Abstract
As a corrective to the lone, exceptional artist theory prevalent in historical conceptions of ‘creative genius’, this chapter explores how the creative person is formed in community as they participate, practice, and perform new ways of being, relating, and understanding their local context and the perpetually changing global world that edges ever closer. The authors observed such an ‘ecology of care’, amidst the instability of the Brexit referendum in June 2016, working with their local research collaborator Dr. Rachel King-Turner and the Belgrade Theatre’s Canley Youth Theatre group in Coventry England, one site among five in a global, multi-sited, ethnographic research project. In observing the group’s affective and intimate labour at a time of perceived social disintegration, the authors ultimately processed creativity as contagion, imagining their research as community-forming and scholarly performance.
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Notes
- 1.
Now practised worldwide, the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry is credited with being one of the principal pioneers in the development of the Theatre in Education (TiE) movement, begun in the mid-1960s. TiE gained steady momentum with its compelling mandate to use theatre and drama as a creative way to provide innovative learning opportunities for young people and enliven education through pedagogy and curriculum. Despite greater applications across diverse contexts (schools, theatres, healthcare, community organisations) around the globe, TiE has become increasingly marginalised within national curricula in many countries. The implications of this dwindling legacy are sobering according to Belgrade Theatre Director Justine Themen. “Theatre is all about learning…it holds up a mirror to humanity” and TiE in particular “can be a powerful tool for young people growing up and working out their place in a complex world” (Themen 2017).
- 2.
As authors of this chapter, writing for editors of this series who have, collectively, tremendous expertise in creativity research, we wish to acknowledge Anne Harris’ provocation in her feedback to us. She asked us to consider whether our “quiet backseat creativity” of this chapter- the ethnographic performance work and ecology of care about which we are most insistently speaking- might call out more forcefully to a reinvigoration of creativity research in general. This comment gave us pause and perhaps also helps explain why we have not spoken so directly to, or of, this broad field of creativity in this chapter. Creativity, over the life of our 5-year research project, has revealed itself to us in some of the smallest, most unremarkable moments. It has announced itself most cogently, often, when we were least expecting it. Creativity has often emerged, then, as a kind of antidote to everything else that is vying for attention, a state of affairs that is depleting our creative resources and robbing us of the stillness, or simple gesture, or small arm of aid outstretched. In this chapter reflecting upon our time in Coventry, as with some of the most ‘creative’ moments in the other sites of this study, we have therefore taken refuge in these quiet backseat moments of creativity. Might this be a grander call to the field of creative research to find the creativity in the implicit, earned moments of relationality and imagination, of care, of shelter from the storm?
- 3.
For this visit to Coventry, our team included Kathleen Gallagher, Dirk J. Rodricks, Nancy Cardwell and our artist collaborator Andrew Kushnir.
- 4.
The youth are identified through pseudonyms.
- 5.
For further thinking about the relationship between truth, art and research, please see Gallagher (2008b).
- 6.
Our conceptualisation of this term draws from Nadine George-Graves (2014) use of the term diasporic spidering to describe the ways in which “many different points of intersection and modes of passage may be woven together around a central core – the individual searcher/journeyer” (p. 37).
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Gallagher, K., Cardwell, N., Rodricks, D.J. (2018). An Ecology of Care: Relationships and Responsibility Through the Constitutive and Creative Acts of Oral History Theatre Making in Local Communities Shouldering Global Crises. In: Snepvangers, K., Thomson, P., Harris, A. (eds) Creativity Policy, Partnerships and Practice in Education. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96725-7_14
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