Creative Practices, Performance, and Community- 3-4pm Integrating Neuroscientific and Psychological Approaches to Explore Group Song-Making’s Efficacy for Fostering Identity and Community Amongst Voice-Hearers - Anthony Pavlo, PhD, Claire Bien, MEd, Deanna Greco, MPhil, Adam Christoferson, Julia Nachemson, MSW
- 4-4:30pm A Kathak Autobiographical Performance Using Drama, Prose of a South-Asian Woman’s Lived Experience in Madness, Sexuality, Patriarchy, & Intimate Partner Violence - Ishaa Vinod Chopra, RECE, MSc Candidate
Integrating Neuroscientific and Psychological Approaches to Explore Group Song-Making’s Efficacy for Fostering Identity and Community Amongst Voice-Hearers - Anthony Pavlo, PhD, Claire Bien, MEd, Deanna Greco, MPhil, Adam Christoferson, Julia Nachemson, MSW
From lyrics that activate shared emotional resonances to beats that synchronize bodily movements, music serves as a medium through which individuals can connect with community. Music’s capacity for reducing alienation and cultivating connection is amplified when people gather as a collective to create original songs. In this session, we discuss findings from our Song-making in a Group (SING) study: a longitudinal investigation of the benefits of group song-making for people who hear distressing voices. Our panel incorporates various analytical and experiential perspectives to delve into SING’s therapeutic mechanisms. Firstly, we will describe some of the techniques that were employed during the song-making sessions for fortifying agency and identity building which were developed from community-based work at Musical Intervention (a sober creative arts space located in downtown New Haven, CT). Next, to exemplify some of the ways in which SING’s impact extends beyond the song-making workshop, we will discuss computational neuroscience analyses of linguistic data captured in qualitative interviews and decision-making quantified from a behavioral task. Finally, we will describe the results from a phenomenological analysis of interviews conducted before and after the intervention that provide insights into the positive transformations described by study participants. By integrating perspectives from music therapy, neuroscience, and psychology, this panel will demonstrate how humanities-based interventions can alleviate distress by fortifying agency, trust, and community.
A Kathak Autobiographical Performance Using Drama, Prose of a South-Asian Woman’s Lived Experience in Madness, Sexuality, Patriarchy, & Intimate Partner Violence - Ishaa Vinod Chopra, RECE, MSc Candidate
The research topic will use the medium of autobiographical performance at the intersections of drama, poetry, and cultural dance movement, with a live audience, rooted in creative, artistic improvisation, to tell my own narrative through an autobiographical lens, using secondary data consisting of edited soundtracks, prose voice-overs, poetry, and improv monologues. My performance aims to address these issues through a Mad, Feminist, QPOC (Queer, Person of colour) and Disability Justice lens. The research question I intend to examine is: How may performance be represented with a live audience rooted in an autobiographical lens using dramaturgy, Indian classical dance (Odissi, Kathak, Folk), and Latin fusion? How may improvisation be used to explore the themes of madness, sexuality, patriarchy, and gender-based violence? A further sub-question is: How can classical dancers disrupt the foundations of traditional Indian classical Kathak dance to shift the narrative methodologies, focusing primarily on sexist, misogynist, patriarchal Hindu mythologies, to the narratives that centre the voices of marginalized, vulnerable, and racialized populations by merging community-engaged arts and storytelling?
