Spaces of Care: Exploring the Performance of Caring as a Teacher with a Doll’s House

Abstract

This flash talk presentation discusses my artistic research practice with a doll’s house, part of a PhD research project which inquired into what it feels like to do care as a teacher. Coming from the perspective of a teacher and artist, the project proposed an intimately artistic way to examine the nuanced experience of performing care in teaching through methodologies of performance, spanning performance/live art, performative installations and participatory performance at schools. The practice unfolded in a ritualistic, private performance engaging with an old doll’s house as a place of exploring the embodiment and temporality of care. This compressed space created caring meaningfully in the absurdity of an adult/teacher playing with a doll’s house, claiming a space for the possibility of imagination for the teacher, ultimately in an embodied performance of an insistence to stay still, in the present. Staying still and silent with the doll’s house eventually became an unsettling, hopeless performance, the performance of radical caring by the despaired teacher who insists on waiting instead of hoping, staying still in facing an also ‘unmovable’, uncertain future. The project contributed crucially to the newly established research area of care aesthetics by examining the lived experience of a group of professionals that has not been previously researched from a performance perspective. It argued for the sustainability of caring practices and experiences through an engagement with the notions of the spatial and temporal in the space and practice of performance.