This paper will contribute to scholarly conversations that critically consider philosophical underpinnings of a newly emerging arts-based or research-creation paradigm as well as implications for the interrelationship among aesthetic mediation, cultural production and social critique/change (Conrad & Beck, 2015; Leavy, 2018; Parsons et al, 2017; Harris, Hunter & Hall, 2015; Denzin, 2017; Manning, 2016; O’Donoghue, 2014). To fulfil this aim, I will explore the ways that artist-researchers, involved in a performance research project called “Cracked: new light on dementia” (Collective Disruption, 2017), imagine how future audience members might engage with performance events, and what these imaginings mean for the artists’ research-creation processes as generative, exploratory, situated, and relationally and aesthetically accountable. “Cracked” invites audience members to reconsider the tragedy discourse of dementia and its implications for stigmatizing interpersonal interactions and broader social policy development (see for example Gray et al, 2020; Kontos et al, 2018; Gray et al, 2017; Dupuis et al, 2016; Kontos, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2012). By drawing from interviews with actors involved in the creation of this play, I will critically interrogate assumptions of audience members as passive observers who uncritically take up research messages embedded within the play.
This presentation starts from 16 mins 17 secs to 27 mins 36 secs.
Presenter
Julia Gray is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in health humanities in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is an interdisciplinary cultural and performance studies scholar, artist-practitioner (playwright/theatre director) and critical social scientist. Her program of research incorporates methodologies and theoretical bearings from the arts, humanities and social and health sciences to interrogate notions of inclusion related to aging and disability; she aims to bolster senses of belonging by engaging different ways of becoming and knowing through performance and the arts.
