Bridging the City: Connecting Art, Performance Design, Environment and Education

Abstract

This study explores knotworks and networks within art, participatory performance design, the environment and education specialists and institutions within the case-project “Nomadic Radical Academy”, realised in 2019 and 2020. The novelty of the research lies in its investigation of how international collaborations impact the performance pedagogy project at the local level. The project bridged a wide spectrum of actors in order to design an interactive space and participatory infrastructure involving a diverse variety of stakeholders. The projects were created by the author of this paper and involved the art venue Gallery Meno Parkas in Kaunas, local Kaunas schools and environment-friendly local art initiatives, families in Kaunas, Kaunas Municipality, The Lithuanian Council for Culture, a performance designer and international artists from the Baltic-Nordic region. The author created the performative milieu in the gallery space with the intention of educating children and young people about the environment and climate change through performance pedagogy methods. The research question is as follows: How are the knotworks and networks created during the planning and realisation of the international performance pedagogy project, and how do they target the local community and influence projects locally in real-time? The study materials were collected by arts-based methods and analysed by utilising reflexive research. The data collected during the planning and implementation phases are the author’s notes and reflections, notes from feedback and discussions with the involved artists and photos and videos. This research can be valuable to educators, performance designers and artists interested in knotwork- and network-building. This research focused on the planning and realisation of the project by involving international performance professionals in site-specific projects designed for local communities.

Arts-Based Action Research on Enhancing Children’s Creativity Through Affect Within Participatory Performance Art and Performance Pedagogy

“…The author of this paper used a NeuroSky EEG device to trace the alpha, beta, and theta waves of her live brain activity (Griniuk, 2020a(Griniuk, , 2021 and analyze moments of relaxation and concentration during her interactions with the children. The data were gathered periodically during the performance in 2019 and are part of ongoing research at the University of Lapland (Griniuk, 2020b(Griniuk, , 2021.…”

“…ABAR takes an exploratory and developmental approach that facilitated cycles of research, in the case of the "Nomadic Radical Academy", from the idea of the pilot project to the artifacts of the performance and the evaluation (Jokela, 2019). A cyclic view of research allows for the possibility of reshaping the research approach, evaluating and developing the research objectives in the process (Jokela, 2019); for example, the study of the "Nomadic Radical Academy" consisted of three cycles: the first cycle focused on research regarding network-building strategies during performance pedagogy projects with children (Griniuk, 2021); the second cycle focused on children's interactive design within art; and the third cycle focused on the performance aims of the article, particularly on how to enhance children's creativity through participatory performance. Knowledge is gained through pilot projects (in this case, during the "Nomadic Radical Academy"), and ABAR facilitated an exploratory approach to the study using data gathered through affective ethnography.…”