In search of community performance through the arts : an alternative journey into the landscape of the body

Abstract

The thesis is an abstract of the reality as I once perceived. It is the reality-in-the-making through the act of writing, an action research beyond practice and thinking. It IS the ultimate "state-of-affair" on "word-chasing," interweaving hypothesis, stories, memory, ad hoc events, images, learnt facts, unspecified assumptions, observations, beliefs, values, conventions, taboos, attitudes and so on and so forth, re-contextualizing reality of the bodily community and its performances as unfolded through the arts from word to word and beyond, hoping to provide alternative insight for teachers and social workers in moments at (or before) work. This thesis is written in a foreign language, formulated by a man grown up confusedly in a land colonized, half Cantonese, half English, forever seeking his innately Chinese presence under the roofs of social institutions shaped by colonial frameworks. Such "foreignness" has transformed the writing in the form of a surgical knife, ripping open the colonized carcass in the process of making philosophical acquisition, as if, in Chomsky's words, "a kind of discovery procedure" (On Language, 2007:131), re-constituting the personal constructs once endeavored and the best possible transformation that are found essential or critical to the constantly refinable way of living-to-be. Thus, the act of writing, often with units breaking down into fragments, never intends to normalize the discourse but rather to seek alternative landings that could best reflect the findings unveiled in the process of wordplay - a theatricalized contemplation beyond surface dreams, structures and living conditions once encountered (and encountering still), like making mobilizing shift, forever re-inventing alternative principles for thought-in-the-making along the stream of consciousness made available or affected at times, with priori often ambiguous and inconclusive. The re-mapping of rules and schemas, including ad hoc approximations, would become part of the transformational rules constantly re-defined (or compromised) from chapter to chapter, re-examining viewpoints passed on or left undiscovered long buried in the landscape of an individual body-mind. As the reader of living experiences, I am making this particular thesis as a specific time journey hoping to generate alternative dialogues with readers, as another individual creative counterpart, through ecological self-play, an indivisible process in pursuing the next possible resolution to be for the often enigmatic individual (pre-)conditions. Therefore, it is a thesis conceptualized through the known as well as the unknown or yet to-be-known, hoping to remap a possible dream-world through the arts in order to make sense out of the real world we are living in or perceiving at times, which could, subsequently, become alternative resources for better reflection among human services providers, especially those in the education and social services professions.