Choreographing collaboratories: studios of situated improvisations

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the concept of situated improvisations. Drawing from two long-term collaboratories in Australia and Canada, the discussion focusses on improvisation as method to unsettle well-trodden pedagogical choreographies in early childhood education. Through co-labouring, we propose situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice for heightening emergent encounters that disrupt the hierarchy of linearity, progress and the false notion of ‘open-endedness’ familiar in early childhood art-experiences. Collaboratories are positioned as lively studio processes that make visible multiplicitous child-material-world relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Improvisation
• ensemble
• studio practice
• art-world relations
• ethos
• choreography
• collaboratory

Introduction

Practice is a way of committing oneself to being present in a situation, no matter the outcome. In this sense it is always an act of improvisation - a willingness to confront what is unknown. (Albright 2018, 5)

In this paper, we put in conversation the studio praxis of two ongoing collaboratories – Conversations with Rain, located in Perth Western Australia on Whadjuk Noongar country at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and Fabrications, located on the territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, shíshálh, Lil’Wat, and Musqueam Nations in North Vancouver, Canada at the Capilano University Children’s Centre. In offering windows into these two major projects, we demonstrate the studio as both an idea and a place (Kind 2018; Vechhi 2010). In understanding studio as both a collaborative conceptual space and as a laboratory of doing, we first introduce the choreographies of thought (Phillips 2014) embedded in the practices of two author duets; Pollitt & Blue, and Kind & Vintimilla. Each duet has an existing long-term collaborative lineage that has propelled the conversation between these two collaboratories and directly contributed to the ‘in-forming’ (Manning and Massumi 2014) of situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice.

Jo Pollitt and Lilly Blue share a decade-long collaboration developing poetic pedagogies and responsive scores driven by multi-disciplinary processes. They work with artist practices of attention, repetition and accumulation through embodied methodologies – Jo as a dancer and writer and Lilly as artist and educator. Initially, Jo and Lilly collaborated from opposite sides of Australia (Perth and Sydney), developing artist pedagogies and simultaneously trialling scores with undergraduate dance students (Pollitt) and kindergarten children (Blue). Their multi-generational practices entwined in a shared studio that took form as both a long-distance collaboration, and as ten editions of BIG kids Magazine – a print publication for children and artists forged as ‘a co-authored work imagined through shared artistic practices of improvisation, specificity and disruption’ (Pollitt and Blue 2013, 3). From such experiments arrived a shared ethos of practice-based led research¹ (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Leavy 2015) and classroom-based studio practice primarily informed by Pollitt’s ongoing inquiry into improvisation, and the work and practices of interdisciplinary, and experimental postmodern artists (see Judson Dance Theatre, Fluxus) and Blue’s lineage of studio practitioners and the influence of Maxine Green’s concepts of Aesthetic education and ‘wide-awakeness’ (1978, 2008). This lineage of influential artists saw process-oriented methods of art making as the artwork itself in a lively continuum with the world they were part of. It is this ‘living’ and lively process that underpins the ongoing studio ethos of Pollitt and Blue and their collaboratory.

Sylvia Kind & Cristina Vintimilla also have a decade-long lineage of working together at the intersection of their work as an atelierista and a pedagogista. For more than a decade, they have been creating situated and inventive processes. The studio in this context has been shaped by a long commitment to the methodology of a/r/tography (LeBlanc and Irwin 2019; Springgay, Irwin, and Kind 2008) and forms of research-creation, where knowing, doing, and making are rhizomatically intertwined. Through this, they have aimed to activate fields of experience, design situations for artistic and pedagogical experimentation and inquiry, and provoke artistic ways of knowing, forms of thinking-doing and sympoetic becomings (see Centre for the Study of Childhood Art 2021). In this work, the impulse that keeps the studio in motion is a desire to create and invent new ways of being and thinking together.

The two author collaborations can be seen as processes of co-labouring (Vintimilla and Berger 2019) which evokes collective doings – and even strugglings – that activate processes and highlight mutuality as its intrinsic pedagogical and artistic force. Co-labouring is essential to choreographic thinking. It is moved by our desire to think pedagogical and studio collective processes as having the potential to push the taken for granted material discursive practices in early childhood education. The collaboratory as an ensemble practice, focuses on moments of mutuality and relational connection that intentionally exceed child centred relations, that typically, are the focus in early childhood experiences. Co-labouring practices are not centred on the individual subject (be that the child as learner, or the adult as teacher). Rather, the attention is in the multiple acts of responding and corresponding that emerge in the everydayness of studio work. Studio work as ensemble practice invites our attention towards gestures of intra-active compositions, where what matters is the collective doings that emerge from such intensely improvisational and relational spaces (Vintimilla and Kind 2021; Manning and Massumi 2014).

Each of the author duets harness improvisation as a complex choreography of the present (partial) moment that deliberately makes room for emergent processes. Improvisation as method offers unfixed entanglements with the vibrancy of the world and within that, specifically in these two projects, with weather and with fabric. While the author duets are necessary in establishing the lineage of collaboration in thinking with studio practice, supporting Rinaldi’s (2006) position that creativity in the adult(s) is essential in attending to the creativity of the child, this paper focuses on the collaboratory as an inherently pedagogical process of ensemble practice made visible through situated improvisations. Divided into three parts, the paper begins with an overview of studio-based situated improvisations, that follow on from and expand on the introduction of the authors collaborative practices. We then share the specificities of the two collaboratories, which are joined in the middle with a section on ethos, and conclude with a coda that brings together the scores that emerged from Conversations with Rain to invite further engagement from readers in thinking with situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice.

Studio praxis – understanding studio as both idea and place

situating - relationing -middling -inviting - delaying - gathering - listening - destabilizing - resisting - improvising - disrupting - attending - responding - moving - accumulating- curating - staying - pedagoging - ideating - – – - - - —- - - - - - - - - - – - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Our work engages the concept of studio as an artistic and pedagogical process of coming into being so that studio is in itself a creative work (Kind 2018). Studio praxis is an immersion in art practices as research (Sullivan 2005) where bodied, felt, ‘motional-relational’ (Manning and Massumi 2014, 42) perception opens rich variances in ways of knowing and being and every work is an experiment, a process of invention and thinking otherwise. In this way, we are invigorating studio as both idea and place. Both collaboratories use improvisation scores to unsettle the boundaries historically created through developmentally appropriate practices and the instrumentalization of early childhood education as a mere site for socialisation. Disrupting traditional gallery and conventional early childhood practices with poetic and non-linear situated improvisations that heighten attention and connection, we argue that studio-based pedagogical processes of ensemble practice can sensitise child–material–world relations.

Studio praxis always involves an ensemble of human and more-than-human participants in simultaneously overlapping and non-linear processes of becoming. Ensemble is a term that is useful as a deliberate interference to the apparent human-centric focus of artists’ practice as it highlights the multiplicity of relations activated and embedded in situated improvisations. Studio praxis is an ensemble of doings and becomings. As Australian indigenous knowledges (see poetic insights by writers Ellen Van Neervan and Claire Coleman for example) have long understood, and many new materialist feminist philosophers, including Deborah Bird-Rose, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway among others have demonstrated, we know that we are part of ‘nature’ and not separate bodies. The blurring of boundaries between skin and environment has been long proposed (Haraway 1990), and in this blurring, we are able to foster a nuanced noticing of relations implicit in ensemble practice. We argue that this heightening of sensitivity and attention through situated improvisations leads to nuanced experiences with materials and hence deepens experiencing with the world as an ensemble practice of relationality. For example, in Studio 1: through explorations of studio materials including tissue paper and graphite pencils, children performed improvised soundscapes of rain which were recorded and installed in a major public exhibition. Noongar poet and performer Maitland Schnaars and Jo Pollitt responded to this sound of child-made rain falling from an overhead speaker in a choreography that articulated a conversation between the Goologoolup waterways of the Yandilup area of Whadjuk Noongar lands underneath the gallery and the waterways in the body. This choreography became a dance film called kep waangkiny (water talking) (Pollitt, Schnaars, and Blue 2019).

In privileging collaborative ways of thinking together through constantly emerging conversations and creations, studio praxis allows for embodied and material pedagogies and builds on Tara Page’s work of material pedagogy as ‘relational, collaborative, and critical’ (2018, 7). Writing from two studios in flux, we attend to the choreography of ‘the complex situatedness of both affecting and being affected by the material world’ (Cooper-Albright 1997, 47) in processes of, as Manning describes ‘everyday choreographies’ and ‘space–time co-mingling’ (2012, 49).

Situated improvisations

Dance scholar and improviser Anne Cooper-Albright’s call for processes that enable readiness for emergence helps us ‘learn to cultivate a civic culture that is responsive rather than reactive to the inevitable shifts in the balance of our lives’ (2018, 16). Emergence is invited by situated improvisations that respond ‘with’ practices of the ensemble rather than responding ‘to’ as an individual. As Donna Haraway describes, situated knowledges are ‘about communities, not about isolated individuals’ (1988, 590)

Continuously crumple a piece of tissue paper to your ear and listen as a tiny sound storm emerges in collaboration of paper, hand, ear, association, presence and attention.

(Score from Conversations with Rain)

What is a score? Manning insists that ‘choreography as a generative practice must ask how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more-than the enabling constraints that set it into motion’ and this statement for us, leads to enacting situated improvisations through the use of scores as key within both studio praxis and Ethos. We draw on ‘score’ (Pollitt 2001) primarily as it practiced by contemporary choreographers with a lineage stemming from Anna Halprin and her West Coast studio that housed decades of workshops on a deck built among trees. Connected with improvisation practices of postmodern artists and choreographers, a score can be a single prompt for response (Yoko Ono 1964) or a series of instructions for elaborate choreographies (see William Forsyth, Deborah Hay, Jennifer Monson). A score is also prevalent in musical composition and notation – enabling musicians to read and ‘play’ what is written – here we think with composers such as Paulina Oliveros and Cat Hope whose scores are propositions rather than a linear ‘how to’ guide.

Scores for improvisation contain processes that support emergent encounters and disrupt the hierarchy of linearity, progress and the false notion of ‘open-endedness’ familiar in early childhood art-experiences. For us, early childhood experiences emerge at the intersection between the arts and pedagogy. As such, there is no doubt that these experiences welcomed open-endedness, yet at the same time, this is not the end goal or the feature that characterizes such experiences. For example, at the Capilano University's Children’s Centre, Authors Kind and Vintimilla have have been grappling with this tension for years. For years, they have been working to activate experiences that shift from experimentation to following a pedagogical intention to experimenting again; co-composing, inserting possibilities, losing the ‘thread’ of the work and ‘restitching’ curricular processes that emerge from the tension in the doings and undoings that have been at the heart of their work. We want to highlight this aspect of improvisation because we want to challenge what we often encounter in our conversations with educators and students: the idea that improvisation means no orientation or lack of intentionality. We approach improvisation as a creative force that activates intentionality. A score is an invitation to respond, within parameters, towards unknown outcomes. A score is generative and collaborative, and most significantly, it fosters the noticing of ensemble practice and emergent child-material relations Figure 1.

Figure 1. Tissue paper rain: Conversations with Rain studio workshop.

It is these pedagogies of ensemble practice that we now demonstrate through sharing the praxis of two studio-based collaboratories, ethos, and projects, firstly exploring Studio 1 in Perth, Australia, and then Studio 2 in Capilano, Canada.

Studio 1: Conversations with rain

Use two pencils simultaneously, one in each hand, make repeated marks on the page until it is full with rain. What if listening were an artwork in itself?

(Score from Conversations with Rain)

The impending lack of rain marks a vital moment for researching children’s relations and engagement with weather. Conversations with Rain is an ongoing multi-platform partnership between AGWA Learning at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and ECU School of Education, exploring children’s creative relations with weather through an ethos of ensemble practice that prioritises embodied imagination, emergence and relationality experienced through situated improvisations. While galleries and museums often perpetuate a white cis middle-class agenda of knowledge construction, these sites are full of artwork that directly critiques, engages and disrupts such value systems and it is with this paradoxical dynamic that we work. Deliberately eschewing didactic learning ‘about’ climate crisis, which commonly leads to increased anxiety, overwhelm, and withdrawal, the Conversations with Rain workshops and creative learning resources offer opportunities for sensing, noticing, breathing, wondering and experimenting toward open-ended imaginative outcomes. The project harnesses artists scores developed by Blue and Pollitt through experimentation with the (human)body and materials to provoke rigorously sensitised and unfixed relations with weather and art. Working with the materiality of graphite, paper, dance and sound, we ask how artists logics and poetic sensibilities challenge current paradigms on teaching ‘about’ climate change, and address what Astrida Neimanis calls for as an ‘urgent need for critical reflection on the state of our environment, on human subjectivity and actions, but most importantly, on their inextricable entanglement and how to then research this’ (Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén 2015).

The Conversations with Rain project saw the creation of over 500 small chap books, an audio guide, two iterations of a multi-generational engagement space, a child-made sound work, studio workshops, a video resource for educators, an interactive response journal, and a dance film. While over 40,000 people visited the gallery during various iterations of the Conversations with Rain project in 2019, including their experience of the sound work called Sound of Rain – exhibited as part of The Botanical: Beauty and Peril, we contain our focus here to the workshops as a way to foreground the collaboratory practices of situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice. Harnessing limitations of the art gallery space, the workshops experimented with materiality as a conductor of intimacy with weather states felt, imagined, and remembered. Over 100 young children participated in workshops where they responded to Ngarralja Tommy May’s painting Raining on Kurtal by taking part in long and slow embodied-looking processes. The workshops focus was on dissolving the binary between humans and the environment through creatively attending to the materiality of rain. To attend to this focus we worked with four questions drawn from a mutable methodology developed using artist practices of Pollitt and Blue, and The Sydney Opera House Creativity Framework (Australia Council for the Arts (2020), Cultivating Creativity: A Study of the Sydney Opera House’s Creative Leadership in Learning Program in Schools, n.d.). We use these four questions as a way to frame and create the conditions for the workshops:

What if everything begins with an embodied practice of noticing and sensing?

What if we respond with rather than respond to?

What if working with scores or frameworks makes expanding range more possible?

What if we trust not knowing how things will turn out?

What if?

These following poetic renderings recall three situated improvisations that emerged during the workshops. By turning to these three moments of ‘arrival’ we show how studio is both idea and place as well as demonstrate how each of the ‘what if’ questions engage with pedagogical processes of ensemble practice through heightening attention to notice and experience improvised and choreographic relations.

Arrival 1: What if everything begins with an embodied practice of noticing and sensing?

The children arrive barrelling into the spacious concourse responding to the large open expanse with large open movements often not welcome in reverential gallery spaces. The environment is controlled. It’s cold. There is no rain. Wide black leather benches soft to touch invite bouncing, rolling and lying down. There is ‘shhhh’ing and coralling from adults. children sit (and bounce and rock and lie and squirm and squeal), and adults stand, still, watching- prepared to oversee and facilitate rather than participate. The children want to move. The space wants them to move. The culture, and traditional pedagogies of learning want them to be still, and quiet. The lead artist disrupts the expectation of a verbal introduction followed by ‘instructions’ with a physical game which she begins playing without explanation. Moving her arms, hands and fingers, crossing her midline, tapping her face gently, inviting children to follow and respond in non-verbal ‘conversations’. Attention and attending is heightened. There is a sense of permission to experience being, connecting and communicating in alternate ways. The artist indicates to the adults that they can participate. Slowly, they do.

Arrival 2: What if we respond with rather than respond to?

A child lies down on the couch. An adult asks them to sit up. The artist follows, and lies down on the couch next to the child. All the children lie down, and look up. The ceiling design is made up of triangles, diamonds and hexagons. There is a sense of space and spaciousness. Distance. Height. Composition. Shape. Line. Concrete. Texture. Architecture. Permission is given to respond, to take risks. Trust is being built in a co-labouring of listening and co-construction of attention and the arrival collaboratory. It is a moment far outside of a ‘class plan’ revealing ensemble practice in action, making it possible for the teaching artist to notice, and amplify a shared studio ethos.

Arrival 3: What if working with scores or frameworks makes expanding range more possible? What if we trust not knowing how things will turn out?

White tissue paper is quiet on each of the chairs. Waiting. There are remnants of blue tape with random letters on the edges, traces of previous lives. Pause …  …  …  …  … . A single piece of tissue paper is lifted slowly and silently, held by the artist for some time, and then passed wordlessly from hands to hands around the circle, from person to person without making a sound. This single incrementally weathered material touched by all the hands in the room, creates a collective relationship with the material, collaboration, and a heightened sense of anticipation. Sensation of breath-holding in the passing of the page. The way it moves between hands makes the air visible – it is moved by the air. Paper as breathing. Paper as rain. Hand. Paper. Air. Hand. There is collective quiet. Collective watching. Feeling. Noticing. Experiencing. The paper. The child. The artist. The air. The environment. The silence. Thickness in the space as the material threads between us, mapping the co- motion as choreography. Attention becomes visible Figure 2.

Figure 2. Page of repeated rain: Conversations with Rain studio workshop.

Each of these arrivals make visible practice-led logics that invite ambiguous, subtle, fragile, sensitive and nuanced ways of knowing-being-learning through non-linear processes of attention. They make visible ecologies of participation (child-materials-sound-sensing-world) which through multisensory, experimental and improvised poetic pedagogies, offer an alternative to didactic learning. They disrupt singular narratives and engage multiple perspectives. These processes make it possible to sit with complexity, ambiguity and not-knowing so as to create opportunities for deepened listening, heightened attention and increased agility in responding with unstable worlds. Pockets of focused attention become portals to meaningful experience with more-than-human worlds and expand the scope of what is possible in learning and engagement in Galleries and Museums. Artist Randi Nygard offers the idea that ‘Artists don’t need to make the world poetic because the world is inherently poetic’ (2020, np); thinking with collaboratories as studio praxis decentres both artist and child and instead privileges pedagogical processes of ensemble practice that make room for generative connections with materials, place, and experience in multiple and collective ways.

Following Kind’s processual mantra, ‘In the act of making thought is being formed’, we posit pedagogical processes of ensemble practice as perpetually experimenting with experiences through everyday practices that cultivate an ethos – a world-making. Situated improvisations give form to studio processes that are pedagogically energised by in-tensions that imminently form and deform curriculum. Ingold (2013), for instance, describes improvisation as a rhythmic quality of working with the ways of the world. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, he views artists and makers as itinerant wayfarers. Their work is not iteration, a repetition or re-presentation of the world, but itineration as they join with the forces and flows of the world. Both collaboratories work with improvisation as method (Pollitt 2001; Vintimilla and Kind 2021; Kind 2018). Similar to choreographer William Forsyth’s surmise that ‘the purpose of choreography is to get back to dancing’ we harness improvisation in the ‘studio’ as a field of experience that is always in process through ensemble practice.

Stitching up an ethos

In foregrounding situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice, we ask how these dialogic processes impact pedagogical and studio work. What does this ensemble practice activate? What are the implications for ‘curriculum-making’?. Authors b & c, in particular, understand curriculum making as processes activated by acts of mutual becomings and co-compositions (Kind 2018, 2020). We are aware that this is not the common understanding that early childhood education has regarding curriculum. Indeed, curriculum in early childhood education is, more than often, understood – and referred to – as a form of ‘programming’ that gets its ‘guidelines’ from a developmentally based, egotistic and human centric swing that moves its pendulum from child centred to teacher centred (Land et al. 2020) as if all we need to do when thinking curriculum is to decide whose desires we are going to follow.

For us, curriculum making within studio practices (and in early childhood pedagogies) goes beyond this categorical opposition. We highlight curriculum as a form of making because it requires inventive procedural intentions that cultivate possibilities for mutual becomings. These mutual becomings defy and resist individualistic forms of living that are so characteristic of neoliberal agendas. They exist in ensemble pedagogies as ecologies of participation where they remain enigmatic to themselves because their singularity is hard to be determined. Yet, even in their indeterminacy, these ecologies constitute and give form to the studio: they activate its curricular processes.

The studio takes form within these encounters, through the dispositions and co-constitutions that are put in motion, attended to and nourished through the concatenation of multiple processes that, slowly, create an ethos. Here, we refer to ethos not necessarily as that which maintains a status quo or the acts of socialisation and collective binding into the brute inertia of neoliberal subjectivities. Following Cristina’s work as a pedagogista at the Capilano Children’s Centre, we conceive an ethos as what is stitched up, giving and taking form by what emerges within the curricular rhythms, rituals and intentions that, year after year, encounter after encounter, situation after situation creates a collective living processes. These processes are referred to as living processes because they create a break from the status quo and have the potential to create conditions for new ways of being and new modes of thinking. Consequently, we understand curriculum making as a form of ethos that carefully stitches a social fabric keeping the void of meaning open. In other words, it embraces its own collective indeterminacies, it does not saturate its practices with meaning or re-presentation, making sense is open to its own reconfigurations, with its difficulties, impasses and failures. This ethos emerges through the multiple creative manifestations of pedagogical and studio work whose politics is that of weakening the managerial and sovereign logics that suffocate what might be possible in early childhood education.

These multiple processes, supported by pedagogical processes of ensemble practice can be demonstrated through encounters or events named in this paper as scores. Returning to Manning ‘This ethos is not a moral category. It is a category of relation’ (2012, 143). And as Sara Ahmed suggests ‘The question of action is a question then of how we inhabit space. Given this, action involves the intimate co-dwelling of bodies and objects’ (Ahmed 2006, 52). It is with this co-dwelling and understanding that ‘relational movement is always improvisational’ (Manning 2009, 31) that we turn to improvisation as a relational method situating place children and materials in pedagogical processes of ensemble practice.

Studio 2: the fabric studio

At the Capilano University’s Children’s Centre, we have envisioned the studio as a place of experimental interplay (Kind 2018). It is an interconnected, interdependent, and resonant space embedded in the life, pedagogies, and orientations of the Centre. While materials, beauty, and aesthetics matter, the studio is not intended to be an art room, art area, artistic installation, or container for creative acts and materials. Rather than bounded by walls or a particular location, the studio is an idea, an event, a situation, and field of experience. It is a site of ideation, of working with and through ideas, materials, places, spaces, and others as we cultivate a relational space of investigating, composing and creating together. The studio seeks to activate unfamiliar and uncommon relationalities, creating conditions and inventing new relations and ways of being with others, both human and non-human. Creating a collective practice takes time as we learn to move with children’s movements and approaches, move with the rhythms, flows, and temporalities of materials and ideas, think together, compose with others, and enter a dance together. As an emergent eventful space itself inherently creative and creating and constantly becoming, it becomes a studio in its use and through relational experimentation (Kind 2018). It is a space in movement.

The projects, concerns, and ideas we engage with certainly matter, yet it is what is activated and how the studio is formed through this that draws our attention. In these choreographies, what is being made is not just artistic productions and projects, but a way of being, thinking, and creating together. In this way, the studio takes shape as a work of art might and has strong resonance with situational and socially collaborative artworks (Bishop 2006), which necessitates processes of constructing situations that ‘produce new social relationships and thus new social realities’ (13). In correspondence with Kontturi (2018), who conceptualizes art as always in process, we are immersed in art’s ‘perpetual movement’ (9) as we engage in ‘ongoing living inquiry through processes of doing, thinking, and making’ (Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin 2018, 132). We enter into thinking in motion, wayfinding, questing, and deep attention as we consider the studio as a ‘constellation of relations’ (Doherty 2009, 17) and as mobile or living architecture. Our conception of the studio as mobile resonates with the artist Do Ho Suh (Sollins, Dowling, and Tatge 2016) and his fabric constructed apartment and dwellings where places are not just physical and tangible but also malleable, porous, felt, transitory, in-movement, and metaphoric.

A/r/tographic methods

The methodology of a/r/tography helps us with this. Our studio events and practices are grounded in and shaped by art practice as research (Sullivan 2005) and a/r/tography. A/r/tography, as a form of practice-based research, is situated in the intersections of art practice-researching-teaching and grounded in the textural, tactile, physicality, and materiality of making (Kind n.d.). While it can be thought of as a research methodology, it essentially is a form of artistry and pedagogy interested in the production of something new (Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin 2018). As Leggo and Irwin (2013) write, to be engaged in a/r/tography is to be immersed in continuous processes of becoming. Movement and processual becomings are inherent in the intersections and interactions of artistic practice, researching, and pedagogy and in the perpetual movement and vibrations in-between. In this way, the studio needs the intra-actions of artistry, pedagogy, and inquiry and cannot be thought of as a separate artistic event or space. As Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin (2018) describe, ‘the a-r-t are contiguous, reverberating through movement alongside one another’ (132) so that the approaches, methods, productions, are in constant movement. ‘art practice creates the conditions necessary for exchanges between materials, knowledge, objects and bodies to occur. Thus, the artist is engaged in a dynamic process of becoming, an exchange that sets things in motion’ (LeBlanc and Irwin 2019, 4)

A/r/tography invites continuous processes of becoming pedagogical (Leggo and Irwin 2013), and learning to see, to attend, to notice, and to respond. A/r/tographers are situated in the midst of researching, living and inhabiting the questions, and in the processual emergences of knowledge in formation. It is situated in the events of thinking-doing (Manning and Massumi 2014) and in the making, emergences, and processual becomings. And what is being made is not just art processes and productions, but we are formed along with the studio and ways of being, living, creating, and thinking together. Thus, in the studio, the a-r-t of a/r/tography is fluid and interchangeable. The studio is configured as an entangled, intersectional space where educators, atelierista, children, materials and ideas move together in fluid ways, learning from and with each other, cultivating life-living pedagogies (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2020), engaging in art practices as a form of research, in correspondence with materials and with each other, collectively immersed in living inquiries. These are not separate elements or roles joined together, rather intra-active becomings. This does not situate ourselves, children, or educators individually as a/r/tographers rather as a collective and community of practice, collectively immersed in the exchanges and movements. What takes shape is a living ecology and choreography of practice (Vintimilla and Kind 2021; Kind 2018), where together we are immersed in expectant and affective becomings, open to the new, unthought, and unseen.

Fabrications

We are guided by life-living pedagogies (Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2020), which instigates a processual curriculum of being, becoming, and co-composing. In this, we consider the materials potentialities and how the materials and processes work with these pedagogies and enable particular ways of being and thinking together. Fabric, in particular, assists us with this.

The studio is intentionally curated so that elements play together and act on and with each other and has an interactive aliveness even before children and educators enter the space. Long lengths of translucent fabric in hues of forest and moss greens, turquoise and sapphire blues, muted greys in the colours of the west-coast skies, white and light grey that resonate with the west coast fog, and soft reds hang over wooden dowelling suspended from the ceiling. The colours and luminosity of the fabric echo with the lengthening soft spring light and with the grasses, shrubs, flowers, and forest visible through the large floor length windows. The fabric has a porous, revealing, and inviting quality, activating dialogue and mediating encounters. The flight-like, ephemeral, transitory, and fluid nature of this fabric resonates with moving bodies, the moving air, the fluidity and transformability of ideas and emerging compositions, each piece enveloping and entangling others as each length is more than one child can easily work with. Even in enclosures and wrappings, its translucent quality allows for visibility and connection. The material itself is always in movement, floating, wrapping, covering, and entangling, and it ‘resist[s] formation long enough to allow us to see the potential of worlds in the making’ (Manning 2016, 15). Collectively, we are immersed in material intra-actions, inhabiting, dwelling in the entangled and interwoven ideas and speculations.

We consider acts of adapting, improvising, responding, moving with materials, children, and others, so that curriculum-making becomes a symbiotic process, and an improvisational journey of moving with each other and with the propositions that we surround ourselves with as well as what these propositions produce. Similar to Kontturi (2018), we think of these collaborations as ecologies of participation that are embodied, relational, enactive, performative, and material. This generates co-constituted and mutual becomings, where the way one comes to know something and what can be known are entangled relational material co-becomings (Kontturi 2018).

Pedagogical processes of ensemble practice that build on these relational material co-becomings are revealed in both Studios 1 and 2. Both studio collaboratories practice improvisation as a method for developing scores and platforms of relation (Manning and Massumi 2014) to support and provoke the in-forming of situated improvisations.

Coda: Score for continuing in the middle of where you already are

-time- tone-temperature-texture-place-pace- - - - - - - - - - - - -

By bringing two long-term author duets and two collaboratories together in conversation across countries and stitching them together with shared ethos, we have relied on shared practice-led logics and indeed attempted to propel the process of writing as studio praxis in itself. Thoughts in-forming continue to thicken and disperse as this quartet of co-authors experience and grapple with finalising this paper through what is an ongoing process. Both collaboratories understand studios as both place and idea; and between the studios sits an ethos that connects the two projects. Together the two collaboratories demonstrate how improvisation as method harnesses scores to activate and invite pedagogical processes of ensemble thinking, being, and responding. Through opening windows into two studios and their pedagogical processes of ensemble practice, we hope to have revealed something of the lively workings of collaboratories. Particularly we have offered insights into how interdisciplinary, embodied, and practice-led approaches can deepen engagement, lead to more responsive child-material-environment relations, and enliven connection as we continue to find new ways to move and listen with an increasingly unstable world:

Cup your hands over your ears,           pause.

   Sea,  cave,  sense,  time;  distinction between ear canal and world      dissolve.    spaces connect human and non human bodies –       imaginative, material, feeling, relational – expanding capacities for listening             this is    sound with the volume turned down      or         very

      quiet          ‘ ‘ ‘ . ‘.’, ‘ ..

                    ‘ ‘’ .’ ..;..’ ‘

                 ‘; ‘ .; ‘       r a i n

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Practice-based practice-led practice-as-research are all terms worth defining and many authors have done this previously. For this paper, we use practice-led and understand it to be the Australian version of the Canadian term research-creation.