Claire van Rhyn
COMMUNICATING CHANGE
Summary
Cultivating awareness and engagement with social transitions through a body-led practice of relational learning
Communities - and the individuals they are comprised of - need practices which can support ownership over social transition processes during an era which demands rapid transformation of our shared priorities and systems. This research sets out to examine modalities and processes that might support such applied causes and initiatives. The research considers the body as a critical modality for engaging with social transition processes, in particular for intervening in metastasised knowledges, narratives and legitimacies. The body - that of the individual, as well as the ‘group body’ of, for example, a community - offers dynamic relational affordances for contextual sensemaking. The enactive trans-modality of the body is proposed as an opening for coming to know the self, others (both human and beyond-human), and the world otherwise. Through incorporating insights from bodied ways of knowing inherent in the field of dance and awareness-based social arts, the research sets out to translate improvisational and choreographic techniques and processes for use as a contextual praxis of body-led relational learning. In particular, the research undertakes to situate such praxis in the context of compulsory Education. Schools are unique temporal spaces, acting as nexus in the present to what has gone before and what is to come. Even so, schools - and the learning that happens in them - have increasingly become onto-epistemically anaemic and troubled by the challenges of our time. As a complex site of social transition, this practice-research sets out to roost amongst the modalities and processes of school-based learning.
Additional info
Two distinct practice phases make up this study. In the initial practice phase, a collection of body-led techniques, drawn from dance choreography and improvisation, are surveyed and reorganised through a series of iterative rehearsal events. Through a process of detecting, observing, and amplifying, the affordances of these collaborative improvisation techniques are organised under three qualities: practices that build awareness of body, group and context; awareness of change across time (diachronic awareness); and systems awareness. This was followed by a situated practice phase with two 16-18 school-based education communities: the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Atlantic College (United World Colleges) in Wales, United Kingdom. This phase positioned the collection of collaborative improvisation techniques as a transgressive relational learning process within the context of each school’s learning eco-system.
Through critical reflection and an iterative layering of doing and knowing, the process of learning is articulated as relational, rehearsive and improvisational. The research presents the implications of this framing for considering school-based learning as a transgressive knowledge generation space. Arguing for the unrealised potential of body-led relational learning, the research circumstantiates its pluralising potential in stiving for onto-epistemic diversity. The research further demonstrates the promise of creating relational practice spaces which - through a methodic rekindling of relational awarenesses - makes tangible shared social values within communities. Such practice spaces are proposed as crucial to revealing and acknowledging communal interiorities as sites for disentangling and co-ordinating shared social ownership during social transition efforts.
Bio
Claire van Rhyn is a design researcher and educationalist with a distinctly post-disciplinary approach. She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, funded by the AHRC’s London Doctoral Design Centre. Her work investigates the body as modality of communication. Through employing a relational design practice – influenced by choreographic thinking and awareness-based approaches – her research develops a bodied methodology for supporting processes of social transition within communities, with a focus on compulsory education settings.
She holds a MSc in Education Research with distinction from University of Exeter and has researched social cognition in schools with Universities of Cambridge, Exeter and Roehampton. As transition consultant, she works with school communities and community organisations on effecting community-led change.
Claire is a member of the Presencing Institute’s Social Presencing Theatre research group. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Design Research Society. As Assistant Director for Shambhala Art Europe, she teaches and hosts workshops internationally on the subject of perception, embodiment and mindful-aware approaches to creativity. Claire’s early professional background is in Art Directing and Publishing Design.
