Arts & Creativities Research Group: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
A collection of videos from the Arts & Creativities Research Group.
Some videos may be in-house use only.
Hip Hop is now the most listened to genre of music in the world, yet it is not widely implemented for educational, therapeutic or cross-cultural uses despite incredible potential and promise. While the uses of rapping have been examined and used somewhat, the applications of beat making and DJ'ing have not, despite it's inherent multiple literacies/intelligences and applications. Dr Gann will present on how and why Hip Hop beat making and culture can be used in a culturally responsive/sustaining way as and educational, therapeutic/wellness and cross cultural intervention as illustrated by the work of his non-profit organization, Today's Future Sound.
This includes an exploration of his Therapeutic Beat Making (TBM) model, which also addresses complex and developmental trauma, and an introduction to understanding the difference between Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex/Developmental Trauma. Additionally, strategies to integrate Hip Hop beat making and culture into classrooms to increase cultural responsiveness and student engagement and deliver core content including STEM/STEAM content in non-traditional and innovative Project-Based Learning ways. Participants will learn basic history of Hip Hop as well as an introduction to beat making/music production with a live demo and audience participation to make an instrumental composition, or "beat", on the spot and to perform live.
A child and adolescent clinical psychologist by training, Dr Elliot Gann is a long-time beat maker and Executive Director of Today's Future Sound (TFS). Dr Gann has been working with TFS in Bay Area schools and community settings, and across the globe using Hip Hop beat making and culture as a mental health, educational, social justice and cross-cultural intervention. He has worked with more than 40,000 youth in the past six years through TFS and is currently developing the Therapeutic Beat Making (TBM) model.
Brazilian songwriting, as well as the music from other countries, is featured by orality, intuition and tacit knowledge. The present research applies the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) to understand the creativity of local songwriters such as Conceição Rosa Teixeira (Pelotas, Brazil, 1930-), who wrote more than one thousand sambas without knowing how to play musical instruments or music theory. Ivan Lins (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1945-), from another point of view, is a wolrd-famous Grammy winner who also highlights intuition and spontaneity in his creative processes. As pointed by several authors (Burnard, 2012; Csikszentmihalyi, 2013; McIntyre, 2016; and others), creativity is not a romantic genius phenomenon but occurs socially according to the agency of individuals. Through observing, interviewing, transcribing, performing, recording and analysing songs, the ongoing investigation develops the conept of songwriting habitus as a formulation to study popular music creative processes including subjective and hidden aspects.
Leandro Maia is a singer-songwriter and lecturer at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL, Brazil). Currently, he is a PhD candidate at Bath Spa University and his research 'Poetics of Song: songwriting habitus in the creative processes of Brazilian songs' is funded by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education, Brazil. He also plays at the international quartet 'Kusanganisa' with Chartwell Dutiro, Chris Blanden and Nick Sorensen and recently was granted the Bath Spa Pioneers Award. Maia has a Masters in Brazilian Literature (UFRGS, Brazil) and a Degree in Music Education (UFRGS, Brazil).
Informed by Black feminism, queer theory of colour, and Afrofuturist theory, Wynn will present a new series of artwork exploring the myth of Drexciya, a mythology created by a late 1990s Detroit band of the same name, who envisioned a half-aquatic/half-human create emerging from the enslaved Africans who were tossed overboard during the middle passage. Of this new series of artwork, they envision creating a new narrative in the mid-Atlantic, disrupting the current archive of the Middle Passage.
Looking to the history of erasure of Black femmes, queer, and gender non-conforming people as a form of violence, they will discuss the ways in which water has shaped their cultural production and it's connection to fantastical forms like Afrofuturism. Charlena will also discuss the moves they have made to theorize Afrofuturism as a liberatory project for African peoples everywhere.
Charlena M. Wynn is an artist, graduate student, and scholar from the United States, interested in African DIaspora art and Afrofuturism as a method of decolonizing modernist curatorial and art education practices. Born and raised in the Southern United States, they are deeply connected to their southern identity as a Black queer artist and use these experiences in their artwork. In a world where Black, queer, fat, and disabled bodies are not valued, Charlena M. Wynn is informed by Afrofuturist philosophy, not only as a cultural aesthetic but philosophy of history informed by African Diasporic epistemologies.