Performances You can Feel and Touch, Theatre Organizations Have Impact with Special Populations and Public

Two examples today of innovative theatre organizations working for change with special populations.

We heard from IJCAIP subscriber, David Wiener, Writer-in-residence for The San Diego Shakespeare Society. The San Diego Shakespeare Society seeks to inspire life-long learning by furthering the public's understanding and enjoyment of the works of William Shakespeare.

Wiener described a project which took place in 2008. The San Diego Shakespeare Society presented a pilot event for special audiences called "The Shakespeare Prescription” presenting a series of shows written by David Wiener, and directed by Artistic Director, Vanessa Dinning. A special show was designed for the visually-impaired and the blind which was attended by approximately 60 people. An improvised stage was created in the cafeteria of The Braille Institute of San Diego and the show opened with a "feel-and-tell" segment devised by Dinning, where props, hats, and costume-pieces from Shakespeare productions were passed around the audience and described by the actors who answered questions followed by a one-hour performance of Shakespeare excerpts.

“ I write one-hour scripts based on Shakespeare,” says David Wiener, "generally focusing on some aspect of his work or the Elizabethan world. The San Diego Shakespeare Society can then use these in just about any setting, large or small, indoors or out, usually for education, outreach, or special events. The biggest event each year for the organization is our annual Student Shakespeare Festival, which now requires six portable stages in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The shows I write are smaller scale, using just a handful of actors.”

Another theatre is making international news with a highly successful deaf blind theatre in Tel Aviv.

The theatre organization called Nalaga’at (Do Touch) strives to provide the deaf- blind population (i.e. persons who are both deaf and blind) of Israel the opportunity to achieve artistic expression, to advance the needs and aspirations of this neglected special needs group, and to create awareness and acceptance of the deaf-blind in Israeli society at large.

The "Nalaga’at" Center is located at the Jaffa port in Tel Aviv and was founded by the "Nalaga’at" non-profit organization. It is comprised of the "Nalaga’at" Theater, home to the Deaf-blind Acting Ensemble; Café Kapish, and BlackOut, the pitch-black restaurant with its staff of blind waiters. The "Nalaga’at" Center currently employs some 70 people, most of whom are deaf, blind or deaf-blind.

We would like to share this Youtube video excerpt below, a news report with behind the scenes footage of the Nalaga’at theatre in action.

Call for Photographs Ethnotheatre

A call for photographs from Johnny Saldana, Arizona State University

I am writing a new book for Left Coast Press titled Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage. The manuscript is due summer 2011 with a tentative publication date in 2012.

The book covers playwriting and production methods for ethnotheatre (also known as performance ethnography and verbatim theatre), and provides references to the dramatic literature in the field (e.g., The Laramie Project, The Exonerated, Fires in the Mirror, etc.).

I am searching for 10 to 15 digital photographs of ethnotheatrical productions which can be featured in the book. I am unable to compensate contributors, but your work will be appropriately credited if it is selected for inclusion.

Please do NOT send me any photos now, but if you're interested in contributing or if you have any questions, please contact: Johnny.Saldana@asu.edu and request a copy of the digital photo submission guidelines (e.g., content, types of files, contrast requirements, cropping, permissions, etc.).

Thanks!

Johnny Saldaña,

Arizona State University

February 2011 Issue of IJCAIP Journal theme "Expressing the Human Story"

The theme for the upcoming issue of The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP, Issue 9, February 2011 will be "Expressing the Human Story" and will feature two contributors both eminent leaders in their respective fields who actively use the creative arts in research and practice.

Johnny Saldana, is Professor of Theatre at The School of Theatre and Film at Arizona State University and author of "Longitudinal Qualitative research: Analyzing Change Through Time," and "Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre," both published by AltaMira Press and "The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers," Sage as well as a new book in process, for Left Coast Press titled "Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage." He is also an Advisory Board member for The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP and was a contributor to the research book, "Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change," Detselig Temeron Press (2010).

Susan MacRae RN works as a clinical ethicist at The Centre for Clinical Ethics, a joint venture of Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph's Health Centre and St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, and was formerly The Deputy Director at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB) MacRae also works as a transpersonal psychotherapist. She was also a contributor to the recently released text book "Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change."

Issue 9, February 2011 of the journal will be accessible at the website at http://www.ijcaip.com and will be available to site visitors in early February. The issue will also feature new book reviews and recent updates and news from The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP.


Subscribe to IJCAIP Journal free with an email CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com "please subscribe"
and you can have free access to our journal, journal archives and all blogs. We will advise
you directly by email as soon as our new Issue 9 February 2011 issue is posted!

Looking Back and Moving Forward, A Retrospective Look at the International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP

Cheryl L. McLean, Publisher, Executive Editor

About IJCAIP

Looking Back, Moving Forward

"Our mission is to publish, disseminate and make accessible worldwide, quality information, research and knowledge about the creative arts in research and interdisciplinary practice." September 2006

The seeds for IJCAIP, The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, were planted in the spring of 2006. At that time we had envisioned a global community linked around the creative arts and its broader applications in research and practice, a network that would extend beyond any single modality, methodology or exclusive field of study drawn from across disciplinary borders in health, education and training.

To achieve this goal, and to provide the necessary communication channels for research and information, individuals were identified and organizations interested in arts in health, training and education were contacted personally to ask if they might like to access a web based newsletter that featured articles about the creative arts as applied across disciplines. The response to this inquiry was overwhelmingly positive. The Canadian Creative Arts in Health Training and Education e/newsjournal or CCAHTE as it was known, was launched in September 2006 as an open access (OA) internet news/journal, the interdisciplinary journal of the creative arts in health, training and education.

An advisory board was established with representation from leading universities and institutions across North America and diverse disciplines in education, the arts and healthcare (nursing, public health, medicine) design and business. As an Open Access journal, we operated CCAHTE on a free subscription basis and welcomed articles from contributors worldwide.

Three years later, in consultation with the journal advisory board and to reflect the publication's broadening scope and international status as the open access peer reviewed academic journal in the field, the journal was renamed The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, IJCAIP. During this time, a new IJCAIP website was professionally designed for increased ease of navigation and easy access to full text articles and an accessible back issue archive was created.

Today IJCAIP has an Advisory Board made up of leaders across disciplines and has a large international subscriber base. The web based open access publication is accessible to researchers, educators and students in over 15,000 libraries in 60 countries around the world including developing nations.

Publishing activities at IJCAIP have contributed significantly to propagating a new and fertile knowledge base for research and information about the creative arts in interdisciplinary practice. The open access free subscription publication sponsors a number of interconnected IJCAIP websites and blogs as well as a monthly subscriber newsletter.

In February we will be publishing the 9th issue of our journal, "Expressing the Human Story". The issue will feature two full text papers, the first by IJCAIP Advisory Board member, Johnny Saldana, Professor of Theatre, School of Theatre and Film, Arizona State University, "Ethnodramas About Health and Illness, Staging Human Vulnerability, Fragility and Resiliency", a descriptive selective literature review of thirty-eight ethnodramatic play scripts about health and illness. The second paper has been contributed by Susan K. MacRae, former Deputy Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, "To Be Human with Other Humans, A Caregiver's Narrative" which illustrates how qualitative approaches and expressing the human story through written accounts and narrative can be transformative and healing for the caregiver. Both papers were originally published in the research book "Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change".

An IJCAIP project, this book is the first book in the CAIP Research Series and was published by Detselig Temeron Press, Calgary, (Editor, Cheryl McLean and Associate Editor, and IJCAIP Advisory Board member, Robert Kelly, University of Calgary). This contemporary research text introduces an emerging and rapidly growing field with a dynamic collection of illustrative articles contributed by leaders across many disciplines who use the creative arts in research and practice, among them leading academics and highly respected adult educators, artist/researchers, playwrights, directors and dancers, nurse educators, physicians, dietitians, social work educators, and environmental activists.

The second text in the CAIP Research Series,"Creative Arts in Research for Community and Cultural Change" is scheduled for release in 2011. This book takes a global perspective featuring research and projects that have used the creative arts in varied forms for community and cultural change. The timely and critical role of the creative arts in action in many forms for social change is discussed and illustrative research articles address topics such as immigration and identity, racism, aboriginal health and institutional life, mental health, disability and other vital community issues such as access to clean water and raising environmental consciousness.

It has been our intention to illustrate the considerable breadth and scope of this field while featuring leaders active in the work in action and practice. We have worked to forge relationships and build collaborative interdisciplinary networks and pool expertise and resources from many diverse fields. Our IJCAIP Advisory Board, representing leaders across disciplines, has been vital to our success and professionalism as a peer reviewed journal and members have generously shared their expertise and scholarly advice to help us advance toward our goals.

Our organization continues to foster and encourage research in the creative arts in interdisciplinary practice as well as carry the message across disciplines publishing articles in international publications, presenting at national conferences and sharing news about the many applications of the creative arts in research and practice. In the last five years, IJCAIP and our related sites and resources have provided open access to a much needed communication hub for research and knowledge in the field. We embraced the philosophy of information sharing and open access at an unprecedented time of change and opportunity in academic publishing. As an Open Access OA journal we continue to offer worldwide access to our web based publication, archives and related blogs without fees or membership charges.

We have recently created additional opportunities for research and knowledge dissemination for those who wish to share related news and research developments with our worldwide readership through custom developed supplementary issues through our IJCAIP Supplementary Issues Programme. Our first supplementary issue, "Exploring Arts Based Methods in Health Research" will be launched in 2012 and will feature news and information about a project involving over 60 individuals and partners from across disciplines under the leadership of Katherine Boydell, Senior Scientist and Scientific Director of Qualitative Inquiry in Child Health and Evaluative Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children and Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Dalla Lana School of Public Health at The University of Toronto.

With new projects underway and the recent release of the first book in the CAIP Research Series, "Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change" and the scheduled release of our second book in the CAIP Research Series, "Creative Research for Community and Cultural Change" we enter into the New Year with a sense of great pride and optimism for the future.

Our mission when we launched our journal in 2006 was to publish, disseminate and make accessible worldwide, quality information, research and knowledge about the creative arts in research and interdisciplinary practice. We have helped contribute to a field of study that stresses the vital importance of creativity and the arts in research and practice for change, added new resources and research to a growing body of knowledge that seeks to give voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the marginalized, offered a place to express the human story and provided new opportunities to share those deeply personal research based accounts with a world in desperate need of truth and authenticity.

As a publishing organization we have demonstrated that in these challenging and changing times the arts matter and have a fundamental role to play in creating communities that care for their citizens. We invite you to join us and support IJCAIP and our ongoing efforts to raise awareness about the creative arts in research and interdisciplinary practice. Visit our website at http://www.ijcaip.com/ and share in our issues and archives where you will witness the creative arts in research and action for hope and change. Invite your friends to subscribe, without charge, to IJCAIP Journal with an email to CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com "please subscribe. Visit our blogs. Learn more about our books and introduce The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice CAIP Series to your students. Pass along the good word and share the news with colleagues.

Artful Inquiry Within Dietetics Among Themes at First Critical Dietetics Conference, Toronto

Announcing

The First International Critical Dietetics Conference

August 19-20, 2011
Ryerson University
Toronto, ON, Canada

Critical Dietetics is informed by transdisciplinary scholarship from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. By contributing to scholarship, practice, and education, Critical Dietetics strives to make visible our assumptions, give voice to the unspoken, embrace reflexivity, reveal and explore power relations, encourage public engagement and diverse forms of expression, and acknowledge that there are no value-free positions. Through these principles, Critical Dietetics will engage with the ever-changing health, social, and environmental issues facing humanity. The First International Critical Dietetics Conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to engage in dialogue regarding Critical Dietetics as a means for growing this burgeoning movement.

What counts as "knowing" in dietetic practice? How do we, as nutrition professionals, come to know what we know and what we don't know? How does the evidenced-based discourse so dominant in dietetics scholarship today, intersect with and benefit from the wisdom-based discourse honed and refined for millennia? What does dietetic culture render silent? What is it that we have already accomplished as a profession? In what ways do we continue to evolve? How can we further build upon the rich roots of our profession? What do we envision for our future? These are but a few of the difficult, but important questions that Critical Dietetics seeks to explore.

Conference Themes

The themes of the conference include, but are not limited to:
- critical analysis of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability, and size in dietetics
- dietetic epistemology and post-structural orientations to dietetic education and practice
- artful inquiry within dietetics employing arts-informed methods such as performance, poetry, literature, documentary film, and art-making
- “civic dietetics” (Wilkins, et al, 2010), social justice, social responsibility, and the human right to food

We welcome abstract submissions under the following headings (times include discussion period):

1. Individual Paper (30 minutes): Please submit a 200 word abstract including the corresponding author's name, email address, and names of co-presenters.

2. Symposium (90 minutes): Please submit three abstracts (200 words each) and a thematic overview (100-200 words) of the symposium. Indicate the corresponding author's name, email address, and the names of the co-presenters.

3. Pecha kucha (20 slides of images to be shown for exactly 20 seconds each): Please submit a 200 word abstract including the author's name, email address, and the names of the co-presenters. Learn more about pecha kucha at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha and http://www.pecha-kucha.org/what.

Email your abstract to criticaldietetics@gmail.com by January 17, 2011. Notification of decisions will be made by March 21, 2011.

Information about keynote speakers, conference registration, accommodations, and travel will be available in the coming months at www.criticaldietetics.org.