Journal & Book Publications

This article prioritises the practice and training of art therapy, and explores how the unprecedented circumstances we currently find ourselves in have needed the discipline to evolve in ways that ensures the continuation of the overall integrity, best practices, ethics, and expected standards. This discourse champions the art in art therapy by highlighting creativity as a core tenet of this resilient discipline.

Citation:
Lay, Ronald. ''Mandated Measures: Seismic Shifts in the Discipline and Training of Art Therapy.'' ATOL: Art Therapy OnLine, vol. 12, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.atol.v12i1.1496.

From arena dog-fights to buzkashi (Afghan polo with a headless carcass), and from traditional Pashtun attan (dance) to bacha bazi (cross-dressing dancers), the cultural landscape in Afghanistan has been inundated with contested and romanticised perceptions of what should be – or not be – considered as Afghan culture. Rather than attempt to argue what ‘is’ local Afghan culture, this chapter seeks to examine the imaginings of Afghanistan from the perspective of ‘circuit of culture’. Adapted from Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (1997), the ‘circuit of culture’ articulates the production–representation–identity–consumption–regulation of cultural practices constitutive of economic forces. More specifically, I use Homi Bhabha’s location of culture as the starting assumption that Afghan theatres (hence, Afghan cultures) are ‘located’ in the local – from Kabul. I shall examine two theatre performances – Kaikavus (directed by Haroon Noori, 2013) and Heartbeat: Silence after the Explosion (directed by a foreign director whose name has been withheld for security reasons, 2014) – to problematise the ‘location’ of Afghan culture as a contested space, especially in how ‘culture’ is influenced or determined by cultural stakeholders. The politics around Kaikavus demonstrated a tussle between a large corporation and a self-funded theatre director, and the issue of cultural ownership. Heartbeat: Silence after the Explosion, on the other hand, demonstrated a physical and discursive interruption to the usual ways of representation (for example, the blur between fact and fiction, postmodern and immersive theatre) when an actual bomb went off in the auditorium during the show. Because the actors were actors I had worked with when I was in Kabul (and had become personal friends), Heartbeat raises urgent questions for applied theatre practitioners, including myself, in how we should – or could – respond and stand side-by-side in relation with people who perform in spite of danger. Bhabha states that social differences “are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project […] that takes you ‘beyond’ yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present” (Bhabha, 1994). I will argue from a postcolonial framework that the project in producing, consuming, and regulating ‘an Afghan culture’ continues along tropes of victimisation both actual and imagined, which dislocates perceptions of the ‘local’ as a crisis separated from the ‘global’.

Citation:
Chow, Edmund. ''Crisis of representation of Afghan culture: An analysis of Kaikavus and Heartbeat: Silence after the Explosion.'' The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance: Volume Two - Brazil, West Africa, South and South East Asia, United Kingdom, and the Arab World, edited by Tim Prentki, and Ananda Breed, Oxon, UK, Routledge, 2021, pp. 375-386, ISBN / ISSN: 9780367134433.

The publication, Backstage: Managing Creativity and the Arts in South-East Asia, draws on the findings of UNESCO’s recent study of the creative sector in the nine countries of the South-East Asian region (Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam). The publication showcases the policy environments in which the creative sector is operating and concretely identifies areas in which exchanges and further development can be engineered to unleash the full potential of the sector. It also tells the stories of the twenty-nine organizations across the region, serving as examples of those who are on the front line of moving the sector forward.

Citation:
Janamohanan, Sunitha, et al. Backstage: Managing creativity and the arts in South-East Asia. Bangkok, UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization, 2021, ISBN / ISSN: 978-92-3-100443-8.

Specifically, the presentation explores the vision for training global actors as it is put into practice at the School of Dance and Theatre of LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. After providing a contextual introduction to the argument, the presentation pivots from specific examples of our approach to actor and performer training. The presentation concludes by highlighting four characteristics of a global approach to actor training: (1) the increasing need of a transcultural ethos to theatre and performance making globally; (2) the impact that the fourth industrial revolution and digital technologies will have in actor training; (3) the importance of aligning curriculum planning with ecological sustainability; and (4) the importance of reconsidering what an Asian conservatoire can be in such landscape and in relation to China’s belt and road initiatives.

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe. ''Global Actor Training: Physicality, Digitality, and Sustainability in the Asian Conservatoire.'' Proceedings of Asia Theatre Education Centre Conference, Beijing, China 05/2019, Asia Theatre Education Centre, 2020, pp. 155-177.

The situation was uncanny to the extent that only comparisons were suitable as a way to fathom the experience. And yet, comparisons failed. The pandemic’s interruption messed with the global plot in unseen ways, and as we live through it and start to forecast where the next scene will take us, it is crucial that we reflect on where we came from and what is the destiny that awaits us. Who owns that future? Who is making it? This piece will consider the current global situation by engaging with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt) and epic theatre as a lens to foresee what theatre criticism in the age of social distancing and digital assemblies could mean. What if the pandemic were a Verfremdungseffekt that sheds a new light to a global social crisis that is been going far longer and is rooted somewhere else? What if the cascade of digital performance we have witnessed in the last few months was a musical interlude announcing the greater forces that are coming into play? What if the muted shout of the quarantine is the gestus that the new digital capitalism will afford us?

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe, and Azadeh Sharifi. ''Pandemic V-Effect: The Plague as Theatre Criticism.'' Critical Stages / Scènes Critiques, no. 22, 2020.

Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities. 

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe, et al. ''Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms.'' Theatre, Dance, & Performance Training, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 20-39, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2020.1829694.

This paper examines the practices of existing social enterprise models and the complexities involved in implementing new structures for community involvement through co-creation, co-design and facilitation. Cybernetics, as a way of looking at and engaging with systems, is discussed to position the role of the designer. Using mapping as a visualisation tool and conversational activity, case-studies are evaluated to provide a broad framework of bottom-up systems thinking through participatory methods to enhance social and cultural values.

Citation:
Chon, Harah. ''Systems Thinking for Bottom-Up Social Innovation: An Examination of Social Practices.'' Strategic Design Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 137-149.

The tendency to describe synthetic scales with proper nouns is becoming less frequent for one reason: a name like Hungarian or Jewish scale does not convey any musical information. A proper noun becomes useless if the scale is not written in standard music notation, letter notation, or if a formula does not accompany it. The trend that has lately gained relevance relates to the altered modal terminology started by George Russell in 1953 in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Ron Miller deepened that concept in 1996 in Modal Jazz Composition & Harmony and Gary Keller did the same in 2006 in The Jazz Chord/Scale Handbook. This article reviews all the major literature in relation to jazz scale theory and examines its evolution in terms of nomenclature. Furthermore, it traces the jazz scale nomenclature tendency, where a critical mass of jazz education seems to be heading.

Citation:
Celi, Diego. ''Heptatonic Synthetic Scales Nomenclature and Their Teaching in Jazz Theory.'' Jazz Education in Research and Practice, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 135-154, doi: DOI 10.2979/jazzeducrese.1.1.10.