLS provide. Those valuing a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach may find immense promise in the same information, seeing potential models for collaboration across our historically vertical performing arts structures (music, dance, theatre, visual art, etc.). What are these jobs? The NEA (2021, n.p.) provides a representative list. Architects; fine artists, art directors, and animators; designers; actors; producers and directors; dancers and choreographers; musicians; “other entertainers”; announcers; writers and authors; and photographers. Archivists, curators, and museum technicians; librarians; library technicians; editors; broadcast and sound engineering technicians; television, video, and motion

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picture camera operators and editors; motion picture projectionists; tour and travel guides; models and demonstrators; printing press operators; print binding and finishing workers; jewelers and precious stone- and metalworkers; photographic process workers; etchers and engravers; and molders, shapers, and casters. Discussing the size, scope, and options that arts study opens up in admissions sessions, audition days, and first-year courses resonates with students and their proud, if skittish, families (“What is he going to do with a degree in that?” asks the skeptical uncle). I argue that discussion of these career paths as options for our graduates should inform what we teach and how we teach it. Especially in professional degrees, those degrees in which most of the degree content is in the chosen major, it is easy for experiences in the area of specialization to be deep and narrow, and increasingly so for students earning master and then doctoral degrees. Knowing the financial realities tomorrow’s professionals are navigating today, it seems that opportunities for students to develop skill in three, four, or more of the paths Crawford articulates become an ethical necessity. It is possible to design experiences that are deep and lateral. Imagine instead of the tried-and-true campus recital, a different assignment that one’s capstone performance project be a community-service event or a media product suitable for distribution. Imagine that one’s compositional portfolio include pedagogical fare suitable for developing students, or perhaps for avocational musicians who don’t read notation. Imagine that students develop and market a musical product or experience and get paid for it during their studies. What if the goal of a small ensemble not be a brief performance in an academic setting, but rather to get a gig, get paid reasonably for it, and earn positive recommendations for the next gig? The website GuideStar offers as a public resource the IRS 990 forms of every non-profit organization in America. How often do undergraduate students in our performing arts programs download, review, and explain them to a friend? Or make assessments of a given business model? These options exist within existing curricular structures, and many employ them today. More should. Doing so takes skills principal to one of Crawford’s six buckets and places them in the context of others, itself a skill arts professionals utilize in their own careers. In so doing performing artists may remember a 19th century meaning of the word entrepreneur: arts presenter. Artists have always hustled. Today’s students must learn to move, organically, from one of Crawford’s buckets to the next, and that doing so has historically been a hallmark of successful artists, scholars, and educators. Given what we now know about the enormous size of the creative sector economy in America, given the opportunities that performing arts study makes possible in that sector, and given the clear pressures upon institutions to show return on investment for their degree offerings, it is increasingly clear

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that we should talk about money and creative economies more explicitly in arts curricula. Already we see higher education performing arts programs that are aligned in ways that correlate with the creative sector industry. Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Arizona State University 2022) and Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts (Carnegie Mellon University 2022) are two arts units structured in this way. Doing so is wise. Artists, it turns, out drive 4.4% of the largest economy in the world. The Next America: Woven Narratives

This chapter is intended to be clear about our time together in the Next America. We know that current and future students, and theirs, will be increasingly diverse, while their parents and grandparents live longer, and hopefully, fuller lives. We know that our current and future students may come to us with different skills and expectations than were assumed of us in our past. We know that for more than half of secondary students in America’s schools, need-based aid will likely be determinative for a potential college career, and that depending upon our location, mission, and the families we serve, the demand for the higher education we offer may vary significantly. Vitally, we know that so many are doing tomorrow’s work today, brilliantly, offering their light if we choose it. We know that while there are immense opportunities for our graduates in America’s creative sector, the cost of an education is increasingly borne by students, creating increasing pressure to describe the career opportunities our degrees open after graduation. Many of these opportunities, either in the creative sector or in academia, will reward artists, scholars, educators, and therapists who are able to connect with a range of communities and generations different from their own. In this work our colleagues, students, and alumni flow from one skill set to another now a teacher, next a performer, tomorrow a technologist, a fundraiser, next week an executive producer (witness the ways so many in the arts flexed during the pandemic). We know that the creative sector generates more than $1 trillion annually, already the third largest sector in America. This chapter uses numbers to talk about the arts, artists, and our communities, and does so broadly. There are risks in such an approach. The most meaningful things in the arts, in education, are unquantifiable. More than knowing this, arts people feel it, in our bones. Counting is technique, not purpose. It is necessary, not sufficient. The key is balance. In the words of the late demographer Rosling “the world cannot be understood without numbers, and it cannot be understood with numbers alone” (Rosling, Rosling, and Rosling 2018, 128). A second risk taken is the puzzle of counting, to do so we quantify groups by differences: doing so may lose larger points about our commonalities. While roughly instructive, such an approach is easily flipped

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into nonsense about walls rather than conversations about bridges. The spirit of this chapter is to urge connection, offered in hopes that when so many use difference as a blade that we and our students employ the arts as healers and truth tellers. To a fault, I have framed this piece as a response to America’s changing demographics in the last three decades, but there has long been a broader truth: The performing arts and arts pedagogy have for far too long marginalized entire cultures, repertoires, and skills to celebrate those of a very specific few. While current and future American demographic shifts may make a practical case for change clear, the moral case must be stated: we always should have centered, rather than marginalized, more voices and cultures, especially in arts education settings. In her 2018 keynote at the Big Ears Festival, Rhiannon Giddens (2018, n.p.) made the point. Because when you really dig deep into the music that lies at the heart of so much American history and gave birth to so many of those cherished record bin genres that have captivated the world, you realize that the story hasn’t even begun to be told. That world music has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, that Africa met Europe far before the invention of the banjo, and that we are always an amalgam of the endless and numerous meetings, cultural exchanges, and influences of normal, ordinary people upon which civilization turns. And when we pick out one narrative from the weave, and let it stand as the whole, it weakens us all. References Arizona State University. 2022. “Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.” https:// herbergerinstitute.asu.edu. Boehm, Mike. 2011. “President’s Committee Tackles Arts Education.” LATimes.com. May 11 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2011-may-11-la-et-artseducation-report-20110511-story.html. Carnegie Mellon University. 2022. “College of Fine Arts.” https://www.cmu.edu/ cfa/. Crawford, Richard. 2001. America’s Musical Life: A History. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Ewell, Philip A. 2020. “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” MTO: A Journal of the Society for Music Theory 26 (2). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/ mto.20.26.2.ewell.pdf. Ewell, Philip A., Rosa Abrahams, Aaron Grant, and Rosa Palfy. (forthcoming). On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Giddens, Rhiannon. 2018. “Keynote Speech.” Transcript of speech delivered at Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, Tennessee, July 3, 2018. https://www.newsounds.org/ story/rhiannon-giddens-keynote-address-2018-big-ears-festival/.

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Grawe, Nathan D. 2018. Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2021. The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Higher Education Arts Data Services (HEADS). 2022. Higher Education Arts Data Services Project. https://home.heads-project.org/. Hersch, Richard, and John Merrow, eds. 2005. Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Jensen, Eric, et al. 2021. “2020 US Population More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Than Measured in 2010.” United States Census Bureau, August, 12 2021. https:// www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/2020-united-states-population-moreracially-ethnically-diverse-than-2010.html. Kruse, Adam. 2016. “Whose Deficit? Or, The Trouble With Asking, How Do We Get Them Here?” Panel presented at the Big Ten Academic Alliance, University of Maryland, October 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KXNVXRXCdU. Lavengood, Megan. 2019. “Bespoke Music Theory: A Modular Core Curriculum Designed for Audio Engineers, Classical Violinists, and Everyone in Between.” Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy 7. https://engagingstudentsmusic.org/ article/view/7362/5716. Lawless, John. 2016. “UNC School of Music Adds Bluegrass Concentration.” Bluegrass Today, December 5, 2016. https://bluegrasstoday.com/unc-school-of-musicadds-bluegrass-concentration/. National Center for Education Statistics, U.S Department of Education. 2022. “Racial/Ethnic Enrollment in Public Schools” Condition of Education. https:// nces.ed.gov/. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). n.d. “Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network.” Accessed January 11, 2023. https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/ creative-forces. ———. 2014. “Jane Chu Confirmed as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.” June 12, 2014. https://www.arts.gov/about/news/2014/jane-chuconfirmed-chairman-national-endowment-arts. ­ ulture ———. 2021. “New Report Released on the Economic Impact of the Arts and C Sector.” Accessed January 11, 2023. https://www.arts.gov/about/news/2021/ new-report-released-economic-impact-arts-and-cultural-sector. ———. 2023. “New Data Show Economic Activity of the U.S. Arts & Cultural Sector in 2021.” https://www.arts.gov/news/press-releases/2023/new-data-showeconomic-activity-us-arts-cultural-sector-2021. National Institutes of Health. 2019. “NIH Awards $20 Million Over Five Years to Bring Together Music Therapy and Neuroscience.” September 19, 2019. https://www. nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-awards-20-million-over-five-years-bringtogether-music-therapy-neuroscience. Pew Research Center. 2014. “America’s Morphing Age Pyramid.” April 10, 2014. https://www.pewresearch.org/age-pyramid/. Robin, William. n.d. “About.” Accessed January 11, 2023. https://williamrobin.com/ home/. Rosling, Hans, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York, NY: Flatiron Books.

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Southern Education Foundation. 2022. “A New Majority Update.” https://southerneducation.org/publications/newmajorityupdate/. Strauss, Valerie. 2014. “For First Time, Minority Students Expected to be Majority in US Public Schools This Fall.” Washington Post, August 21, 2014. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/21/for-first-time-­ minority-students-expected-to-be-majority-in-u-s-public-schools-this-fall/. Taylor, Paul. 2014. “The Next America.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/next-america/. Texas State University. 2022. “Bachelor of Music (B.M.) Major in Music Studies (Mariachi Concentration with Teacher Certification in Music, Early Childhood Through Grade 12).” http://mycatalog.txstate.edu/undergraduate/fine-artscommunication/music/music-studies-mariachi-concentration-teacher-certification-grades-ec12-bm/. University of Maryland. 2022–23. Music Major. https://academiccatalog.umd. edu/undergraduate/colleges-schools/arts-humanities/music/music-major/ #requirementstext.

INDEX

4E cognition theory 15, 16, 21 1619 Project, The 328 AAWS see Australian Actors’ Well-Being Study Abrahams, R. 352 Abramo, J. 46, 48 ACDA see American College Dance Association Ada Jenkins Center 334 adjunct faculty members: agency 225–226; BIPOC 223, 232; challenges 223; conflicts, values and practices 231; curricula development 230; development, lack of access 229; financial compensation 224–225; interpersonal relationships 227; participants, survey 224; perceived value 228; performing arts-specific concerns 230–231; professional development 226–227; suggestions, improvement 233–234; survey 223–228; time and unpredictability 228–229 Adorno, T. 51, 52 ADTA see American Dance Therapy Association affective effects 14–15 affective engagement 18, 20 affective scaffolding 21

Afro/Caribbean dances 262, 263 Agosto, J. 148–151 Ahmed, S. 59 Ahuja, R. 67 Ailey, A. 102 Aix-en-Provence, France 163 Akinleye, A. 125 Alexander, M. 352 Amazon 50, 186, 193 AME see School of Arts, Media, and Engineering American Association of University Professors 221, 234 American College Dance Association (ACDA) 260, 270n1 American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) 34 American National Association for Music Education 44 America’s $1T creative-sector economy 341–342, 353–356 anathema 251 andragogy 93 anti-racism 37, 40, 326, 336; calls for 4; community-engaged knowledge production 325; HMPP 323, 324, 327, 328, 331, 335, 336; seminar series 80, 83–84 anxiety 52, 53 Apartheid 244 Arizona State University (ASU) 193, 194, 197, 218, 356

Index  361

Artist as Citizen, The (Polisi) 247 artistic citizenship 247–248, 283 artistic thinking 59, 61, 62 art music to heart music: composers 276–278, 281, 282; conflicting values, academy 279–282; relational composition 274–276, 278–279; see also community music A/R/Tography 81–83 art residencies 60; coexistence 62–64; defending collectiveness 64–66; ecological imagination 59; FAR 67–69; invitation poétics 59, 60, 64, 66, 68; knowledge, trans-mission of 61–62; needs vs. desires 59–60; relational experiences 66–69; “residency defense” 64–65; situated learning 63 arts communities 311–312, 319 Artsedge, Kennedy Center 248 arts education: access to 307–308; communities 311–312, 319; emotional rewards 311, 317; equity 316–317; as holistic endeavor 314–315; mental health 317; research methodology 309–310; see also community colleges ArtsKC, regional arts council 308 ASU see Arizona State University Audition (Shurtleff) 109 Auslander, P. 181, 184 Australian Actors’ Well-Being Study (AAWS) 294, 301 Authentic, The 107 authoritarianism 245 autoethnography 13, 17, 21 autonomy 93, 249, 250, 252, 253 baccalaureate dance degrees: African American experiences, missing presence of 259; Afro/Caribbean dances 262, 263; career pathways 266 curricular reforms 257–258; data collection, project 261; DEI 261–263; education and training 257, 258; future 268–270; informal learning 267; institutional websites 261, 272; institutions, focus group 260, 272; interdisciplinarity

259, 263–265; racial injustices 260; required minors 264; social justice/global awareness 262; values, curriculum 267–268 Bachelor of Arts (BA) 5, 72, 78, 81–84, 86, 127, 130, 131, 258, 266 Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) 5, 193, 258, 264, 266 Bachelor of Music 5, 352 “back learning” 96 Baker, G. 247 Bakunin, M. 50 Baldwin, D. 148, 153 Bannon, F. 259 BAPP see BA Professional Practice BA Professional Practice (BAPP arts): blogs 136–138; distance education nature 127; interconnectedness, Internet 132–133; iWBL 128, 129, 130; name iterations 142n3; openness 138–140; origin 128; personal history of 129–132; Siemens’s five knowledge types 134, 135 Barber, J. 282 Barker, A. 210 Barr, S. 239 Barton, J. 44 Bartow, A. 109, 110–111 Bates, V. 48 BBIA see Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Beckman, G.D. 210 Beneath the Bricks: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Slavery, and White Supremacy at Davidson College 330 Benedict, C. 46 Bennett, D. 209 Bennington Experience, The 257, 269 Berlant, L. 45, 49 Bernstein, M.Z. 126 BFA see Bachelor of Fine Arts Big Ears Festival 357 BIPOC see Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Birth of a Nation 330 Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian (BBIA) individuals 45, 47, 48, 54 Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC): faculty members 223, 232; students 98, 99 Black Arts Movement 112

362 Index

“Black Excellence” 89 Black Eyed Peas 51 Blank, S. 213 Bliss, T.J. 139 blogs 136–138 BLS see Bureau of Labor Statistics Boal, A. 107, 116 Bogart, A. 292 Boggs, G.L. 108 Bolwell, J. 258 Borg, B. 217 Brandeis, L. 244 Breathwork 169, 170 Breivik, M. 209 Bridgstock, R. 209 brown, adrienne maree 147, 150, 157, 299 Brown, C. 60, 62 Brown, T. 163 Bryon 164–167, 171 Bryon’s theory of integrative performing 164–167, 171 bubonic plague 184 Building Leadership Skills course 216 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 354 Business and Legal Practice in Entertainment course 216 Buy Black movement 47 Byrd-McPhee, M. 29 Cage Which Holds a Heart, The 300 Cajete, G. 167, 168, 170, 171 California State University 191 Camerata Fiorentina 161 Cantillon, R. 210 capitalism: capitalist class 45, 46; global 45, 47; music educators 46; racialized capitalism and recognition 46–48 capstone projects 216 Cardi B 54, 55 care: as accountability 297; CRP 298; feedback 298; practice of 296–297; vulnerability and trust 297–298 Carlson, K. 193, 195, 196, 198, 201, 204 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The 260 Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts 356 Carney, L. 204 Carruthers, G. 274

Carville, J. 91 Caves of Lascaux, France 98 Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER) 148, 149 Center West Art Center, Olhos D’Água 63 Central Wyoming College (CWC) 309 Chang, J. 108 Chapman, D.A. 240 Cheng, W. 44, 48, 49 CHER see Center for Hartford Engagement and Research choral music 92, 280 choreographic copyright 29–30 Christie, G. 152–155 Chu, J. 351 “circles of presence” 168 civic responsibility 239 Clague, M. 207 Clarke, C. 67 Clayton, J. 54 Cleveland, W. 149, 154 Clytigation: State of Exception 187 CM see community music coding 35 coercive hospitality 195–197, 199 cognition 15 cognitive complexity 93 Cole, B. 284 collaborative composition, music 284 Colombetti, G. 18, 21 Commission on Race and Slavery (Davidson College) 323, 327, 329 community colleges: access 316; arts community 311–312, 319; arts education 307–308; arts practices as holistic endeavor 314–315; building community 317–318; as centers for arts 308–309; collegiate arts students 318–319; and Covid-19 pandemic 315–316; curricular function categories 306; description 306; emotional rewards 311, 317; equity 316–317; faculty 313–314; findings, research 310; as gateway to arts 312–313; mental health 317; motivation 310–311; non-curricular services 307; open access 306; research methodology 309–310; student population 306

Index  363

community cultural development: diversity as social asset 302; in higher education 292–293; PATW 295 community dance 34 community engagement, arts 148 community music (CM): choral music 280; collaborative composition 284; community-engaged curricula 285; composers 276–278, 281, 282; composition 280, 281; conflicting values, academy 279–282; current pedagogy 282; definition 273–274; ethical and civic responsibilities 282–285; facilitators 274; interventions 274; paradigm shifts 276–278; participants 275; participatory performance 274; philosophy 274; presentational performance 274; relational composition 274– 276, 278–279 “Concert for the Biocene” 185–186 co(n)fusion: description 58; power relationships 68–69; as valued practice 69; see also art residencies connectivism: interconnectedness, Internet 132, 133; and performing arts 132–133 Conquergood, D. 327 conscientization 293, 303n2 constructivism 96 contingent faculty: divisions 221; postsecondary education labor 222–223; see also adjunct faculty members contract grading systems 18–19 Corless, I.B. 299 Coronadämmerung 44 corporate workforce trainings: “I” words, creative process 21; positive affect 21 Cottle, J. 329 Covey, S.M.R. 297 Covid-19 pandemic 3, 17, 56, 77, 146, 154; and community college 315–316; live performances 208; loss of opportunities 147; PATW 301; social disparities 191 Crawford, R. 354, 355 creative activity 1, 38; assessment, schools 32; everyday 118; “I” words 21; performing arts adjuncts 222, 229, 233

creative capital 298, 303n7 Creative Futures Studio 216 creative research 11, 12; academia 30–31; ethical standards, dance 33–35; evaluation 32–33, 37–38; non-tenure-track faculty members 31–32; postsecondary dance 36–40; recommendations, tertiary institutions 40–41; study methods and participant recruitment 35–36; support and legitimization 29–30, 38–40; tenure, advancement, merit, and stability 31–32; value hierarchy, funding availability 39 creative-sector economy, Next America 342, 355–356; arts therapies 354; career options, creative sector 354; expensive higher education 353; money in arts 353; NEA 341, 354 creative spaces, HBCUs: dance 100–103; FSU 90–91; NCLB 89; piano instruction 94–97; visual arts 97–100; vocal/choral instruction 92–94 Creative Technologies Program (CTK) 193 Credit Suisse report 45 Cristantemi 185 critical embodiment: Davidson College 329–330; HMPP 323–324, 327, 328, 331, 335, 336; intersectional perspectives 330–331; local guest artists 331–333; methodologies 326–328; positionality, intersections, and gaps 324–326; student projects 333–335; submerged histories 328–329 Critical Response Process (CRP) 37, 112, 298 critical thinking 61, 137, 213, 242, 245, 250, 326 Cross, M. 300 Crow, M.M. 3 CRP see Critical Response Process Crucible, The 181 “Cruel Reality Shoe” pedagogy 109 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 21 CTK see Creative Technologies Program cultural “intertexts” 329

364 Index

culture: community cultural development 292–293; definition 108, 292; generous 112, 118 CWC see Central Wyoming College Dabars, W.B. 3 Dafne 161 Dahl, C.J. 293, 294 Daily Arts Exercise class 118 dance: assessment 32–33; choreographic copyright 29–30; community 34; competition culture 17; core curriculum 256; demonstrative effects 14; ethical standards, creative research 33–35; feedback 16; financial profit 30; funding, lack of 29, 39; HBCUs 100–103; pedagogical approach 15–16; people’s memories 62–64; postsecondary, creative researchers in 36–40; recommendations, program/ department 40–41; recursive process 15; researcher integrity 33; as research field 30–31; southern HBCU dancers 101; tenure and advancement 31–32; and White supremacy culture 256–257; see also baccalaureate dance degrees; decolonizing tertiary dance education dance, computing, and engineering (DCE) 126, 192–195, 197–203; academic activity 192, 198–201; academic members 198; disruptive charges 199–201; redistributive effects 203–204; research 193, 197, 198, 200–203 Dance Education with Entrepreneurship 265 Dance Movement/Therapy Certification Board (DMTCB) 34 Dance Performance Studio 152 Dance Practices of the African Diaspora and the American Experience 262 Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft 161 Davidson, C.N. 3 Davidson, R.J. 293 Davidson College 323, 329–330 Davidson Microaggressions Project, the 327 Davis, C.U. 260

DCE see dance, computing, and engineering Declining by Degrees (Hersch and Merrow) 353 decolonizing tertiary dance education: anti-racist seminar series 80, 83–84; collaborative voice 81–85; designing and carrying out, workshops 77–79; educational model/structure 81–82; methodological perspectives 76–77; PAR project 72–74; postreflection, design process 79–85; student participation 85–86; student’s voice 79–80; Swedish tertiary education 73–74; teachers’ voice 80–81; themes from students 84–85; theoretical perspectives 74–76 DEI see diversity, equity, and inclusion De Keersmaeker, A.T. 163 de Melo, P.G.R. 61 DeMeulenaere, E. 297 democracy: autonomy 252; definition 250; deliberation 250–251; El Sistema’s discourse 247; equality 251–252; foundations 248; popular sovereignty 250; premises of 250, 254n1; prerequisites 250; reciprocity 253 democratic citizenship: arts and funding 246; authoritarianism 245; critical thinking, schools 245; discourses 247; economic arguments, education 246; performing arts rhetoric 247–248 demographic change, Next America 349; “age pyramid” 342; average enrollment, HEADS music institution 345, 345; fulltime faculty 347; grand total music enrollment, HEADS 344, 344; HEADS Project 340; student ethnicities, American public schools 343, 343; URECH + other/unknown, HEADS 346, 347; URECH students 346, 346; white, URECH enrollment, and URECH + other/unknown 348 demonstrative effects 14 Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 294 de Reizabal, L. 207, 210 Derrida, J. 63

Index  365

design-thinking 76, 77 Dewey, J. 129, 131, 142n2, 319 Digital Audience, the 216 disciplina 61 disciplining integration 164; hypothetical contexts 166–171; integrative living 167–169; integrative performing 169–170; learning and teaching researching 170–171; opera training 165 disciplining transdisciplinarity 162–164 Disorienting Davidson tour and project 330, 335 disruptive charges 199–201 distance education: BAPP (arts) 127–132, 135, 136–142; blogs 136–138; connectivism and performing arts 132–133; lenses 134, 136; MAPPs 127–132, 134, 135, 140–142; openness 138–140 diversity 256, 302 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) 191, 192, 199, 226, 256, 257, 260–263, 265, 266; values, dance degree 261–263 DMTCB see Dance Movement/Therapy Certification Board Dogg, S. 51 Dokubo, S. 106, 107, 113 Dolan, J. 113, 114 Domenici, E. 258, 259 Downes, S. 132, 133 Duffy, A. 11 Durrant, A. 131

empathy 111, 119, 139, 168, 169, 242, 249, 251, 252, 278 empowerment 53, 132, 274, 275, 277, 293 Engaged Musician: Theory and Analysis for the Twenty-First Century, The 352 Enterprising Musician course, The 211–213, 215, 216 entrepreneurship: entrepreneurial mindset 213–214; US music tertiary education 126; see also music entrepreneurship envy 52 epistemicide 74 equality 69, 89, 90, 98, 149, 227, 242–246, 248, 250, 251–252, 254, 277, 328, 329 equity 4, 53, 146, 256; community colleges 316–317; educational 90; implicit contract grading system 19; in music programs 12; with(in) parasitical resistance 190–204 ESSA see Every Student Succeeds Act ethical standards, creative research in dance 33 “ethics of otherness” 61–62 Eurocentric dance 101 Evanston, C. 329 Everyman in the Mall 111 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 307 Evison, F. 240 Ewell, P.A. 352 expositive effects 14

echo chamber effect 201–203 Eckert, R. 240 ecological imagination 59 economic value, arts education 241, 242 education: democratic citizens 245–249; for marketplace 243–245; vocational 243–245; see also arts education; distance education; higher education Eisenstein, C. 168 Eliot, H. 129, 131 Elliott, D.J. 283 Ellsworth, M. 187 El Sistema 247, 249 embodied knowledge 11, 12, 59, 142, 325, 327, 332 emotional awareness 298

Fabião, E. 60, 62 Facebook 138, 149, 295–297 faculty: adjunct 223–235; BIPOC 223, 232; coercive hospitality and 195–197; community colleges 313–314; contingent 222–223; non-tenure-track 31–32, 38, 223 FAR see Flash Art Residency Fayetteville State University (FSU) 90–91; dance, teaching 101–103; piano instruction 94–97 Federal Copyright Law 30 Feitosa, C. 68 Feldman, J. 19 Ferlazza, L. 98 Fisher, A.W. 190, 194–196, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204

366 Index

Flash Art Residency (FAR): invitation poétics 68; MoveSpace 67, 68; power relationships, co(n)fusion of 68–69 Floyd, G. 44, 191, 256 Forbes, B. 325 formlessness 110 Foster, S.L. 30 Foucault, M. 76, 85 Fraleigh, S.H. 31 Frank, G.L. 351 Fraser, N. 47 free-thinking 245, 246, 253, 254 Freire, P. 164, 170 gamification 187 Gay, R. 298 generosity: generous culture 112, 118; Theater of Generosity 106–107; TOGG 108, 110–117, 120 George-Warren 331, 332, 334 Georgia Institute of Technology 194 Gesamtkunstwerk 161 Gibbs, P. 165 GI Bill 306 Giddens, R. 328, 357 Ginwright, S. 299 global capitalism 45, 47 Goffe, D.A. 146, 149, 150, 153, 155 Goldbard, A. 293 Gonzales, I. 11 Gordon, A. 327 Gotterdämmerung 44 Gottschild, B.D. 329 grade horária 61 Graham, M. 247 Grant, A. 352 Grawe, N.D. 342, 344, 348–350 Green, H. 329 Greenspan, A. 244 grief: languages of 299–301; metaphors for 300–301; in plays 292, 298–299; verbal responses 299, 300; wildernesses 298, 299 Guattari, F. 60 Guirá, G. 67 Gumbs, A.P. 296 Hagood, T. 260 Hamilton 354 Handshake.com 216 Hanstein, P. 31, 258, 259, 268 Harcourt, B.E. 164

Harjo, L. 114, 115, 118 Harney, S. 153 Hartford: artistic career 146; worldclass arts education 148; see also Performing Hartford Hartman, S. 327 Harvey, D. 45 HatcherPuzzo, A. 12, 100–103 Hay, D. 146 HBCUs see Historically Black Colleges and Universities H’Doubler, M. 257, 258 HEADS see Higher Education Arts Data Services Hearne, T. 50 Heisenberg, W. 165 Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts 356 Hersch, R. 353 higher education: arts, purpose of 103–104; arts programming in 90; colonization 74; community cultural development 292–293; economic results 242, 243; “inclusive excellence” 3; interdisciplinarity 256, 257; pedagogical principles 91; performing arts, future of 5–7; and performing arts relationship 1–2; societal demands 2–3; teaching 208; teaching-learning interactions 86; United States, the 2, 242–243; vocational training 1; see also postsecondary education; tertiary education Higher Education Arts Data Services (HEADS) Survey: aggregate music enrollment 342; comprehensive management data, arts 340; grand total music enrollment, 1990–2020 344, 344; institutions participating and average enrollment 345; trends 346; URECH music students, ethnicity 345, 346; URECH + other/unknown, HEADS 346, 347; white, URECH enrollment, and URECH + other/ unknown 348 Hine, P. 108 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) 12, 263;

Index  367

dance 100–103; FSU 90–95, 101–103; piano instruction 94–97; postsecondary education 91; STEM programs 90; visual arts 97–100; vocal/choral instruction 92–94 History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories (HMPP) 323, 324, 327, 328, 331, 335, 336 Hitler, A. 49, 50 holistic intelligence 168 Hope College 194 hospitality 61–63, 195–197 Howard School for African Americans 90 Hrabowski, F.A. 3 hub and spoke career 209 humanity 45, 140 Illinois State University (ISU) 193, 195 “implicit” contract grading 19 inclusion 256 Inclusive Histories of Davidson College 327 Infantas, D. 150 In It to Win parody web series 17 Instagram 148, 149, 153 Institute of Work Based Learning (iWBL) 128, 129, 130 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 33, 39 integrating disciplines: disciplining transdisciplinarity 162–164; historical contexts 160–162; integrative living 167–169; integrative performing 169–170; learning and teaching researching 170–171; Performing Arts Disciplinary Continuum 161–162; transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy 164–166 integrative living 167–169 integrative performing 169–170 interdisciplinarity: dance degrees 259, 263–265; higher education 256, 257; and parasitical resistance 192–194; postsecondary dance education curricula 240 interdisciplinary performance 162; art making 118; creative practices 17 International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO) 203 International Indigenous Speakers Bureau of Canada 218

In the Heights 150 introductory acting courses: “Cruel Reality Shoe” pedagogy 109; “Daily Arts Exercise” 118; elder actors 106; generosity 107–108; genuine generous culture, creation of 112; hope 113–114; Jeet Kune Do 110–111; madness/ dreaming 116–117; SEED 112–113, 117; as social engagement 109–110; TOGG 111–117 Invasion of Privacy album 54 invitation poétics 12, 59, 64, 68; formal presentation 66; micro politics 60; relationships, forces of 66 Irannezhad, Z. 204 IRB see Institutional Review Board iWBL see Institute of Work Based Learning Iyengar, V. 193, 198, 202, 203, 354 James, J. 328 Jamnikar, N. 67 Jaque, S.V. 301 Jawaharlal, M. 191 JCCC see Johnson County Community College JEC curriculum see Justice, Equality, Community Jobs, S. 50 Johnson County Community College (JCCC) 308 Justice, Equality, Community (JEC) curriculum 328 Kahlich, L. 247 Kana, J. 282 Karimi, R.F. 12, 117 Katen, J. 11 KCACTF see Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theater Festival’s Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theater Festival’s (KCACTF) 302 Kerr, S. 115 Kerr-Berry, J. 259, 269 Kezar, A. 232 Kincy, K. 151 kin-space-time envelope 114–115 Kloppenberg, J.T. 250 knowledge: embodied 11, 12, 59, 142, 325, 327, 332; Siemens’s five knowledge types 134, 135; transmission of 61–62

368 Index

Koff, S.R. 267 Koomson-Davis, A. 146 Kraut, A. 30 Krenak, A. 58, 68, 69 Krumer-Nevo, M. 75 Kruse, A. 351 K-shaped pandemic economic recovery 45 Kuftinec, S. 302 Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies 194 Lacy, Z. 334 Lakes, R. 247 La Monnaie, Brussels 163 Landi, D.L. 329 Lane College, Tennessee 94 Lavengood, M. 352 LaViers, A. 193–194, 195, 197, 198, 200–202 Laymon, K. 153 leadership 218, 233, 245, 264, 279; institutional 350; shared 3; skills, composer 278 League of Resident Theatres (LORT): production model 179, 180, 183; rigidity of 181, 182 learning: accretion 138; acquisition 138; emergence 137; performing arts, process of 133; realizations of 137–138; situated 15, 63; and teaching researching 170–171; through coexistence 62–64; transmission 137 Lebron, C. 53 Led Zeppelin 48 Lee, B. 108, 110, 111, 113, 114 Le Grange, L. 74, 75 Leonardo, Z. 47, 48, 50 Lerman, L. 37, 107, 112, 298 Lévinas 61 liberal ethics 55 lifetime learning 1, 93 LinkedIn 138 Look to the Mountain (Cajete) 170 Lorde, A. 51 LORT see League of Resident Theatres Los Angeles Times 341, 353 Louth, P. 46 Lundgren, L. 12, 72–74, 78–80 MA see Master of Arts Macalester College 112

macro-politics 60 Mãe, V.H. 61, 62 Mandolidis, K. 67 MA Professional Practice (MAPP) 140–142, 142n1; Internet, use of 127; personal history of 129–132; Siemens’s five knowledge types 134, 135; specialization 128 Mars, B. 51 Martin, S. 12, 97–100, 113 Marx, K. 45, 46 Master of Arts (MA) 127, 129, 130 Master of Fine Arts 5 Master of Music 5 mattering 62 Maxey, D. 232 Maxwell, I. 294 McCarthy-Brown, N. 75, 259 McEwen, M. 139 McGregor, S.L.T. 170 McKenny, R. 44 meaning-making 75, 264 Media Entertainment 216 Mellin, S.H.D. 327, 330, 335 Merrow, J. 353 meta-cognitive skills 18 meta-performative commentary 18, 27 micro-politics 60 Middendorf, I. 169, 170 Middlesex University 128, 129 Midgelow, V.L. 170, 171 Midgley, W. 75, 85, 86 Minton, S. 30 Miranda, L.M. 150 MOCO see International Conference on Movement and Computing Montaño, D.R. 283 Moraes, J. 12 Mota, I. 67 Moten, F. 153 movement-based courses 259, 262, 268 Mozart, W.A. 48 multiculturalism 258, 259 multimodality 17–18 multiple intelligence theory 93 Muñoz, J. 113, 114 music: and capitalism 50–52; challenges and changes, musicians 207–209; classes, music entrepreneurship 211–213; classical music making 50; cruel optimism, musical attachments

Index  369

48–50; entrepreneurial mindset 213–214; equity in 12; global COVID-19 pandemic 44; hiphop 50–52; making 52–54, 56n3; pedagogy 49; performance curriculum 211; piano instruction 94–97; symphony orchestras 208; tertiary education 126; vocal/choral instruction, HBCU 92–94; see also community music; opera music entrepreneurship: capstone projects 216; certificate 214–217; classes 211–213; designing, certificate 216–217; Enterprising Musician course, The 211–213, 215, 216; fieldwork experiences 216–217; guest artists 217; mindset 213–214; outcomes, entrepreneurial courses 218–219; teaching 217–218; Udacity 213, 219n2 Music Entrepreneurship Capstone Project 215 Music Entrepreneurship Certificate: core values 215; designing 216–217; goal of 215 Music Entrepreneurship Fieldwork 215 Music Industry Studies I and II 215 Music Marketing for the DIY Musician 217 Music Product Creation and Development course 215 Music Society Task Force for the Undergraduate Music Major 47 Musil, P. 258 muziektheater 163 NASAD see National Association of Schools of Art and Design NASD see National Association of Schools of Dance NASM see National Association of Schools of Music NAST see National Association of Schools of Theatre National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) 340 National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD) 32, 34, 41, 340 National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) 5, 211, 340, 341

National Association of Schools of Theatre (NAST) 5, 340 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 208, 341, 354 National Institutes of Health 354 NCLB see No Child Left Behind NCLBA see No Child Left Behind Act NEA see National Endowment for the Arts needs vs. desires 59–60 Neruda, P. 109, 110 Netflix 186 Nettl, B. 276 Next America: changing cultures 341, 349–353; creative-sector economy 341–342, 353–356; demographic change 340, 342–349; woven narratives 356–357 Next America, The (Taylor) 342 Ngai, S. 45, 52, 53 Nicki Minaj 51 Nicolescu, B. 162, 165 Nóbrega, C. 60, 62 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) 307 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 4, 89, 307 Noddings, N. 296 non-tenure-track faculty 223; creative research 31–32; evaluation of creation research 38 Norman, M.J. 336 normative thinking 61 Nussbaum, M.C. 249 Obama White House 89, 90 OERs see open education resources Office of Knowledge and Enterprise (OKED) 197 OKED see Office of Knowledge and Enterprise O’Leary, J. 46 Oliver, W. 239 Onfray, M. 63 open education resources (OERs) 139 opera: education 126, 160, 163, 172; improvisation training, curricula 170; invention 161; “opera myth” 161, 169; transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy 164–166

370 Index

optimism: cruel 48–50; definition 49; optimistic attachments 49 Østern, T.P. 12, 72, 74, 78–81 Osterwalder, A. 210 Palfy, R. 352 pandemic live-streaming, failures of 181–183 Pappas, R.K. 125 PAR see participatory action research parasites 190, 199 parasitical resistance 126; coercive hospitality and faculty 195–197; and decolonization 204; DEI initiatives 191; disruptive charges 199–201; echo chamber effect 201–203; hosts 195; and interdisciplinarity 192–194; parasite-host system 190, 194; passing, concept of 199; redistributive effects 203–204; and tertiary education 191–192; transition toward 198–199 Paris, D. 45 Parker, A. 14 Parks, A.C. 240 participatory action research (PAR): designing and carrying out, workshops 77–79; design thinking 76, 77; methodological perspectives 76–77; postreflection, design process 79–85; student engagement 72–74; theoretical perspectives 74–76 passing, concept of 199 pathway as structural metaphor 167 Patreon 186 PATW see Plays Across the Walls Payton, D.M. 12, 92–94 pedagogy 2, 11; BAPP (arts) and MAPPs 141; care 292, 296–298; composition 276, 279, 285; “Cruel Reality Shoe” 109; culturally relevant 93; dance 15–16, 73; of hospitality 61–62; lifelong learning 171; LORT 179–183; music 12, 49, 52–54; performance, theorizing of 14–16; production 178–180; transdisciplinary counter-critical 125–126, 164–166; trust 297–298; writing 15–16 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 164

peer-review process 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 233 Pell Grants 2 People Dancing: The Foundation for Community Dance 34 People’s Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT) 193 performance: behaving “as if” 21–22; multimodality 17–18; for new audiences 23–24; performative encounter 14, 15, 19, 21; PPR 18–20; and subjective experience 15; teaching 13–14; theorization of 14–16; transdisciplinary professional development 16–20; workforce development 20–23 performative autoethnography 17 performing arts: adjunct faculty 221–235; alums 4; connectivism and 132–133; Covid-19 pandemic 3; for democracies 241–254; digital series 147–150; equity and inclusion 4; federal funding 4; future obligations 1; graduate programs 5; and higher education relationship 1–2; knowledge 11; “liveness,” history of 184; mediated performances 181, 182; proximity vs. intimacy 184–186; “residency defense” 64–65; responding to the moment 129; Siemens’s five knowledge types 134, 135; SNAPP 4; and tertiary education 60; theory of performing 164, 165; transdisciplinarity 164; US higher education 5; well-being of society 239; see also dance; interdisciplinary performance; music; Performing Hartford; theater Performing Arts Disciplinary Continuum 161–162 performing arts education: antithetical to democracy 248–249; artistic citizenship 247, 248; autonomy 252; empathy, cultivating of 251–252; liberatory power of 247; popular sovereignty 250; reciprocity 253; selfobjectification 249; strategic discourse 247–248; vocational focus 249

Index  371

Performing Hartford 146; artists 158n2; artists experience, campus 155–157; asset-based community development 147–148; Coming Home 151; creation of 147; Dance Performance Studio 152; digital series 147–150; “faculty dance concert” 151; nests of care 150; On-Site 150–153; policing 153–157; rideshares, artists 154–155; semesters and course 149 PESIT see People’s Education Society Institute of Technology Pew Research Center 340, 342 Pigneur, Y. 210 PlayFullSpace 107, 109, 111, 115, 120 plays: grief, emergence of 298–299; PATW 292, 295–296 Plays Across the Walls (PATW) 292, 302; community cultural development 295; covid-19 pandemic 301; goals 295–296; online format 295 Polisi, J.W. 247 “Politics of Performance,” The 264 Pollard, V. 214 postsecondary dance roles, creative research in: ethical and rigorous approach 37; evaluation 37–38; support and legitimization 38–40 postsecondary education: contingent faculty 222–223; HBCUs 91; transdisciplinary performance pedagogy 13–24; see also higher education; tertiary education “Power Flower” 331, 337n4 power imbalance 74, 154 power relationships 60, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 247 PPR see Project Performance Rubric Preeshl, A. 126 Preston, D.D. 11 Prichard, R.R. 239 Prince 90 Princeton University 194 Privilege 50 production pedagogies 178–180 Project Performance Rubric (PPR) 15, 26; abstraction 19–20; acknowledgement 19; application 20; contract grading 18, 19; metaperformative commentary 18 proximity vs. intimacy 184–186

Queen Latifah 89 queer utopia 114 racial coding 98 racial equity 335 racial injustice 45, 98, 260, 324 racialized capitalism: centering recognition 46–48; settler 45 racial justice 146 racism: Davidson College 323, 329–330; Trinity 153–157 RAD Lab see Robotics, Automation, and Dance Rajko, J. 126, 194–195 Reagan era 29 reciprocity 250, 252, 253 recognition of prior learning (RPL) 128 redistributive effects 203–204 Reed, S.A. 29 Regelski, T.A. 171 Reichert, N. 18 relational composition: compositional activities 276; humility and flexibility 282; methods and terminology, research 274–275; musicking 275; research 274–276; social responsibilities 276; teaching 278–279 relational ethics 126 Reppen, C. 12, 72, 74, 78–81 “Requiem” 48 research 2; on art residencies 62–64; dance 30–31; DCE 193–194, 203; FAR 67–69; integrity and legitimacy 33; invitation poetics 12; invitation poétics 64–66; “practice-based” 31; productivity and teaching 222; relational composition 274–276; see also creative research; participatory action research “residency defense” 64–65 Responsibilities to Academia 11 Revelations 102 “reverse welcoming” 63 Richerme, L.K. 12 Rigolot, C. 163 Riipen.com 217, 218 Ring Cycle 50 Ring Shout, the 332–333 Ritchey, M. 46 Riverview Correctional Facility, Ogdensburg 295 Robert A. Peck Arts Center 309

372 Index

Robin, W. 352 Robinson, D. 258, 259 Robinson, W. 45 Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab 193, 194, 202, 204 Rodenburg, P. 168 Rodrigues, L. 67 Rogers, J.T. 179 Rolnik, S. 60 Rosling, H. 356 Ross, A. 96 Rozie, M. 150, 151 RPL see recognition of prior learning Sageseeker Productions 148, 151 Schechner, R. 14, 21 School of Arts, Media, and Engineering (AME) 194 School Sports Co-Ordinator (SSCo) 129, 130 Schupp, K. 17, 126 Scott, J. 126 Sebastian Chang, E. 116 Sedgwick, E.K. 14 SEED see Striking, Engaging, Entertaining, and Delicious self-objectification 249 self-reflective written narratives 38 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 306 Seton, M. 75, 76, 86, 294 Shabu, A. 325, 332, 334 Shakespeare 106 shame 53 show must go on mentality, the: harmful dynamics 180; higher education 178; initial use 179; performing arts communities 179, 180; world-building 178, 179 show must respond, the 188–189 Shurtleff, M. 109 Siemens, G. 132–134, 135, 137 SIGs see special interest groups Silverman, M. 283 Simon Fraser University 193 Sinclair College 308 situated learning 15, 63 Síveres, L. 61 Skelton, K. 126 Skype 128, 138, 141, 182 Small, C. 275 SNAPP see Strategic National Arts Alumni Project social capital 292, 302n1

social consciousness 239 social justice 239, 262, 283; and hip-hop 49; music educators and 47–49, 51; music making 49, 54 somatic intelligence 167, 168, 169 special interest groups (SIGs) 138 spiritual ecology 168 Spolin, V. 107, 116, 117, 119 staged theater 336 Staley, D.J. 2 Starving the Beast 91 Stenner, K. 245 Stevie Wonder 90 Stewart, M. 51 Stockholm University of the Arts 72 Stovall, J. 335 Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) 4, 208–209 Striking, Engaging, Entertaining, and Delicious (SEED) 112–113, 117 structural racism 72, 78, 83, 86, 98, 99 student-centered learning 214 Student Influence and Quality Development in Higher Education (Bill 1999/2000:28) 73 student involvement, curricula development 12 Sueko, S. 118 Super Holiday Tours 217 sustainability: communal modes 188; “Concert for the Biocene” 185–186; distribution 187–188; economies 186–187; institutionalization 188; pandemic live-streaming, failures of 181–183; production pedagogies 178–180; proximity vs. intimacy 184–186; show must respond, the 188–189; “the show must go on” mentality 178–180 Swedish Higher Education Act 73 Swedish tertiary education 73–74 Swoboda, D. 126 Symonds, D. 15 Szabó, M. 294 Tanztheater 163 Tao of Jeet Kune Do 108, 110–111 Taylor, B. 45, 191 Taylor, M. 15 Taylor, P. 340, 342, 343, 348, 349, 350, 353 Taylor, T. 51

Index  373

teaching 13–14; dance, HBCUs 100–103; and learning researching 170–171; music 92–94; music entrepreneurship 211–213; relational composition 278–279; teaching-learning experiences 59, 60, 69; visual arts 97–100 TEDx talk 197 tertiary education 61–62; decolonizing curricula, dance 72–86; and parasitical resistance 191–192; Swedish 73–74; see also higher education; postsecondary education Texas State University 352 theater: community-building 292; community participants 293; freedom 109; LORT 179–183; “the show must go on” mentality 178–180; and TOGG 111–117; well-being in 293–294 Theater of Generosity 106–107 Theater of GenuineGenerosity (TOGG) 108, 120; acting training 109–110; in action 117; American exceptionalism 110; aquatic pillars of 113–116; curriculum design 111–112; Jeet Kune Do 110–111; SEED public performance 112–113; teach acting 108–109 Thomson, P. 301 “time traveling emotion,” the 299 “Tiny Desk concert” 328 Title I school 92 TOGG see Theater of GenuineGenerosity Toscher, B. 209, 210 Training of the American Actor (Bartow) 109 transdisciplinary counter-critical pedagogy 125–126; Bryon’s theory of integrative performing 164, 165; poetic thinking 165, 166; steps, curricula development 172; unity of knowledge, the 165 transdisciplinary professional development 16; multimodality 17–18; PPR 18–20 Trinity College 146, 148, 150–155 Trinity International Hip Hop festival 150, 152, 159n4 Trouillot, M.-R. 327, 333

Trouton, L. 75, 76, 86 Truman Presidential Commission on Higher Education, 1947 242 Trump, D. 90 trust 297–298 Turino, T. 274, 277 Twitter 138 Udacity 213, 219n2 ugly feelings: art making 53; description 52; disorienting nature of 54; of envy 52; inaction 53; repulsion and distancing, practical aims 52, 53; shame 53 UIUC see University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign UNC see University of Northern Colorado United States higher education 242–243 “unity of knowledge,” the 165 University of Brasília (Brazil), The 60, 62 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 193, 194, 197 University of Iowa 282 University of Manitoba 130 University of Maryland 352 University of Northern Colorado (UNC) 352 University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education 221 University of Virginia (UVA) 194 UVA see University of Virginia Valencia College, Orlando 309 value hierarchy, funding availability 39 values, dance curriculum 267–268 valuing 36, 62, 118, 137, 200, 247, 267, 354 Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music 351 Vassar College 153 verbal response 299, 300 Virelles, A. 12, 94–97 visual arts 97–100, 110 wage inequity 130 Wagner, R. 44, 49, 50, 161 Wait, M. 351 Waltz, S. 163 Warlikowski, K. 163 Waters, H. Jr. 112, 113 wayfaring 60, 62 Wayne State University (WSU) 194

374 Index

well-being: actors 294, 301; connection 294; healing and 299; pillars 294; possibilities for 298–299; purpose 294; in theatre 293–294 West, K. 51 white privilege 72, 86, 98, 334 “wicked problems” 76–77 Wiley, D. 139 Wiley’s 5Rs 139 Wilkerson, A. 152–157 Williams, T. 332, 333 Willingham, L. 274 Wilson, E. 214 Wilson-Mendenhall, C.D. 293 Wisconsin Idea, The 257, 269 Witte, P. 240 workforce development: corporate workforce trainings 20–22;

institutional impacts 23; performance-based curricula, corporate trainings 22–23 Workforce Development Program 14, 20, 23 writing: pedagogical approach 15–16; as performative 16; teaching 18, 19 WSU see Wayne State University Yi, T. 327 Yoga of Eating, The (Eisenstein) 168 Zazzali, P. 107, 113 zero: philosophical concept of 107; place 114 Zoom 77, 78, 147, 149, 156, 181, 182, 295, 296