Sleep of Reason: critical reflections on performance arts-based research as psycho-social commentary in expressive arts therapy praxis

ABSTRACT

This arts-based case study is a critical reflection on how performance art can be used as psycho-social commentary. It is an attempt to amplify arts-based inquiry using critical understandings of diverse and inclusive meaning making in expressive arts praxis and psychology. It examines the use of performance art in the expressive arts to understand psycho-social proximity to and complicity in dehumanization and structural racism. This arts-based research exists in the intersections of culture, race, the arts, and social commentary with the goals of learning how it facilitates awareness of psycho-social justice and how current uncritical expressive arts and psychology praxis and practitioners can perpetuate structural racism and racial trauma. It asserts performance art can be utilized as a catalyst for psycho-social transformation in creative ways.

KEYWORDS:

• arts-based research
• critical race theory
• expressive arts therapy
• performance art
• photo therapy
• racial trauma
• social justice
• arts-based inquiry

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the free production of Sleep of Reason at Lesley University would not have been possible without the budgetary support from the Office of the Provost, the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the graduate Division of Expressive Therapies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angélica Pinna-Perez

Angélica Pinna-Perez is a core faculty member at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences in the Expressive Therapies Division. She has worked as an actor/creator, therapist, and social action activist engaging in community arts and community based mental health counseling since 2003. She has worked artistically, clinically, and in advocacy in the United States and abroad with an interest in transnational/transcultural and social justice expressive arts based work in the context of globalization. Scholarly interests are in the application of expressive arts in the service of understanding, reframing, and making meaning of suffering, trauma and oppression in individual and social contexts. She identifies as a scholar-activist-artist and is committed to exploring how the study of racialized social structures can be practically relevant and foster clinical individual and social transformation using the expressive arts. She also has a private practice in Cambridge.

Rachel Frank

Rachel Frank is a visual artist working with sculpture, theater, and performance. She received her BFA from The Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from The University of Pennsylvania. Frank is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, and The Franklin Furnace Archive. She has attended residencies at Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Sculpture Space, The Women’s Studio Workshop, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her performance pieces have been shown at HERE, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Select Fair, and The Bushwick Starr in New York City, The Marran Theater at Lesley University, and most recently at The Watermill Center in collaboration with Robert Wilson. Currently, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.