Autorentext

Ali Duffy, PhD, is Professor and Graduate Director of Dance at Texas Tech University (USA), Artistic Director of Flatlands Dance Theatre, and co-founder of the International Parenting and Dance Network. She is mama to sweet Noah.

Sarah Johnson is Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Head of the MFA Dramaturgy program at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.

Tamar Neumann is Instructor in English at Tarrant County College, USA. Her research focuses on the performances of open adoption, and how those performances highlight the social construction of families. Her creative work highlights the stories of those who live in open adoptions.

Klappentext

Pandemic Motherhood explores how various artistic practices and processes have been instrumental in processing, sharing, and learning about the intersectional epidemics unique to mothers living in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

Exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic and childcare converge to create challenging circumstances for women and mothers, the book interrogates ways in which individuals navigated these challenges through dance, performing arts, and theatre. Central to this topic is a growing body of literature about how applied performance affects change, activates transformation and healing, and engages communities in shared lived experience. The collection highlights artistic processes and experiences of developing, creating, devising, or contributing to artwork that centralizes topics of social inequity with pregnancy, motherhood, and womanhood. Pandemic Motherhood also features innovative artistic practices from contributing authors that illustrate complex, diverse experiences of contemporary and coexisting states of art making and mothering.

This edited collection is ideal for students, scholars, and researchers of applied and socially engaged arts, as well as students of sociology and gender studies.

Inhalt

Introduction

Section 1

Pandemic Matrescence: Pregnancy, Miscarriage, Infertility, Birth, and Postpartum Experiences

Chapter 1. Performance + pedagogy + pregnancy: a COVID-19 pandemic experience

Chapter 2. Representations of science related to reproduction on stage

Chapter 3. dear emi

Chapter 4. Storytelling, community, and the postpartum experience during COVID-19: affirming the humanity of mothers through trauma-informed facilitation

Chapter 5. My blessingway Project: a story of birthing a mother and (her child) hope

Chapter 6. Breastfeeding stories

Chapter 7. A choreographic motherhood: the (re)birth of self in creative process and practice

Section 2

In the Weeds: A Mother's Work is Never Done. Mothering Children, Teenagers, and Adults through a Pandemic and Beyond ****

Chapter 8. My mom worked during the entire pandemic and all I got was this stupid quarantine

Chapter 9. Space for our children

Chapter 10. Artistry and authority

Chapter 11. Dance as legacy: passing on an artistic practice to my daughters

Chapter 12. Pregnancy and motherhood in dance: a UK and USA comparison

Chapter 13. Digital media's bearing on maternal well-being: an ethnographic case study

Chapter 14. Intimacy direction and mothers: Is the light at the end of the tunnel still there?

Section 3

Performances of motherhood: art making, ideation, processes, outcomes, and participation through the lens of mothering during the COVID-19 pandemic

Chapter 15. Pandemic Mama: devised performance for community impact

Chapter 16. Pivots and pianos: choreographing through the COVID-19 pandemic with a 5th grader

Chapter 17. Performing a "real" family: finalizing an adoption amid a pandemic

Chapter 18. Venus in quarantine

Chapter 19. BIRTH!: a dance documentary exploring autonomy, trauma, and triumph

Chapter 20. Famalao'an/Babae: socially engaged art, feminist pedagogy, and shifting women's storytelling with CHamoru and Filipino students through zine-making in Guåhan

Chapter 21. "Our children": Sarah Sudhoff's multidisciplinary artivism in motherhood

Chapter 22. Mama's move: embodied storytelling

Chapter 23. Life as a mother artist: loving and grieving through dance

Conclusion