This webinar will present a variety of approaches for using performance as a research methodology. Each presenter has used performance as a methodology of exploration and creation and will share the emergent design that evolved from their process. Using embodiment in engaging the creative process allows for a mobilization of resources including emotional, ancestral, ecological, social, spiritual, physical, cognitive, sensual, intuitive, cultural and more. Drawing upon the arts in embodied expressions and enactments are ways of "telling the story" in symbolic ways that are able to" hold and contain", to have coexisting within them complex and at times even contradictory elements. The telling of stories and the expression of personal narratives through a wide variety of art forms to a community of witnesses can be a powerful experience for all involved and contributes to new ways of knowing and engagement.

 

Performance as research then becomes a 'mediating moment' and serves as a bridge between worlds of the known and not known as it emerges into form.

  

We are in that moment, flooded with a kind of deep knowing- the recognition perhaps of something we might always have known - a feeling of the rightness of that moment- of an internal kind of knowing- a declaration of faith in the creation.

  

Rilke writes: 

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly." 

   ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God