Handle with Care: Values in our Hearts

A COLLABORATIVE IMPROVISATIONAL MICRO-OPERA ABOUT IDENTITY, CONSENT AND TRUST

Being part of a performance group using research-creation methods for Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE, directed by Professor Eldad Tsabary, funded by SSHRC), I proposed and led the creation of an improvisational collaborative micro-opera, Handle with Care: Values in Our Hearts, to build on our conversations about consent, trust, and identity, and overcome post-pandemic malaise that was preventing the group from creating and performing together. Swinging between extremes of openness and defensiveness, we explored our competing desires to cultivate our creative autonomy and identity and to utilize collaborative processes to create together. Acknowledging the multiplicity of our perspectives, we considered what we expected from each other: civility, respect for our differences, support, cooperation. Rules could guide or motivate, be resisted or broken, or provide opportunities to transform our relationships. My proposition aimed to explore these personal crises of our conflicting urges for individual identity and autonomy and for belonging and collaboration.

This research creation project was developed using methods of participant ‘art-based’ inquiry, grounded theory, autoethnography, critical theory and collaborative encoding of criteria in the age of relativism. Alternating solos and chorus work wove postmodern theatre, with electronic and acoustic sound, spoken word, singing, dance, video, and visual art. Using mimetic techniques of mirroring and reflecting allowed the chorus to appreciate, embody, harmonize, and support soloists’ performances, echoing and carrying forward sensorial reverberations. This playful and raw performance strengthened trust among performers and revealed the codes of values in our hearts.

The collaborative and supportive process of making this micro-opera and the reflective process of thinking about how the work related to readings on method, law and philosophy were revelatory. I find that the entangled intellectual and embodied practices of law and the arts interact and support each other in research-creation. Identity, trust and consent are at the heart of building respectful and positive social, artistic and legal relations at local, national, regional and global levels. I wonder whether embodied collaborative practices based on identity, trust and consent can help us to reimagine and reshape international law and governance for our times...

Sets, Props, Costume and Design Elements

O.E. Fitzgerald, Handle with Care: Values in Our Hearts, 2023, waste bulbs, cardboard, fabric, plastic, 2’ x 15” (front)

O.E. Fitzgerald, Handle with Care: Values in Our Hearts, 2023, waste bulbs, cardboard, fabric, plastic, 2’ x 15” (back)

O.E. Fitzgerald, Cloak of Tattered Hearts, 2023, worn fabric scraps, plastic, 10’ x 3.5’

O.E. Fitzgerald, Emergent Relations, 2022-2023, moulded waste cardboard packing paper, gesso and oil paint, 3’ x 1’

O.E. Fitzgerald, Lines of Flight, 2022, moulded papyrus parchment, tempera paint, mod podge, embroidery thread, recycled fabric remnants 9’ x 5’ (theatrical lighting)

O.E. Fitzgerald, Lines of Flight, 2022, moulded papyrus parchment, tempera paint, mod podge, embroidery thread, recycled fabric remnants 9’ x 5’ (daylight)