Managing the spatialities of arts-based practices with school children: an inter-disciplinary exploration of engagement, movement and well-being

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The paper aims to provoke new pathways within arts and health research that engage with the spatialities of arts-based interventions for building social and emotional wellbeing. We adopt an understanding of social and emotional wellbeing as a situated and relational effect rather than an individually acquired attribute. METHODS: A social scientist and a choreographer both accompanied a mask-making workshop for exploring identity and body language with children aged five and six at a primary school in the North of England. RESULTS: The collaboration generated an alternative emphasis on movement, rather than behaviour, as the focus of managing spatialities. CONCLUSIONS: The arts practitioner has to facilitate a balance of movements that, within the intended practices of the session, can be categorised as controlled, uncontrolled and improvised. This attention to movement enables a versatile conceptualisation of social and emotional wellbeing that is still situated and relational but also expressive of habituation and improvisation.

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