My visit in Australia included various artistic and research activities. Here are some highlights presented in photos.

 

Bagryana Popov’s Uncle Vanya in Eganstown in April 16-17

Uncle Vanya is a site-specific, durational version of the play by Anton Chekhov, an early environmentalist. Performed over two days, Uncle Vanya is an immersive experience that dissolves the division between audience and performers, as they move through the rooms and grounds of these homes. The characters of the play grapple with a deteriorating environment, the economic difficulty of living on the land, tensions around family inheritance and deep family bonds. We enter the world together; a world of the past and an experience of here and now. – LaMama

The (Eco)Pedagogy of Recognition – presentation for SUSTAINed Network at La Trobe University in April 19

In my talk I discussed how the pedagogy of recognition (Foster 2012) can be seen as a form of EcoJustice education (Martusewicz, Edmundson & Lupinacci 2015).  EcoJustice education starts from a systematic cultural-ecological analysis: the critical investigation focuses especially to the structures of modern thinking and to the discourses that reproduce those deeply rooted assumptions of modernity. Education which aims for supporting eco-ethical consciousness needs, along with the discourse analytical approach, an (eco)phenomenological attitude as its starting point. Eco-phenomenology extends beyond the conceptual structures towards the sensual world, which is more than human. The pedagogy of recognition claims that new ethical understanding can occur when we shift our action from (conceptual) knowing to (perceptual) recognizing. The pedagogy of recognition respects all forms of lives as equally valuable.

 

Being an artist-researcher-educator presentation at VCA, University of Melbourne in April 19

I gave a personal talk about my life as a former student of dance in VCA and a current artist-reseacher-educator. I talked about my journey from a student in Australia to the independent practitioner working in Finland. I also talked about my own artistic-pedagogical method of dance animateuring and presented its six thesis. It was great to visit my old school and meet the current postgraduate students!

 

Movement explorations with Dr. Bagryana Popov in April 20-22 

Bagryana and I continued our collaboration by doing some movement explorations both in studio space and outside. Soo Yeun You joined us on Thursday and it was great fun to work with her again after ten years! (We danced together in Bagryana’s Studies in Being Human in 2006.) Bagryana also presented her research paper The listening body: Encounters with trees, water, rocks for me, which was very interesting because the paper handled our collaborative project from last year in Finland. In our practice we used authentic movement technique and we focus especially to the concept of landscape – as in our childhood memories, as in the experience of multi-sensory presence. On Friday Bagryana and I walked along Yarra Creek and research the landscape as a personal sanctuary of everyday.