Author: performinginforming.uk

Vipavinee Artpradid

12 February 2019

A core element in VisAbility’s 4-day programme is the public announcement performance on the first day. Former participants and the VisAbility team perform a dance in a public space to get people curious about the programme. Afterwards, they give out flyers about the programme, inviting community members to come and check it out the following day. What I love most about public outdoor performances is the unplanned ‘choreography’ that goes on with the audience. The spontaneity of coming together through dance is beautiful to experience and be a part of.

At about 1 pm we all got in a van to travel to Kokkadicholai village where we then spent some time observing VisAbility’s rehearsals for the performance later that day. Watching rehearsals provides a different kind of insight into the performers. It is another aspect of ‘audience research’ that can definitely be studied more!

At around 4 pm we traveled to the main road and the researchers did some additional baseline surveys in pairs to get a sense of conducting baseline surveys. Two of the researchers had already conducted a baseline survey the previous 2 days.

The first performance took place with a crowd of people, livestock, and vehicles forming around the performers and extending into the middle of the road. Afterwards, the researchers spread out and talked to audience members using the methods we had discussed. As the audience got a sense of what our research team was doing, some people showed non-verbal language that clearly invited us to come and talk to them, some preferred to walk away, some came closer to listen to our interviews with their family member or friend, while others decided they would rather observe from a distance. Well done to our researchers for expertly maneuvering the cultural and social minefield!

A second public announcement performance took place up the same road and this time an even larger crowd formed. There were plenty of audience members for the research assistants to approach! It was particularly encouraging that many people were interested in participating in a focus group. What struck me about the community was how friendly and approachable everyone we talked to was. They openly shared their experiences and really appreciated what we were doing. Field research can sometimes be extremely challenging in terms of responsiveness, but the community made this experience very enjoyable and heart-warming.

Vipavinee Artpradid

12 February 2019

As an audience researcher for the performing arts, you can guess I got pretty excited when Dr. Hetty Blades, Co-Investigator of the project Performing Inclusion, asked if I would like to join the team in Sri Lanka to help with the audience experience data collection. This was in view of the parallels between my PhD research at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE; Coventry University) and the project, both of which explore how dance affects audience understandings and perspectives towards disability. I had once engaged dance as a form of activism and self-empowerment to facilitate the questioning of gender roles and expectations by audiences and teachers, so VisAbility’s work particularly appealed to me. Getting to work with local researchers to ensure the sustainability of similar projects in the future made the work even more meaningful.

On Tuesday 12 February 2019, we held the first peer learning session with Sri Lankan researchers working with us on the project. The session was held at Miani Technical Institute just outside Batticaloa. It’s an amazingly peaceful place that was set up by a group of Somascan Fathers in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, which hit Batticaloa particularly hard.

The researchers working with us here are a very diverse group, ranging from a women’s rights activist to a recently graduated visual artist. Disappointingly, we don’t have anyone from the disability community though we had advertised the training through two organizations that conduct disability research.

Helena started us off by talking about VisAbility’s work in Sri Lanka since 2015 and then Lars introduced this new research project. He went on to provide a general overview of research methodology and then I focused in on audience research.

After giving an overview of the main audience research methods, we discussed the factors that determine which methodology to use. We also went through specific examples of each of these methodologies. We then went through the questionnaire and interview questions we would be using in the audience research that day, which included the version that one of the researchers had translated into Tamil.

As a group, we came up with a list of factors to consider when conducting audience research for the specific village we are working in – Kokkadicholai. We also went through informed consent and guiding questions for the brief post-performance interviews that the researchers would be conducting that afternoon.

What was perhaps most fun about the session was that the researchers would be applying what was discussed in the session the same day with the audience of a public dance performance by VisAbility participants.

The researchers also provided their cultural knowledge and expertise in translating and tweaking the surveys and questions to suit the local context.

There was also a very useful discussion about how we should talk about disability in a way that does not lead interviewees to adopt our terminology rather than their own. We all shared knowledge from our own work and lives, which is something that could not be found in any research methodology textbook!

Hetty Blades

Over the past few months, we have been working on the practitioner resource arising from our observations and findings. The aim of this resource is to provide dance and human rights practitioners with a means to experiment with drawing connections between dance and human rights, and help them to plan effective workshops. For the past ten days we have been back in Sri Lanka, sharing the draft with members of the VisAbility team and some of their workshop participants.

 

The first draft of the resource includes two sets of cards: one set features eight dance-related concepts, such as ‘self-expression’ and ‘group work,’ and the other set involves four legal empowerment-related skills, such as ‘self-confidence’ and ‘collective action’. These concepts and the links between them came directly from our observations during fieldwork. While we had in mind a few ways that the cards might be used, we were particularly interested to see how VisAbility and the participants might use these in their workshop planning.

 

In Jaffna, we worked with five participants, all of whom had been involved in VisAbility’s workshops since the start of the project, and therefore have experience of working with dance concepts and rights principles. Rashmi (from VisAbility) and Hetty introduced the toolkit, showing how it might be used to identify dance concepts that can help develop the skills needed to address discriminatory scenarios that the participants face in their daily lives. Working in small groups, the participants then experimented with how they might use it to develop their own workshops.

 

In Batticaloa, we handed the reigns over completely to Helena and Mahesh (from VisAbility), who used the cards in a slightly different way. Rather than working with specific scenarios, they introduced a third set of cards which referred to social barriers, such as ‘exclusion’. They then used them to explain how they had come up with particular exercises, showing participants how they work with the connections between barriers, the skills needed to overcome them, and the capabilities developed through dance. The participants then used the cards to plan their own exercises, mapping the connections between each area.

At the end of each workshop we held a group discussion to reflect on how they found working with the resource, whether they might find it useful when working within their communities, any criticisms and how it could be improved.

 

Below are a summary of the key findings from the workshops:

 

-Making links between dance and rights easier when framed through a social barrier/problem from the daily lives of the workshop participants.

 

-Another set of cards with guidance about preparing for workshops, context, considerations etc. would be useful.

 

-Blank cards could be used to allow participants to articulate their own barriers, skills and movements.

 

-The resource has the potential to be used for prepping workshops and within workshops, to help participants think about the links.

 

-Some of the participants were enthusiastic about the potentials of the resource for them to do this work in their own communities.

 

-Helena, Mahesh and Rashmi felt that it could be helpful in their workshop planning and their training of trainers. They had helpful suggestions about concepts and exercises that we hadn’t included, such as power, and individuals ‘conducting’ the rest of the group in order to control which movement they all performed. They also suggested using arrows and +/- signs as a way of visually demonstrating the links.

 

Next steps

Next week, Lars and Mahesh will run another workshop session in Wattala, this time introducing the resource to a group of dance practitioners, who have limited or no experience of working with rights. They will give feedback on the potential usefulness of the resource and its usability for people unfamiliar with the area. Lars will also meet individually with several disability rights practitioners in Colombo, who have not done work with dance before, to gather their suggestions on the resource – and whether they can see themselves using it in rights-awareness trainings.

Responding to the feedback from the Batticaloa and Jaffna workshops, we will generate a set of cards that describe social barriers, include blank cards so that people can add their own barriers/exercises/skills and a comprehensive user guide. This second draft will be shared at our workshop in London on 3^rd September where we will welcome further feedback before we publish the final version.

 

Lars Waldorf

Dance is a foreign discipline and they sure do things differently there. I was at my first Dance Studies Association conference in early July, watching the opening addresses when the conference organizer got muzzled mid-sentence by three eminent dance scholars, who then staged a “provocation” to challenge academic norms. I was clearly not at the Society of Legal Scholars anymore.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Dance and Conflict” and several presentations looked at the role of dance during and after war. I also picked up a copy of Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf’s edited collection, Choreographies of 21^st Century Wars (OUP 2016). It contains a valuable chapter by Janet O’Shea on how bharata natyam’s functions changed over the course of Sri Lanka’s civil war – “from radical to apolitical to conciliatory” (114).

Hetty and I were on a panel on “dance, disability, and human rights” with two of her colleagues from Coventry’s Centre for Dance Research. Charlotte Waelde (another legal scholar) spoke about dance, rights, and intangible cultural heritage. Kate Marsh talked about how the “Traces of War” project created “spaces of connection and empowerment.” When it was our turn, I confessed up-front that I was a legal scholar trying to pass as a dance scholar. I framed our analysis within Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and then left it to Hetty, the authentic dance scholar, to discuss our preliminary findings (you can download our PowerPoint slides here: performing-empowerment_july-2018). We got several good questions but the toughest came from Sara Houston who asked us about the link between the workshop participants’ increased range of movements and their increased assertiveness about rights. We acknowledged that we have been struggling to explain this. We head back to Sri Lanka in August to do more follow-up interviews with participants and that will certainly be a focus of our conversations with them.

Hetty Blades

Straight after the end of the second stage of fieldwork, the research team travelled from Batticaloa to Colombo where we hosted a roundtable event at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) to discuss our research activities and share some preliminary findings. (We chose ICES for the event because of the strong research and advocacy they do on disability rights: http://ices.lk/category/projects/diversity-and-social-inclusion/.) We were joined by 25 practitioners and academics working in human rights, disability rights, dance, art and research. We were all really pleased to have the opportunity to share our work with people from such a wide range of backgrounds.

We started by introducing the aims of the research and then VisAbility talked about their practice. We heard from Mahesh about how his experiences as a dancer and working in his local community inspired him to work with people with disabilities. Gerda talked about the aims of the workshops, the types of exercises they include and how they draw connections between the principles of ‘mixed-abled’ dance and human rights. Helena and Nirma then disussed the rights workshops, including the information the participants are given and the modes of delivery. This was followed by a screening of VisAbility’s new film about their work, which can be viewed here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbmhx28eCDg&feature=youtu.be

We then turned our attention to sharing the preliminary findings. The timing of the event, just two days after the end of fieldwork, meant that we were only at the beginning of analysing the data we have collected. However, from our interviews and observations we were already able to report some interesting changes in the participants’ feelings and behaviours. Encouragingly, we also have multiple examples of cases where participants have used what they have learnt in terms of both human rights and confidence to assert their rights, demonstrating greater legal empowerment.

After discussing the initial findings, we introduced a draft version of a resource that we have been developing to help support and stimulate practitioners who want to explore the relationship between dance and human rights. This is going to be a key outcome of the project and we are looking forward to continuing to develop it over the coming weeks and months.

We then opened the floor and received some very useful questions, spanning topics including; gender, age, sustainability, methods, ethics, intersectionality, notions of empowerment, the recruitment of participants and the future of the research. Thinking through some of these questions is really important as we move into analysing the data and writing up the findings.

In general, we found the response at the roundtable to be very positive. There seemed to be interest in the project from many people across different sectors and some promising ideas about how the findings might relate to the work that they do. This is really encouraging as we are starting to see how effective the combination of dance and human rights education can be for helping people to develop legal empowerment and hope that some of the thinking and findings from this project can underpin future work in this area.

Sri Lanka feels a long way away from where I write now, in cold, grey London, but I have kept hold of the optimism about the future of this work that I felt after the roundtable and feel motivated to find ways to support its continuation. In the meantime, we hope to share with you a recording of the event and a draft version of our resource before long. Watch this space!

Hetty Blades

At the end of last week, the research team and VisAbility gathered again in Jaffna for the next round of workshops and fieldwork. Before the workshops started we carried out interviews with some of the participants who took part in the last workshop. We asked them about their experiences over the past five months and whether they have used the knowledge and confidence they reported at the end of the workshops. The results so far have been really positive. We heard how some participants have gained access to benefits and services that they were not aware of before the workshops. Some participants also reported increased mobility and a continuing reduction in pain.

We have now finished two days of the workshops, which combine new and returning participants. Those who did the workshops before have been leading some of the exercises and supporting the new people, which has created a focused and productive atmosphere. The workshop will lead to a new performance that is scheduled to take place in Jaffna on 21 December. VisAbility are continuing to develop and test different methodologies for combining mixed abled dance and human rights education.

Since VisAbility completed their coaching here in August, some members of the group have met periodically to prepare a performance. Whilst larger questions about sustainability are on all of our minds, it’s really encouraging to see that the group have continued to work together and we are looking forward to seeing them perform during the workshop tomorrow!

 

Hetty Blades

We held our second Advisory Group meeting on 7 December. Despite the rather predictable technical problems when connecting from Scotland, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Germany and the UK, we had a very productive and thought provoking meeting.

We started with a presentation outlining how we conducted the first part of the fieldwork. We explained the structure and focus of the workshops in June and July, VisAbility’s subsequent coaching sessions, and how we went about capturing people’s experiences. Some of the methods used for doing this didn’t work as well as others, so we spent some time discussing methodology. We then outlined our preliminary findings, including positive results regarding mobility and self-esteem as well as increases in self-efficacy and rights awareness among some participants. These results were gathered before, during and directly after the workshops. As we explained to the group, our task now is to gauge whether these positive outcomes have been maintained over the past five months.

We then opened the (virtual) floor to the Advisory Group who asked some really helpful and challenging questions, ranging from our plans for sustainability to the focus of the rights workshops. One important question that arose is how we might demonstrate the link between dance and legal empowerment: were the positive outcomes we observed the result of dance, rights-awareness, or the combination of the two? This is an ongoing question for us and one that has shaped and re-shaped the methodology throughout the project to date. Another question arising from the discussion is whether the disempowerment that participants face is a result of their disability, or to do with the larger political and social-economic situation. Both these questions highlight how a control group, and/or working with a greater number of people without disabilities would have deepened the research. Whilst we had hoped to have more non-disabled participants in the research, we were not able to recruit as many people as we would have liked. Nevertheless, these questions have really helped us to think about how we approach the next round of fieldwork in December and January.

 

Lars Waldorf

A big issue for any project promising empowerment is sustainability. The first aspect of sustainability is whether increased self-confidence and self-efficacy in the workshops and performances carries over into everyday life. We won’t be able to assess this properly until we come back in December and January, but our initial, follow-up interviews paint a mixed picture. On the one hand, many participants say they now intend to apply for government benefits that they didn’t know existed before. (Of course, the real test will be how persistent they are as they encounter bureaucratic indifference or discouragement.) On the other hand, we did an interview with a disabled workshop participant whose mother and sister kept speaking for her – so much so that my interpreter lectured the participant that “you need to speak for yourself now that you have been empowered.” That didn’t have the desired effect (and it later prompted something of a lecture from me on the need to keep research and advocacy more separated).

The second, more obvious aspect of sustainability is how to continue these dance and rights workshops once VisAbility’s members go back to their homes in Colombo and Cologne. As an audience member told us after the public performance in Jaffna’s Old Park, it is not good to do this just one time. In fact, VisAbility is already trying to make its work more sustainable. It got some funding from the German government to do follow-up training in mixed-abled dance and rights awareness with selected participants from the initial workshops. Last week, I watched VisAbility do four days of training with 10 participants in Batticaloa – five people with disabilities who, it is hoped, could train others in their communities plus two teachers and three students from the Swami Vipulananda Institute for Aesthetic Studies. At the end of the training, the participants gave a rousing, outdoor performance to assembled staff and students from the Institute. The choreography had been co-created, with movements built from shared personal stories.

After the performance ended, the Institute’s Director, Dr. Jeyasankar, invited the participants to talk about their experiences of the performance in front of the audience. Many of the disabled participants spoke movingly about how they had never expected to perform publicly – let alone in front of a university audience. In a follow-on meeting, Dr. Jeyasankar talked with VisAbility and the participants about the possibility of mainstreaming mixed-abled dance into the Institute’s curriculum, as well as hosting monthly dance workshops for the participants. If these things happen, then VisAbility’s project will have left an important legacy for education and inclusion in this country.

Lars Waldorf

For the past four weeks or so, I have been watching Sri Lankans of all different shapes, sizes, and abilities practice mirror exercises and try out contact improvisation. But I have been struggling with what to look for and how to articulate what I have seen. I’ve read through Hetty’s observations, I’ve Skyped with Adam, I’ve peeked at Mahesh’s notations, and I’ve pestered Gerda with questions. But I still get distracted by aesthetic associations – seeing “Café Müller” in an improvisation with chairs or “D-Man in the Waters” after a spectacular slide along the floor. What gets lost in such undisciplined inter-disciplinarity is how to identify bodily expressions of empowerment.

Another confession: I came up with the title for this research project (“Performing Empowerment”) without ever having read Judith Butler. So, it was a happy accident to find The Judith Butler Reader (alongside a near-complete set of Tintins) in the bungalow I’m renting here in Batticaloa. So far, I have come away with two things from an initial and admittedly superficial reading of her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble. First, performativity partly arises from the lack of access to justice. Butler credits Derrida’s/Kafka’s “Before the Law” with inspiring her notion of performativity: “There the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. … I wondered whether we do not labor under a similar expectation concerning gender … an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (94). Second, human rights claims (appeals for justice) can create new performances of gender. Butler describes how her early involvement in the lesbian and gay rights movement led her to “understand how the assertion of universality can be proleptic … conjuring a reality that does not yet exist … a future-oriented labor of cultural translation” (96).

VisAbility’s public performances of mixed-abled dance are meant to challenge the performativity of disability in Sri Lankan society. But in Jaffna, they also confronted the performativity of gender. Several disabled women were reluctant to take part for fear that performing in the street would bring shame on themselves and their families. Some asked to wear masks but such complete concealment contradicted VisAbility’s core mission. Happily, a compromise solution was reached whereby the dancers wore face paint and performed inside a public park. In subsequent interviews, we learned how disability and gender also intersected with political identities. A few of the disabled women were former combatants who had wanted to maintain a low profile in order to integrate into post-war society. We now need to explore whether they see their performance in the park as something of a “performative subversion” (93) of their disability, gender, and political identities.

 

Hetty Blades

As indicated in the title of the project, the aim of this research is to ascertain the degree to which combining dance and human rights education ‘empowers’ participants, in particular people with disabilities in Sri Lanka, many of whom are living in poverty. Although legal experts might disagree with me, legal empowerment appears to have a fairly clearly delineated meaning to my novice eyes. For example, the UN General Assembly report on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and Eradication of Poverty (2009) describes it as “the process of systematic change through which the poor are protected and enabled to use the law to advance their rights and interests as citizens and economic actors” (2). However, in the arts, the term is used in a more fluid way. The breadth of the concept is something addressed in-depth by dance scholar Sara Houston in her article ‘Participation in Community Dance: A Road to Empowerment and Transformation?’ (2005). She points out how empowerment can have different meanings in different contexts, and points out some practitioners’ concerns  that the potential of the arts to lead to transformation and empowerment can sometimes be expressed in simplistic terms (167).

Whilst legal empowerment is central to the aims of VisAbility’s work, it is not the only way that they seek to empower participants. In a recent interview,  co-founder and choreographer Gerda König pointed out how empowerment can mean much more than someone exercising their legal rights, suggesting that participants facing challenges in their lives and overcoming insecurities after involvement in the workshops are markers of increased empowerment.

It is therefore important for us to have a clear sense of what we mean by empowerment in order to be able to measure it. In order to clarify the way that we are thinking about empowerment, we asked some of our interviewees what the term meant to them. Of course, there are obvious problems with the task of translating a term that has no set meaning. Nevertheless, the responses were interesting. A number of participants talked about empowerment as  being taught things or being given confidence — implying that it is external and can be learned. On the one hand,  VisAbility’s dance and rights workshops clearly aim to empower through legal education and dance experiences. However, on the other hand, this also suggests that participants are buying into ‘top-down’ notions of empowerment, in which those in positions of (em)power(ment) can teach others how to gain this quality.

Reflecting on the first round of fieldwork, the title of the project has taken on a deeper meaning. Each workshop resulted in a performance. These were major milestones for the participants, many of who were very shy at the beginning of the week and hesitant to perform in public. Our interviews revealed that the performances enabled participants to locate and demonstrate new feelings of confidence. The association of empowerment with a performative act implies something fleeting and temporary, but also repeatable. As we look to the next round of fieldwork in December, I am interested in thinking more about how various forms of empowerment might manifest as performative acts in the daily lives of the participants, and how we can reach a co-constructed understanding of what it means for them to experience and inhabit empowerment.

References

Houston, S. (2005) ‘Participation in Community Dance: A road to empowerment and transformation?’. New Theatre Quarterly, 21(2), pp.166-177. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1659/1/fulltext.pdf

UN General Assembly (2009) Report on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and Eradication of  Povertyhttp://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/reports/Legal%20empowerment%20of%20the%20poor.pdf