Experience and the artist's body: resisting the Uber-artist construct in socially engaged performance

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This was a conference entitled ‘Embodied Performance and Social Change’, hosted by the Centre for Popular Education, Sydney University of Technology.

2. Practice that targets agency tends towards activities, exercises and approaches that do not necessarily foster empathy in participants. While a full critique of empathy is beyond the scope of the paper, consistent across the domains of psychology is the claim that one function of empathy is the promotion of social interaction. Specifically, social psychologists place empathy as a contingent motivator of prosocial behaviour (Decety and Meyer 2008).

3. This is also evident in the practice of many colleagues. In order to create distance between what might be his own individualist (ultraistic) aims, James Thompson (2008) shifted roles dramatically – in social terms, this might be thought of shifting from host to guest. That is hosting the theatre experience, to being guest in a community.

4. Philosopher Johnson (1999, 84) opens terrain for discussing ‘the felt quality of our experience … where description brings awareness of how our experience “feels” to us and how our world reveals itself’ (Johnson 1999, 84).

5. I was fortunate to contribute to the development of the sector, and the resilience of graduate practitioners over the 8 years at University of South Wales from 2006 to 2014. Research on this work is published in the Asian Journal of Drama Education (Dennis 2012).

6. Reclaiming the Shrew was a short-term residency funded to bring a physical performance approach to adapting Shakespeare with disenfranchised young people in the Wales valleys. Key objectives included engaging young people, building capacity in local arts workers working across social contexts, community and university. Young people repeatedly spoke about how the diversity in the participant population (young people, university students, graduates, visiting artists, and local arts workers) made the experience real.