Curator Welcome Embodied Performance: Worldmaking Sally Gradle embodies a teaching and art making practice that is tied to the eternal heartbeat of humanity. In sharing this video triptych Art Seen invites the act of witnessing. In rendering the endurance that is required in the process of world making, Gradle performs rendurance.1 She challenges her students’ and our capacity to remain responsive rather than paralyzed within the presence of troubling situations. For students learning to be teachers her leadership risks the unconventional. These students submit a translation, a trans(per)formative act for our consideration. They offer an enfleshed experience of “radical hopelessness,” that performance theorist Maurice Stevens (2003) describes as a sign that we can work towards a sense of the social good, without denying or being stilled by the burden of history and the sign of hope for the oppressed (p. 174). We have the opportunity in this publication of Art Seen to re-enter these performances through Gradle’s responsive poetry and the video documentation of the living presence of the students and herself, as performers, witnesses, and transformers. Barbara Bickel
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1 Rendurance is an imaging practice fusing artistic rendering with endurance in the context of the impossible possibility required for freedom. This concept was developed by curriculum theorist R. Michael Fisher and shared in a recent conversation. |