Navigating the tension between openness and quality artistic encounters in intermedial experience: a teaching artist’s account

ABSTRACT

In this article, a teaching artist shares their understandings about designing a large-scale interactive intermedial arts experience for children aged five to eight years, and articulates findings about the conditions that promote quality experiences of this kind. When designing interactive arts experiences, a tension exists between providing openness and structure that derives from motivations to inspire creativity, but this does not need to be the case. Fears of constricting and stifling participants’ creativity are voiced frequently. Enabling constraints are presented here as a method of promoting openness, creativity, and acts of imagination in interactive arts experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Enabling constraints
• open works
• artistic inquiry
• creativity

Large-scale interactive arts experiences designed for children can offer rich opportunities to inspire young artists and lower barriers to engagement. These events can equally devolve into chaotic and superficial experiences in the absence of quality experiential design and adequate scaffolding of the experience. Young audiences, although often in possession of vivid imaginations and excellent artistic impulses, when left unchecked can become lost and overwhelmed in large-scale arts experiences. There is a recognised tension between providing openness and structure (Cremin and Chappell 2021; Haught-Tromp 2017) in interactive arts experiences that derives from motivations to inspire creativity. Research tells us that this does not need to be the case. In the experience of this teaching artist and this performative work, quality arts experience is characterised by participants engaging in creative thinking through movement. The quality of this arts experience is the result of expert dramaturgy and understanding the potential of the experience, rather than the result of innate artistic sensibility in young people. This article captures one teaching artist’s experience of a large-scale interactive intermedial arts experience, Creature Interactions: An Interactive Workshop, a creative work bridging interactive art installation and intermedial physical theatre created to engage children aged five to eight years in creative movement. The author articulates findings about the conditions in which quality experiences characterised by creative engagement are fostered, and in the case of Creature Interactions, achieved by facilitating an arts experience that generated creative thinking from participating children.

Context

In recent times we have seen an upsurge in large-scale interactive and immersive digital arts experiences such as Van Gogh Alive, Otherworld, or Wink World. These experiences are certainly proving popular with audiences, but it is worthwhile to consider the quality of the arts experience offered with a view to enhancing these experiences for participants. With the upsurge of these types of digital arts experiences, it is timely to examine these types of works more closely, particularly those targeting young audiences for whom these experiences can be their introduction to the arts. This article examines questions of quality in the context of one teaching artist’s work inside an immersive and interactive intermedial arts experience in the field of physical theatre entitled Creature Interactions: An Interactive Workshop.

Creature Interactions was initially produced for the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s (QPAC) Out of the Box Festival, the southern hemisphere’s largest festival for children until its COVID-19 suspension in 2020. The bi-annual arts event features works made for young audiences aged eight and under. Creature Interactions was originally commissioned as an accompanying work to Creature: An Adaptation of Dot and the Kangaroo by Stalker Theatre, but Creature Interactions, the interactive workshop has gone on to have successful seasons both nationally and internationally as a standalone immersive interactive arts experience for young audiences that aims to promote embodied artistic thinking while educating about Australia’s environment. Creature Interactions was a co-production by Stalker Theatre and QPAC. Stalker Theatre is a Sydney-based physical theatre company who produce inter-disciplinary, physical, and visual theatre, utilising interactive technology and projection. The author of this article was a key collaborator on this work and the insights shared here arise from the author’s role as teaching artist, developing the workshop structure, and working inside the experience as co-artist with participants.

Creature Interactions, billed as an ‘interactive workshop experience’, sought to blend interactive digital media and arts learning in an immersive intermedial workshop experience for children. The expertise and knowledge of teaching-artists were fused with the digital proficiency of technology designers to create what would ultimately be termed a performative workshop. The technology used in the work was created by researchers at University of Technology Sydney’s Creativity and Cognition Studios who are ongoing collaborators with Stalker Theatre. The workshop structure and participant experience were designed and delivered by teaching artists led by myself, a teaching artist/researcher from Queensland University of Technology.

The workshop entailed a 360-degree immersive visual environment within which participants were led through an arts experience exploring an interactive virtual environment. Specifically, participants were immersed into a 360-degree, 11-metre-high digital rendering of an Australian bush landscape. Infrared cameras captured the movement of participants and trigger points were coded into the interactive environment, allowing participants to move and change the environment making this technology a perfect vehicle for a physical theatre experience. The intermedial workshop led by a teaching artist featured movement-based interactions with projected scenes depicting the flora and fauna of the Australian bush. Each scene contained coded-trigger points in objects (such as butterflies, leaves, or flames) which respond to physical actions. The teaching artist used movement skills to demonstrate ways of interacting with the digital environment, set movement-based inquires, and worked as a co-artist with participants to find creative ways of interacting in the immersive environment through movement. Within this intermedial space, children were challenged to experiment with movement ideas, engaging in creative thinking while learning about Australian flora and fauna, including risks to the environment (species extinction and natural threats such as bush fire) (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Children interacting with interactive environment featuring Australian flora and fauna.

Figure 2. Children interacting and manipulating with frog shape.

Creature Interactions has had multiple seasons both nationally and internationally. It is important to note that the research captured in this article pertains to two seasons only: Brisbane 2016 and Shanghai 2019. Brisbane being the premiere season and Shanghai being a later season which benefited from the reflections, insights, and advances in creative practice generated through the 2016 season. In this article, reference is made to initial workshops, referring specifically to the test-audience and opening workshop of the premiere season of 19 forty-minute workshop experiences over 11 days. The second research cycle occurred in 2019 with eight workshops over four days. Data collection occurred through audiovisual recordings of workshops, reflective journals, and interviews with teaching-artists delivering the workshop, technology designers, and key production staff associated with the project, in addition to the tacit understandings generated in and through the creative practice. These data inform the understandings presented here by the author who was the only teaching artist to deliver the two seasons of Creature Interactions at the centre of this research.

Quality of experience

Capturing quality in arts activities is a contentious topic, which is couched in terms such as value and impact (Gattenhof 2017; Carnwath and Brown 2014). It is not the intention of this author to engage in debate about the larger questions of evaluating quality in arts experience, but it is important to establish what quality means in the parameters of this article. In keeping with the teaching artist’s duality as artist and pedagogue, the demonstration of creative thinking through movement is viewed as the key determinant of quality.

The insights in this article are shared through the account of a teaching artist. Taylor and Booth (2016), pioneers of the teaching artist field, describe the teaching artist’s practice as having purpose and harnessing artistic knowledge to achieve learning goals in, through, and about the arts. At times, these goals emerge during unfolding practice and at others are clearly articulated prior to the project. In the case of Creature Interactions, clear goals were not set prior to the workshop development, but emerged through practice. The intermedial experience was initially designed as an extension experience for the mainhouse show, Creature: An Adaptation of Dot and the Kangaroo. The extension experience would allow audience members to ‘play’ with the interactive projections used by physical theatre artists in the show. Yet what began as a secondary experience ended up as a standalone work that has gone on to multiple national and international venues. As the work developed, the goals of the workshop included a range of outcomes relating to artistic skills related to creative movement, and more specifically the application of creative thinking to movement in the intermedial space. Creative thinking is recognised as a vital component of artistic activity (Snepvangers, Thomson, and Harris 2018; Torrents Martín, Ric, and Hristovski 2015). Creative thinking is considered a key marker of quality in this research due to its integral relationship to art making, and evidence suggesting that when working with young children it is preferable to focus on the creative process rather than products (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 2011; Sharp 2005).

It must be acknowledged that there is no standardised definition of creative thinking (Lucas 2016; Snepvangers, Thomson, and Harris 2018; Harris 2008), which makes the evaluation of creative thinking difficult. Despite a lack of consensus regarding creative thinking’s characteristics, scholars have offered a variety of frameworks and definitions. For the purpose of this research, ACER’s creative skill development framework (Ramalingam et al. 2020) has been adopted to assess the creative thinking skills demonstrated by participants in Creature Interactions.

ACER’s trinary framework proposes generation of ideas, experimentation, and evaluation of the quality of ideas as the constituents of creative thinking. As this arts experience has been created for children under eight, the focus is on the processually embedded aspects of creative thinking in keeping with the suggestion that it is preferable to focus on creative process rather than products when working with young children (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 2011; Sharp 2005). For this reason, evaluation of quality as aligned with creative thinking during the interactive workshop process of Creature Interactions is concerned with only two components of ACER’s framework: (1) the generation of ideas (number and range of ideas) and (2) experimentation (playing with ideas, new and pre-existing). The quality of the arts experience is evaluated through observation of these indicators of creative thinking, with the knowledge that creative thinking is an essential component of artistic activity.

The economics of attention and quality of experience

It is not enough to catch attention; it must be held. It does not suffice to arouse energy; the course that energy takes, the results that it effects are the important matters. (Dewey 2009, 91)

Dewey’s words are particularly important when we consider the notion of quality in an arts experience, holding attention through the lens of creative thinking involves engagement through the generation of ideas and experimentation with ideas. This is the ‘course that the energy takes’. The idea that arts experiences need to do more than just ‘catch’ attention proved prescient in the early development of Creature Interactions. Imagine if you will, you are a six-year-old child with a height of just over a metre, you stand in a large open space surrounded at 360 degrees by interactive projections stretching to a scale of 11 metres high. The scale of this work dramatically towers over the under eights for whom this work was created. It is certainly a spectacle, and generated energy and interest from participants, but not all energy and interest are productive or conducive to a quality arts encounter.

During initial workshops, it was clear that the scale and spectacle of the technology were sensorily overwhelming, impeding participants’ ability to engage in a productive manner. It was hoped that children would generate, share, and experiment with ways to interact with the digitally interactive projections through movement. In short, children would use creative thinking to develop movement that responded to and engaged with the digitally simulated Australian bush environment, including trigger points coded into environmental objects and animals. Instead, children ran, jump, swooped, screamed, and played at times with the projections and at others, among themselves in a raucous game of ‘chasey’. The children tried one-off experimentations, usually repeatedly engaging in one way of moving and interacting with technology indicating a deficiency in idea generation and experimentation. The participants were certainly having fun, but it is questionable whether you could count this as an arts experience of any quality, falling short of the desired aims of promoting creative engagement. The space was overwhelmingly loud and the teaching artist leading the workshop felt helpless to affect any quality outcomes in the environment. This state became affectionately known as the cacophony of children, pointing to the crescendoing energy and sound from children and what could be described as a chaotic and overwhelming experience during the first workshop of Creature Interactions, indicating that creative thinking was not being effectively stimulated. Adults in the space described the experience as chaotic, articulating a sense of exhaustion and elongation of time. Dewey (2005) would suggest that the experience was cut short from maturing by an excess of receptivity where sensory qualities overwhelm the experience. It must be noted that having attended other large-scale interactive works with my own children, this is not an uncommon scene. What became clear as a teaching artist is that the children were unable to respond productively to the experience as they were over-awed by the scale resulting in an abundance of unsustained attention. Put simply, the participants failed to engage creatively because they were over-awed by the scale of the technology, and as a result, the creative possibilities presented by the interactive technology were left largely unexplored because participants didn’t know how to engage creatively. There was simply too much openness for young participants to navigate resulting in a deficit of creativity and artistic engagement.

Ultimately, the space and its set-up undermined what Lanham (2006) terms the ‘economics of attention’. The prioritising of technology over the engagement of attention from participants resulted in a miscalculation of technology’s ability to hold participants’ attention. The projected interactive technology was not maintaining children’s interest, evidenced in a young boy’s question to the teaching artist, ‘can we nap now? Is it nap time?’. Davis (2012) suggests that attention is given in exchange for worthwhile experiences, attesting to the fact that the initial workshop had not been worthwhile enough to maintain the participants’ attention. While the technology had stimulated interest and energy, it was not capable of maintaining interest, holding attention, or stimulating creative thinking. Dewey’s assertion that we need to do more than ‘catch attention’ and ‘arouse energy’, but carefully attend to the ‘course that energy takes’ resonates strongly with this situation and the dramaturgical function of the teaching artist leading the experience. Returning to Lanham’s notion of the economics of attention, observations by the teaching artist suggest that stimulus in this experience was in abundance, but what ‘we lack is human attention needed to make sense of it all … an economics of attention. Attention is the commodity in short supply’ (Lanham 2006, xi). So, how do we assist participants, particularly young audiences to give their attention to meaningful engagement with arts experiences without stifling creativity?

I argue that this requires dramaturgy by artists who are practiced in creating arts experiences and managing the ‘economics of attention’ such as directors and teaching artists. It is the function of the teaching artist in this case to create the conditions or context to induce creative engagement that generates and experiments with movement ideas (Torrents Martín, Ric, and Hristovski 2015). When reworking Creature Interactions after the initial workshop, it was acknowledged that achieving a quality arts experience requires social interaction between teaching artists and participants (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 2011), as it proved a false assumption that this could be achieved through interactions between participants and technology alone. Facer (2011, 8) would support the need for social interaction to shape an experience, reminding us that ‘developments and change … are not the product of some magical power of “technology alone” but are co-produced through social, material and epistemological practices’. The quality arts experience sought here aligns to Manning’s (2016) concept of art-as-practice that emphasises the practice rather than the object and uses the object as an activator rather than the experience itself, enhancing its aesthetic yield and artfulness. ‘Artfulness, the aesthetic yield, is about how a set of conditions coalesce to favor the opening of a process to its inherent collectivity, to the more-than of its potential’ (Manning 2016, 58). Ultimately, after dramaturgical re-shaping of the workshop to encourage creative engagement, Creature Interactions reflected Manning’s art-as-practice by lessening the reliance on technology and reframing the technology as an activator of experience. It was found that this enhanced the quality of the experience for the participants. Further, it became apparent that quality arts experiences can be planned, and it is possible to create the conditions in which a quality arts experience can operate without stifling children’s agency or artistic impulses. To achieve this, directors and teaching artists enact a form of dramaturgy that functions during the planning phases and inside the unfolding experience. Their dramaturgical instincts and abilities allow them to go beyond creating a uniform or rigid experience. Instead, they establish the conditions (Manning 2016; McLean 1996) or contexts (Torrents Martín, Ric, and Hristovski 2015; Kaltenbrunner and Procyk 2004) in which quality aesthetic encounters are more likely and predictable in quality. In other words, the artistic experience is enabled through dramaturgical decisions rather than relying on technology or participants themselves to generate a quality arts experience.

Enabling arts experience

Creature Interactions was conceived as an open-work driven by interactive play with technology to elicit creative responses from participants, but from the initial workshop, it was evident that the technology alone was not enough to maintain participants’ attention or promote a quality arts experience. There was a desire to maintain the experience’s open form and privilege play-based interaction, but there was also an acknowledgement that too much openness had undermined the quality of the experience and led to a breakdown in attention. The question of how to shape the participants’ experience without impeding creative agency and unique artistic responses became the primary concern as the workshop was reworked to promote a quality arts experience featuring engaged creative thinking.

Manning and Massumi (2014, 93) suggest that in the context of creative engagement, ‘letting things flow’ as was the case in the initial workshop of Creature Interactions, is insufficient to enable something creative to happen. They assert, ‘In our experience, unconstrained interaction rarely yields worthwhile effects’ (Manning and Massumi 2014, 94). Cremin and Chappell (2021) support this view, asserting that affecting creativity requires a finely tuned balance between freedom and structure. Bix and Witt (2020) suggest that constraints are effective because they reduce the solution set for a problem or inquiry. Theorists (Haught-Tromp 2017; Medeiros et al. 2018; Torrents Martín, Ric, and Hristovski 2015; Manning and Massumi 2014) suggest enabling constraints as a means to navigate this balance. Enabling constraints are injected into the emergent process while maintaining openness for participants to affect agency and their unique aesthetic response within the experience. The notion of the enabling constraint may seem counter-intuitive, but it is productive and positive in its dynamic. By way of explanation,

‘enabling’ because in and of itself a constraint does not necessarily provoke techniques for process, and ‘constraint’ because in and of itself openness does not create the conditions for collaborative exploration. (Manning and Massumi 2014, 94)

For the Creature Interactions experience to be productive and conducive to a quality arts experience, care was taken to maintain the open form of the work and the emergent nature of the experience while inserting enabling constraints into the workshop. Drawing on Eco’s (2006) understandings of open works, the experience needed to celebrate the ‘unfinished’ and view uncertainty as a positive feature. Further, Eco suggests that within open works it is possible to present possibilities to the participants that have been rationally organised, oriented, and endowed with specifications to promote a quality experience. In keeping with this, the embedding of enabling constraints is a useful scaffold to present possibilities to participants that allowed the workshop to achieve its final form as a quality arts experience.

Enabling vitality through form

In response to the initial workshop of Creature Interactions, which did not elicit the quality of experience we sought and ultimately achieved for participants, enabling constraints were enacted to assist in creating the conditions in which participants could exploit the potential of the interactive technology and their artistic interactions inside the workshop experience.

As a teaching artist, the familiar territory of process drama form offered a flexible enough scaffold to allow for openness and creativity, while providing a structure for the artistic encounter. Structurally, process drama is organised around episodic units or frames that provide the foundation for the emergent, improvised action generated by participants. The workshop form needed to allow responsivity to the participants’ impulses and responses, facilitating a co-construction of meaning by the participants, the teaching artist, and the interactive digital projections. Process drama form allows for plurality of meaning and experience through the openness of its structuration processes (Haseman 1991). Crucially, the process drama form required the teaching artist to work from a position inside the workshop form, acting as a collaborator and co-artist, catalysing aesthetic opportunities into artistic experience (Dunn 2016; Lamberton-Arcolano 2014; Bowell and Heap 2005; Neelands and Goode 2000). The teaching artist’s presence and interactions with the participants sought to rebalance the earlier assumption that ‘letting things flow’ and the technology alone would produce a quality experience for young participants.

In keeping with the process drama form, a sequence of frames was injected into the workshop. The curation and sequencing of the frames created a flow of artistic skills and an emotional arc to the workshop experience. The technology’s scenes and interactive features were organised into workshop frames, with a projected scene and a set of programmed interactions providing the central focus of each frame. In opposition to initial approaches, where the projected scenes were allowed to run, the workshop structure had pauses between the projected scenes during which the teaching artist taught the participants movement skills, emotionally engaged them with narrative points (such as a bushfire and helping save koalas from extinction), provided artistic inquiries and facilitated reflection.

Each workshop frame followed a repeatable structure that strengthened the workshop form, leading to more focused action and engagement from participants. The form was further strengthened through the addition of repeatable cycles of artistic inquiry inside each frame of the workshop. The repetition of inquiry cycles fuelled artistic curiosity and exploration while also providing a sense of certainty. The repetition of inquiry cycles provided security in an environment of unfolding possibilities. The sense of chaos that had undermined the initial experience was now by the fifth workshop quietened, promoting and ultimately achieving a meaningful, artistic encounter for the workshop participants.

Artistic inquiries

Artistic inquiry is a way of problem solving and making sense of experience through the creative process using artistic methods (Hervey 2000; McNiff 2017). Importantly, artistic knowledge and aesthetic knowing are privileged when artistic inquiry is enacted. Medeiros et al. (2018) suggest that narrowing the problem space or defining the problem assists in cultivating creative thinking and more creative solutions. The artistic inquiry offers a method of narrowing the problem space. The teaching artist’s role here is to establish the enabling constraint of an artistic inquiry posed as a challenge or curious question to be explored during the participants’ interactions with the interactive projections. The establishment of artistic inquiries scaffolds the participants’ experience, providing access to what aesthetic scholar Maxine Greene would term ‘possibility’. Here I am reminded of Greene’s (1995, 62) assertion that aesthetic encounters are not accidental or ambling occurrences. Rather, they must be configured, intentional experiences to allow participants to become conscious of ‘what is not yet, of what might, unpredictably, still be experienced’.

Throughout the workshop, the frames contained a repeatable pattern of artistic inquiry. It was a repeatable process of inquiry and reflection with the following stages:

1. The teaching artist draws participants into a community of artistic practice (through enrolment, yarn circles, communal artistic creation).

2. The teaching artist models an aspect of artistic practice (skill, method of inquiry, technique).

3. The teaching artist establishes an artistic inquiry as a curious task based on artistry.

4. The teaching artist encourages participants to pursue the inquiry (through play, experimentation, co-artistry).

5. The teaching artist facilitates the participants’ return to the community of artistic practice and a collective sharing of the inquiry outcomes.

6. The teaching artist asks curious questions to foster reflection.

The use of teaching artist modelling and co-artistry was central to the inquiry process. The positive effects of modelling experienced in Creature Interactions are not unique. Henriksen and Mishra (2015) similarly assert the positive outcomes that derive from a balance between teaching artist modelling and participants’ own practice. Critical to this process is the modelling of arts skills, including generating ideas, experimenting with ideas, taking calculated risks, and trialling and refining arts skills. A site of artistic exploration was created by the teaching artist, and the skill of artistic thinking (encompassing both creative and critical thinking) was scaffolded into the workshop form.

The artistic inquiry process described above can be distilled to three simple phases as pictured in Figure 3. Embedded in the phases of this cycle are ACER’s creative skill development framework (Ramalingam et al. 2020), which includes generation of ideas, experimentation, and evaluation of the quality of ideas. Within these phases are the divergent approaches of creative thinking as participants generate and test ideas in response to the artistic inquiry task and equally the convergent process of critical thinking as participants evaluate their ideas against the inquiry task. The final phase of each cycle included sharing and reflecting on the artistic outcomes they generated in response to the artistic inquiry task.

Figure 3. Artistic inquiry as a distilled process.

Openness was maintained during the artistic inquiries where participants were encouraged to explore freely and imaginatively to generate ideas and experiment with new and existing ideas. The certainty of structure and injection of artistry transformed the chaos in the initial workshop to artistic inquiry that enriched the experience as a whole. Through the enabling constraint of artistic inquiry, Gulla (2018) would suggest that participants were enabled to find and channel their voices. Through artistry, they were accorded a sense of agency evidenced by the children’s range of movement ideas generated and their ability to generate ideas that extended beyond mimicry (Wearing 2015). By scaffolding the experience further, creative thinking was enhanced and artistic skills deepened. Rather than inhibiting creativity, the enhanced form opened up possibility. Eisner (1996) uses the metaphor of ‘casting nets’ to describe this type of inquiry, reminding us that the quality of the experience depends on the nets we cast. The additional scaffolding of the workshop allowed better quality nets to be cast and ultimately improved the experience for participants.

It was observed by a creative working on Creature Interactions that with the injection of the enabling constraints, namely artistic inquiry cycles and process drama form, the projections no longer overwhelmed and dominated the workshop. The participants calmed down and produced strong artistic responses to the stimulus provided by the interactive projects. In the words of a creative working on the project, ‘the technology is almost just a pre-text, a backdrop for artistic and social learning together … A context for learning’. The technology no longer dominated and ‘cut short’ the experience. In short, the enabling constraints opened up the experience to greater artistry and creative engagement for the participants.

Imagination and creativity

In accordance with Manning and Massumi to foster ‘worthwhile effects’, the artistic experience requires constraints. In the context of art, these constraints are needed to create the conditions where meaningful interactions through artform can occur. An essential marker of artistry is the engagement of imagination and creativity (Torrents Martín, Ric, and Hristovski 2015). Underpinning the enactment of the artistic inquiry process is the recognition that social and emotional safety for participants is crucial for creative engagement. There is an acknowledgment that creativity is uniquely related to one’s openness to experience (PISA 2019; McCrae 1987), which is enhanced by a sense of safety and security. The predictability generated through the artistic inquiry cycle in each frame of the workshop operated to strengthen the workshop form while offering participants a sense of security.

In the initial workshop, inadequate attention had been paid to the idea that safety is required to release imagination and support creative thinking. What had previously not been given enough thought was that unpredictability and unfamiliar environments make many people, particularly children, feel uneasy or hyper-aroused to the changes around them. By offering a predictable structure, we sought to counter some of these emotional inhibitors that can affect creativity. The increased sense of predictability and safety, led to discernibly more creative work from the participants who spent observably longer time engaged in the movement-base inquiries to ultimately generate more movement ideas, and often sought to work with others to build off others’ ideas and work in teams to arrive at more collaborative movement solutions such as collectively attempting to raise the projections as high as possible, create whirlpool effects through moving in unison or experimenting with jumps. The need for structure to access imagination is supported by psychologist Vygotsky (2016) who asserts that imaginary situations always contain rules.

In effect, by enacting enabling constraints, the conditions were created for participants to engage imagination and enact creative thinking. Acts of imagination are a hallmark of an arts experience, enabling the participants to go beyond actual experience, and construct alternative possibilities in which a fragmented situation becomes a meaningful whole (Passmore 1985). Imagination’s role in imagining new possibilities, possibilities that do not yet exist, is echoed by a range of theorists (Dewey 2005; Eisner 2002; Greene 1995; Loewy 1998). Loewy (1998) positions imagination as the result of a stimulus that arouses curiosity, and once curiosity has been aroused, imagination comes into play.

In this case, the workshop sought to challenge participants to use their bodies as tools of their imaginations. Through interactions with the interactive projections, they were prompted to imagine themselves in the simulated Australian bush landscape and respond through movement. Movement prompts took the form challenging curious questions (inquiries), some inquiries inspired by the animals in the projected environment (e.g. kangaroos, koalas, swallows) and others taking the form of more abstract explorations of time, space, direction, and energy as children interacted with digital projections. Here the interactive projections were stimulus, but the teaching artist and enactment of the enabling constraints summoned forth imagination and generated artistic exploration and creative thinking. Manning (2016) would suggest that artfulness was present because of the conditions created by the teaching artist, not because of the presence of the technology. In Manning’s words, ‘Artfulness is not something to be beheld. It is something to move through, to dance with on the edges of perception where to feel, to see, and to become are indistinguishable’ (2016, 60).

The teaching artist’s dramaturgical skillset as seen in the enhanced workshop form featured the use of curious questions rather than suggestions. Also evident was the teaching artist’s ability to read the room and seek moments of aesthetic potential, then catalyse these into meaningful interactions with art and technology. Ultimately, the teaching artist’s use of enabling constraints accompanied by their capacity to model ideas and connect participants to artform skills generated artistic thinking and distributed creativity across the workshop participants. In short, the conditions created by the enhanced workshop scaffolding allowed creativity to flourish and the quality of the artistic experience was enhanced.

Conclusion

Art and creativity are often naively connected to notions of openness and freedom, but paradoxically, the seed bed of creativity and acts of imagination is constraint. Fears of constricting and stifling participants’ creativity are voiced frequently when designing large-scale intermedial arts experiences. The understandings of this article reveal that constriction is not a synonym for constraint. Enabling constraints as demonstrated in the development of Creature Interactions reveal themselves as generative and productive. It is through enabling constraints that we can quiet chaos, find footholds into arts experiences, and open up new possibilities through creative thinking. Acts of imagination and creativity can be enhanced by enabling constraints. To draw on the seedbed analogy once more, enabling constraints act as a hot house to grow new possibilities.

It is clear through the understandings gathered in the development of Creature Interactions that quality arts experiences are the result of expert dramaturgy by creatives such as teaching artists and directors. Creatives who understand the artistic potential in the experience and can tap into the innate artistic sensibility of young people. It is possible to create the conditions in which large-scale interactive arts experiences can foster quality artistic encounters of high aesthetic yield and artfulness. Key to this is an understanding that we cannot rely on objects (or in this case technology) to be an arts experience on their own. Teaching artists and directors are stewards of quality experience. As a teaching artist, the words of Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis seem an appropriate conclusion to this article.

True teachers use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).