String figuring: A practice to witness the beautiful

String Figuring is a movement-based practice to witness how people experiencing marginalization can inhabit their positionality critically and creatively. For this, I use creative and pedagogical prompts called scores. I argue that assuming positionality as given can become immobilizing for people who historically have been forced to positions of inferiority. Therefore, I offer String Figuring as a creative intervention that, leaning into the speculative possibilities of the arts, education, and feminist theory, can render positionality moveable. My study engages with faithfully witnessing creative interventions in three dimensions that I proposed to explore positionality in-movement in one’s lived experience: 1) tactics of place-making, 2) entanglements and ways of engaging with genealogies, and 3) tactics for engaging with tension, addressing pain, and refusal as a political gesture. About these three dimensions, I propose first that place-making tactics are not limited to physical space. When lacking a physical location where we feel we belong, or when materially constrained to a hostile location, practicing place-making can be a practice. Second, I show that genealogies that constitute our histories, bodies, and movements can be available to us by giving attention to our embodied history and creating linkages to those gestures we need to keep close. Third, I propose that tension is a force related to movement and difference. Still, we can focus on how tension functions as a support and make it work for our needs. In this study, I present that by studying our positionality creatively using scores as pedagogical and creative devices, it is possible to experience in our bodies that we can always move, despite and against pain, othering, and dislocation. Such creative interventions are, I argue, a contribution to beauty—understood as a political commitment to act in the name of justice and life against violence.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hernandez, Catalina

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lucero, Jorge
• Travis, Sarah
• Nguyen, Mimi Thi
• Monson, Jennifer

• Movement-based pedagogy
• feminist of color theory
• witnessing
• scores
• arts practices
• dance improvisation
• contemporary art

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Catalina Hernandez

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116086

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116086