Freddie’s PGCERT Blog

The website (https://religiousliteracy.myblog.arts.ac.uk/research/religion-and-belief-in-higher-education/) offers a plethora of resources, text, video and audio based, which highlight the complexity of this subject both in education and in the arts.

The complexity is not just due to the nuances between the meaning of religion, spirituality and philosophical approaches to life, the complexity of this subject has also to do with how it intersects with other aspects of one’s identity be it gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and economic condition.

I picked a few pieces from the website to get a sense of this complexity.

Reina Lewis’s (2019) discussions on fashion with speakers from diverse faiths, clearly show how intertwined the history of culture and cultural expression (in this case through fashion) is with religion, identity and politics.

The Shades of Noir (2016) event Race, Religion and Free Speech focuses on the link between religion and cultural identity, which unfortunately in this case reveals the discriminatory portrayal that the media paints of Muslim folk, linking this people and brown people in general to terrorism; creating extremely dangerous stereotypes. This piece also points out the need to work harder toward religious literacy and how if social media has been a helpful vehicle for this, education must do more.

Sinclair’s (2015) article on artists challenging religion through art is also interesting in this context as it highlights how powerful art can be in challenging religious practices and ideas, which no longer are applicable nor acceptable in contemporary society.

Sabri’s et al (2008) article on faith in academia points out the complexity of the interaction between religious faith and academic study. The article is focused on theology students and explains how important it is to explore the interaction between academic and existential realms. However, perhaps even more so, for students that are not studying theology, but are following a religion and are enrolled in art courses, this interaction should be focused on, especially given the transformational nature of studying artistic subjects, which tap into creativity and existential questioning.

So, applying this new found knowledge or perhaps deeper questioning, in light of these articles, to my own teaching practice is no easy task. I feel that I need to work on developing some kind of exercise that can encourage students to become more religious literate (or at least check that they are) and inclusive of religion, spirituality and philosophical approaches. I don’t think this can be a one off exercise though. I feel it needs to be an approach, a practice that feeds an appetite to be curious, to be respectful and to want to learn from one another.

In terms of students’ work, I’d like to think they’d be able to feel free to incorporate their belief in their work. I’d like to encourage that as a way to break stereotypes, a way to understand more profoundly the reason behind certain customs and a way for those of us who follow others, to be more respectful from our new understanding.

Some questions still arise though:

• In the relationship between religion and art: does art question religion or is it a vehicle to persuade toward it, albeit a different one? What should we encourage and should we as educators?
• In the relationship between religion and education: should we support students in their spiritual development, should we encourage them to question their beliefs or just respect the ones they have?
• In the relationship between religion and race and/or gender/sexual identity: how much do we assume about race and religion and how damaging is it to those that follow that religion? How can we encourage students to investigate further before making gross assumptions?

References:

Lewis R., 2019  Faith & Fashion: Collecting Arab Dress, Chronicling Multiple Faiths at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/research/current-research-and-projects/fashion-design/faith-and-fashion (Accessed on: 23rd May 2022)

Sabri, D., Rowland, C., Wyatt, J., Stavrakopoulou, F., Cargas, S., Hartley, H. (2008) Faith in academia: integrating students’ faith stance into conceptions of their intellectual development at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13562510701794043

Accessed on 25^th May 2022)

Sinclair, L., 2015 The Groundbreaking artists challenging religion through art at https://www.dazeddigi(2015)tal.com/artsandculture/article/28290/1/the-groundbreaking-artists-challenging-religion-through-art (accessed on 24th May 2022)

Shades of Noir, 2016 Race, Religion and Free Speech at: http://shadesofnoir.org.uk/race-religion-and-the-influence-of-media/ (accessed on 24^th May 2022)

UAL, 2022 Religion, belief and faith identities in Learning and Teaching At https://religiousliteracy.myblog.arts.ac.uk/research/religion-and-belief-in-higher-education/ (accessed on 26^th May 2022)

This article brought back lots of memories of how I was brought up.

Even before I started working for money, I was imprinted with the utmost sense of duty. This meant that I never did what I actually felt like, but always what I thought I was supposed to do. Everything was work: school, sports, music, reading, etc. Everything had to be done thoroughly and produce the best result possible before I could even consider having some light fun. This approach of course carried on when I started working: I had to fulfil all expectations first, complete the to do list, accomplish all the work. As Seth explains: “taking care of myself was not work […] taking care of myself was synonymous with avoiding “work” or being lazy or somehow ditching out on the sacred activity of capitalism: working for money or prestige or some related benefit”, which in my case was also my parents’ expectations.

Although it is taking me a very long time, and I am still not great at it, I have come to the understanding that taking care of myself, not only is an absolute bare necessity, but it is part of work and without it work itself would suffer. Without taking care of ourselves, without healing, resting and taking time to understand our needs, our strengths and weaknesses, we cannot operate to our full potential.

Berg and Seeber argue against this constant rush, this pressure to do more and faster. They explain (2016, 26) how: “periods of escape from time are actually essential to deep thought, creativity and problem solving”. They also encourage us (2016, 28) to fulfil the need “to protect time and a place for timeless time and to remind ourselves continuously that this is not self-indulgent, but rather crucial to intellectual work”.

In my practice it is difficult to find the time to heal. Especially when working as Production Manager, I often find myself sucked into the vortex of work: I feel the responsibility to support students’ events, ensuring students are safe, feeling supported and that can go on stage and perform in front of their friends, family, industry professionals being as successful as they can. So I end up working constantly.

This approach is of course not sustainable and brings on burnout, which in turn could potentially lead me not to be able to support students as well as I could.

I am learning to draw the line (admittedly I often regress…) and stop when due to and go rest, fulfil my hobbies, physical and social activities and generally re-charge my batteries.

This is also what I try to show the students. I try to treat them with empathy and kindness and encourage they do the same with themselves, to take good self-care, because no one else can do it for them.

References

Berg, M. and Seener, B.K. (2016) The Slow Professor. Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy Toronto: University of Toronto Press

This journal was absolutely jam packed with super interesting, useful, inspiring information. I read it a couple of times (yes, the whole thing!) and I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface!

I found the “practice-based social practice” approach of Shades of Noir (SoN) quite invigorating. The push toward “more deeds and less words” is sacrosanct and it encouraged me to get my act into gear and go do something positive instead of just thinking about it.

In a Freirean pedagogical context where a dialogic approach of teaching is promoted, it also very much rings true to embrace the: “Need for intergenerational discussion, criticism, a space to practice safely self-care and articulate self-determination in order to liberate ourselves from the struggles of oppressive structures, both in education and society”.

I must admit, I didn’t realise there were so many different models to define disability by and how the “New Radical Model” takes the “Social Model” a step further by being concerned not just with disability rights, but with disability justice. “Disability is not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives ”(World Health Organisation). The social model doesn’t take into account (SoN, 2020):

• The dual needs of people with learning disabilities (it presupposes a solely outward imposition from wider society
• Impairments that are related to social circumstances, such as economic poverty or malnutrition
• Wider intersectionality within the experience of disabled people of colour

I also found very positive to think of disability as part of human diversity vs a social tragedy (Withers, 2012).

The article I spent longer on was the interview with Maria Ashodi. Having worked in performance my entire life and quite a few times with aerial artists, this article really opened up a whole other world, a very different point of view, which I hadn’t engaged with before.

The tradition of Biwa Oshi was mind blowing to me. The idea of blind travelling artists travelling throughout Japan making a living through art was incredible and even more so, considering they would prepare a piece for 5 years, audition with it to a panel of blind audience and wait for a verdict that would change their entire life!

Ashodi’s Extant company was just as inpiring: a company led by BAME people who aimed at redefining the artistic space around visual impairment and disability. Ashodi explains how creating access for visually impairment is at the heart of their work and accessibility is not tagged at the end. Here I realised how my feeling proud for offering audio description of shows to people with visual impairment, was actually not something to feel so proud of, it was an arrogant assumption that people without visual impairment should have the right to choose what to show to those that had one. This disempowers the performers and distances the audience. In an Extant piece is the performer his/herself that describes the movement as part of the piece. The audience can then be part of the piece more profoundly, instead of hearing the disembodied voice of the non-disabled describer, through their headphones.

When thinking of it from a Production Manager’s perspective, a piece featuring visually impaired aerial artists, poses great challenges: how can I make it safe? How can I ensure the artists know where they are when in the air, how do they communicate to their riggers at height how can I ensure they will not make false moves and have an accident? I appreciate that Ashodi’s main goal is to enable people with disabilities to do the same things as people without disabilities, but how can we ensure safety when it comes to something so dangerous?

In my practice I need to be very careful about how I risk assess these pieces and even more so when they involve greater danger. Perhaps I would first need to talk to the artists to see what they need to feel safe, what precautions they are used to having, what I can do to ensure they feel safe and that they are actually safe. I also need to ensure I can provide these artists with the same opportunities I would provide artists without visual impairments. Perhaps I just need to consider the situation as it is, without assuming that being able to see counts a hazard mitigating factor (makes the activity less dangerous). Perhaps once I put in place safety measures for people with visual impairments, those same measures have to become the norm for all.

When it comes to student work, I need to encourage students to explore diversity in their work in as many combinations as possible. As Ashodi states: “Diversity [is] a place of genuine exchange that can become part of a creative force. It is equality and opportunity at every level, at leadership level as well, to challenge the decision makers and their roles too”. So student work needs to explore this idea of exchange, of challenging decisions, of making art accessible to all, performers and audiences.

This could happen if an open dialogue is established, if safe place is available, if possibilities are open, if barriers are broken, if even Health and Safety becomes an environment where positive solutions are found instead of one where hazards are eliminated.

This article helped me understand something I didn’t know had a definition: “Invisible Disability”. Too often we assume to know people, we assume that what we see is actually true, we take for granted that our evaluation of people is accurate. Too often we are presumptuous and disrespectful. Too often we don’t look with what Mindfulness would define as “beginner’s eyes”, we rely on our experience, culture, notions thinking we know, but actually we don’t and we don’t even make the effort to find out.

I found very interesting how the artist Barokka uses paint on her body, during her piece, to make her pain visible, to help the audience understand. I also very much appreciated her commitment to making her shows accessible at the cost of not performing the show at all. This is absolutely what should happen everywhere and possibly the only way to ensure that sooner or later fully accessible events will be the norm. It is very interesting how she explains her drive toward making events accessible: “Ironically, in order to produce, write, and perform a show about the vagaries of pain, the invisibility of pain, disabled identity and realities, the persistence of pain – and of multi-layered pain, exacerbated by social conditions, what Yasmin Gunaratnam calls ‘total pain’ – I’d paid such attention to how accessible the show would be for other disabled people who might want to attend, and because there had been no option of dedicated care given to me, I’d given up on my body being allowed to be free of pain. ” […] Accessibility should extend to all – those behind the scenes, performers, as well as audience members – with multiple D/deaf and disabled identities, and more than one impairment”.

In explaining the challenges she experienced when putting together her piece, Barokka also highlights the importance of taking into consideration intersectionality: “I was the only Indonesian artist at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that year, let alone the only Indonesian, disabled woman artist.” […] I was representing a country, a gender, and our minority community of disabled people – disabled people being, however, the largest minority in the world.” She explains further how many blows to her dignity this caused her along the way, e.g. when she was gifted a scarf as an act of charity by the Indian government after being defined by her disability: “[my colleagues are] seen not as artists, scholars, nor even people capable of describing ourselves, but objects for charitable gifts.”

In my own practice, I would blatantly steel Barokka’s suggested exercise, “an intersectional, disability-aware exercise for production classes. I would ask students how, if they lived with chronic pain, they could continue to perform and produce.” I would then encourage disabled students to tell their stories, making a piece about them, so that people without disabilities could try to fully understand them, e.g. a sound piece that represent their pain, or a physical piece that visualises it or both.

As a Production Manager of our performance spaces I would make every effort to make every piece accessible. First of all I would aim at providing audio descriptions, touch tours, accessible seats, accommodating audience members that may need a different chair or extra cushions, making backstage areas more accessible, make scripts and interpretations of shows available online ahead of the shows starting. I would also make every effort to establish a good working relationship with people with disabilities or organisation that support people with disabilities to monitor our accessibility choices and give us constructive criticism.

This article made me sad and disappointed. Growing up in Italy as a Lesbian in the 80s/early 90s (I hope it’s ok to draw this comparison), I had hardly any reference in the media. If you sum this with the rampant homophobia in the country and on my doorstep, I felt quite lonely, outcast. Even to this day many lesbian characters, are played by heterosexual women, which I find inaccurate, insensitive and disempowering. So, I can only imagine how insulting and frustrating this must be for disabled people of colour not to be represented in the media.

As Thompson (2017) explains: “lack of representation really affects one’s self esteem, one’s ability to connect with all of their identities”. It makes people feel excluded from their ”disabled identity” or ”of colour identity”, within the other identities they have.

Thompson also poses the question about whether it is better to have accurate representation or to have more representation. I vote for accurate representation, campaigning toward having more of it. We already live in a media world that misrepresents us, e.g. see also how women are misrepresented in the media: if we keep letting the media do this to us, we will never be able to gain a true understanding of who we are, we will be erased and replaced by idealistic avatars that no one can relate to.

In my practice as a teacher, I would appeal to the course leader to meet some disabled people of colour to look at our curriculum together to see whether there is anything that fundamentally prevents them from wanting to apply. I would see if there are any fundamental changes we could make to our infrastructures and as Production Manager I would aim to put those in place.

I would see if there are ways to encourage disabled students of colour to come forward and tell their stories, perhaps teaming up with other students to put their skills together. Failing that I would try to reach out to disabled people of colour outside the university and ask them to come forward to tell their stories, teaming up with our students.

References

Siebel Newsom, J. (2011) Miss Representation – The Representation Project. At https://therepproject.org/films/miss-representation/ (Accessed on 5.05.22)

The disabilities services webpages, gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into the definition of disability according to the Equality Act 2010 and what falls under discrimination by law as well as the situation in which people are officially protected and what the (minimum) reasonable adjustments are that organisations should be making for employers (an in our case students too) with disabilities.

The pages champion the Social Model of Disability. People with disabilities are not defined by what is “wrong” with them, but by what they need. It aims at breaking down barriers (physical or caused by attitudes) that cause people not to be able to do certain things.

As the Production Manager of our Performance spaces, I am very aware about how this concept of breaking down barriers is key in how we organise our spaces and make them accessible to students, staff and audiences alike.

When I was at Southbank Centre, where I worked for 12 years before moving to CSM, I was the Technical Manager for the Unlimited Festival 2014: I managed all the events happening in the front of house spaces.

Unlimited is a festival that commissions work from disabled artists. The festival gifted me the opportunity to understand a lot more about disability and helped me realise not only how ignorant I had been, but also how able-ist is the world we live in. As part of the festival we put in place methods to make our events as accessible as possible. I was proud of that, but I didn’t realise how this effort was very much an add on toward the end of the production process as opposed to part of the everyday operations of the building. Disappointingly, after the festival ended, most those provisions got dropped. The few that were kept, e.g. audio describing shows, were in place only on special occasions. Why?

Nnow, here at CSM, I am facing the same challenge. Although our spaces are somewhat accessible, there still is a very long way to go to make them fully accessible. It seems that the argument is that it is too expensive and too time consuming to provide accessibility all the time, but accessibility shouldn’t just be add on, it should be incorporated in the events we put on. As a matter of course.

So as part of my practice I pledge to make permanent changes to our infrastructure and to work with students to think more closely about what it means to for a piece to be accessible and how that can become the norm.

I would like to hold some focus groups with students that are comfortable with sharing their disability and ask them how we can move forward.

I would also like to put together some workshops where students with disabilities and students without disabilities can make art together, ensuring it is accessible to all. I believe this would also inform the most effective ways to make changes to the infrastructure of our spaces. I would like to hear from people with disabilities to understand their needs first hand instead of making assumptions and imposing inadequate solutions.

References

Unlimited. At https://weareunlimited.org.uk/our-work/our-history/ (Accessed on 03.05.22)

Christine’s film and her use of sound, highlights the importance of sound as a method of immediate communication. Although those of us that can hear, usually understand sound as something to be experienced through hearing, sound is very much a whole physical experience, visual and sensory, that can be used to reach people in a more immediate, way: sound transcends word.

What really struck me about Christine’s film is the idea of ownership of sound: people who have access to sound through their ears behave like they own it and have a say in it. This determines a series of conventions that are only available to those that can hear and as such they exclude those that cannot. So, although Christine respects those conventions, which she refers to as “possessions”, she also aims to reclaim sound, making it more accessible to all, to reach a wider audience in a way that can be unfiltered “organic, unpolished, fluid, free”.

Christine shows us how sound vibrations can create visual art (see her use of loudspeakers playing back traffic noise and creating paintings), as well as reach our bodies directly and triggering our emotions from within in a visceral way, which is almost osmotic.

As a sound practitioner in performance myself, I very much love the idea of using sound as a physical (the whole body) medium and not just a medium that can be appreciated through hearing. If we only rely on hearing, apart from making sound inaccessible to those that cannot hear, we also promote a very passive experience, incomplete, one-dimensional experience – there is also a difference between effortless hearing and conscious active listening. Sound is physical (fluctuations of pressure), so we can exploit its ability to move particles/objects, to generate vibrations in our bodies, which can result in transmitting different emotions and as such guide our audiences through a more immersive, complete and accessible experience (see my microteaching blog post for the TPP Unit).

In my teaching practice I would start with sessions on “feeling” vs “listening” to sound, promoting the advantages of the wholly physical experience, looking to transcend completely that involving hearing.

It is important to note that this very visceral experiences are likely to put students in very vulnerable positions as they can be emotionally triggering. So I would make every effort to establish a safe place for the students, one where they can feel free to leave the room if the experience becomes too intense as well as feeling free to stop or refuse altogether to share their contributions if too difficult for them.

In terms of their practice, I would then ask the students to explore and design sound content to communicate physically through sound the story they are trying to tell, emotion by emotion, physical reaction by physical reaction. This could evolve in a visual interpretation kindled by sound, which could connect to a haptic experience (vibrations could reach the audience by touching the vibrating objects as well as the vibrations reaching the body through air) and perhaps even, depending on the visual materials used, to an olfactory one (different vibrations could “excite” different kinds of paint with different scent). Although my practice has sound at its core, students may wish to start from a piece of visual art or physical performance arts and use sound to communicate it, fine tune it, make it more immersive, more inclusive.

Further thoughts:

The film reminded me of “The Ontology of vibrational force” (Goodman, S. 2012) where he explains that this ontology is: “The basic process of entities affecting other entities” […] “Sound is merely a thin slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals”. […] “Sound comes to the rescue of thought, rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body”. […] If we subtract human perception, everything moves. Anything static is so only at the level of perceptibility. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating”. “[…] Vibrational ecologies”. “[…] This ontology is concerned primarily with the texturhythms of matter, the patterned physicality of a musical beat of pulse, sometimes imperceptible, sometimes […] visible”.

Christine’s film also reminded me of the beautiful science of Cymatics where sound frequencies, can excite matter and make visible, precise, predictable patterns, which can be used to develop artistic pieces, unveil what’s not obviously seen, tracking information and get a deeper insight into nature. As Evant Grant (2009) suggests: “Think about the sound of the universe forming. Perhaps sound had an influence on the formation of the universe itself”

References

Goodman, S. (2012) The Ontology of vibrational force in Stern, J (2012) The Sound Studies reader Abington: Routledge

Grant, E. (2009) Making sound visible through cymatics. At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsjV1gjBMbQ (Accessed on 01.05.22)

Stanford, N. (2014) Cymatics: Science vs music. At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oItpVa9fs (Accessed on 01.05.22)