The Pedagogy of Recognition Dancing Identity and Mutuality
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
RAISA FOSTER The Pedagogy of Recognition Dancing Identity and Mutuality ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of the board of the School of Education of the University of Tampere, for public discussion in the Auditorium Pinni B 1100 Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere, on November 24th, 2012, at 12 o’clock. UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE ACADEMIC DISSERTATION University of Tampere School of Education Finland Copyright ©2012 Tampere University Press and the author Distribution Tel. +358 40 190 9800 Bookshop TAJU [email protected] P.O. Box 617 www.uta.fi/taju 33014 University of Tampere http://granum.uta.fi Finland Cover design by Mikko Reinikka Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1779 Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis 1253 ISBN 978-951-44-8957-0 (print) ISBN 9978-951-44-8958-7 (pdf) ISSN-L 1455-1616 ISSN 1456-954X ISSN 1455-1616 http://acta.uta.fi Tampereen Yliopistopaino Oy – Juvenes Print Tampere 2012 Acknowledgements In this artistic and educational research journey I have been accompanied by a group of inspiring people to whom I would like to extend my gratitude. I thank my supervisor, Professor Eero Ropo, at the School of Education of the University of Tampere. I am immensely grateful for his reply to my email from Australia in 2006 and his encouragement to send my research proposal to the doctoral programme of education. I have enjoyed our inspiring conversations about identity, both on a professional and a personal level. I am also deeply grateful for Eero’s understanding in letting me do this research in my own way. I pledge my gratitude to Professor Veli-Matti Värri at the School of Education of the University of Tampere. I greatly appreciate Vellu’s empathetic and enduring support throughout this long and, in places mentally wearing, journey. He has also been my main source of guidance on theory related to phenomenology. My gratitude extends to other professors and my fellow postgraduates at the School of Education. I am also deeply grateful to Virginia Mattila for patiently correcting the English language of my manuscript. I take substantial pleasure in being positively challenged by encouraging yet observant pre-reviewers’ comments by Professors Bernadette Baker (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Juha Varto (Aalto University). I have been privileged indeed to receive advices from such highly respected scholars. This research would not exist without the inspiring Katiska team. So the biggest thanks to composer Maija Koskenalusta, performers Mikael Hautala, Rasmus Järvenpää, Valtteri Lahti, Aimo Laitamo, Lauri Mäkinen, Jere Riihinen, lighting designer Jere Mönkkönen, sound technician Jukka Ruostila and video technician Antti Kuosmanen. Thanks also to all of those (musicians, photographers, ticket sellers, audiences, reviewers, supporters, festivals, etc.) who have been an important part of making Katiska flourish. In 2005 when I was studying dance animateuring in Australia, Professor Don Asker at the School of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) was an important source of creative insight on practice as research. While thanks are due to Don for my initial turn to art-based research, I am grateful also to Helen Herbertson and many other lecturers at VCA and humble before the professional extent of their expertise in arts. Thanks also to all my fellow postgraduates at VCA, especially Bagryana Popov, Jordan Beth Vincent and Marlies Weeting. 3 For financial support for my academic research practice I thank the University of Tampere. I also appreciate the financial support for the creative process as well as the production and touring of Katiska from the organisation of Tampereen taidekasvatus, the Björkqvist Foundation, the City of Tampere, the municipality of Kangasala, the Arts Council of Pirkanmaa, the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Pirkanmaa region), the Regional Dancer Center in Central Finland and the Regional Dancer Center of Eastern Finland. I am deeply grateful to all my students, past and present. My gratitude extends to my friends and colleagues in Kangasala, Tampere and Mikkeli who have patiently listened to my long monologues on art, education and research, especially Heidi Vartiainen and Hilma Heikkinen. Special thanks also to Michael Foster for introducing me to another, Australian, culture. The new perspective on education, arts and life itself changed me profoundly, both personally and professionally. The support from my family extends beyond gratitude. My parents Tarja and Tapio Tarvainen have given me the gift and understanding of combining enthusiasm with hard work, both much needed for an animateur–researcher. I greatly appreciate the IT support which I have received from my brothers Antti and Jussi Tarvainen, but also all the challenging discussions I have immersed myself in with them and their partners Nina Riutta and Kati Kaunisto. I present my warmest thanks also to my sister Terhi Borg and her family, Andrew, Ruben and Rasmus, in Australia. Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my beautiful partner, Maiju Kekki, who has been more than patient and understanding. Thank you for the endless process of listening and discussing as well as reading and commenting my manuscript. Most of all, thank you for sharing and celebrating the journey of our life – as it is in this and every moment. 4 Abstract This dissertation describes an educational space in which questions of identity as well as mutuality are brought to the fore. It concerns a dance animateuring project called Katiska, which started in summer 2007 in Finland. Dance animateuring refers to the practice of artistic creation, where the steps of the dancers originate not from a choreographer, but from collaborative improvisatory work by the performers under the guidance of an animateur. Dance animateuring means dance activity which aims to celebrate every person’s own natural mode of expression through movement. Therefore the purpose of dance animateuring is not to achieve mastery of any particular dance technique or style, but rather to discover everyone’s own expressing, moving, living body. On the other hand, through body and movement, a specific theme can also be investigated. By increasing body awareness, dance animateuring aims to dig deeper into the means of identity and self and by doing so, support the growth of humanity. Dance animateuring intertwines the body and the mind; therefore it is an attempt to return to the understanding of humans as holistic beings. The artistic exploration was built on a marked interest in the emancipation of the suppressed voices of young men. It was guided by the question: What would these young men tell about themselves? The answer to this question was presented through movement and music in Katiska, which premiered on 8 May 2008 in Tampere, Finland. The practice-led research journeyed through various phases of improvisation, performance, discussion, analyses, reading and writing, on its way to answering to this question: How does dance animateuring creates a space for recognition; understood broadly as identification, self- recognition and mutual recognition? First the book presents the theoretical background for the bodily-practice-based inquiry. The whole practice is built on a phenomenological understanding of the body as lived. The ontological and epistemological position is mostly derived from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Then the book moves on to the methodological discussion and proposes a new practice based method, eragraphy, which was inspired by the North American new paradigm qualitative research methodologies such as a/r/tography and crystallization. I coined the term eragraphy by combining the words education, research and animateuring. The name eragraphy also refers to a description of an era. In other words it is, borrowing from ethnography, a “thick” description of a chosen aspect of human existence – in this case of recognition – in the context of postmodern era. The eragraphical practice requires the mind of 5 a nomad, the willingness to wander about – especially on the pathways of the previously unknown. Second, the book presents a new pedagogical theory, the pedagogy of recognition. It mainly follows Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition which offers a template to organize more analytically what is practised intuitively; the experienced, the artistically initiated and the empirically collected material of this research. The section proposes a change in pedagogical thought on three levels. First, it proposes an attitude of improvising instead of producing. In other words, it claims that new understanding can occur when we shift our action from knowing to recognizing. The second section of this chapter describes the concepts of identity as narrative and performative. It also presents self-recognition as a way of recognizing personal capacities and responsibility. In the third section the course of recognition ends with mutual recognition, where the questions of love, justice and esteem are brought to the fore as well as the conceptions of alterity, ambiguity and dialogue. The section also proposes a new concept, I-lessness, the disappearance of the object self, which can be experienced in dancing with others. This dissertation does not aim to promote dance as its main goal; dance is not the object of the examination, but rather an example of various possible venues, in which individuals can meet in the spirit of recognition. In this research, dance has served as one of the methods of collecting research data (the dance