Musical co-creativity and learning in the Kokas pedagogy: Polyphony of movement and imagination

Accepted Manuscript Title: Musical co-creativity and learning in the Kokas pedagogy: Polyphony of movement and imagination Author: Eva Vass PII: DOI: Reference:

S1871-1871(18)30260-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.12.004 TSC 544

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Thinking Skills and Creativity

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7 August 2018 25 November 2018 9 December 2018

Please cite this article as: Vass E, Musical co-creativity and learning in the Kokas pedagogy: Polyphony of movement and imagination, Thinking Skills and Creativity (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.12.004 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

Musical co-creativity and learning in the Kokas pedagogy: polyphony of movement and imagination

Eva Vass

Lecturer, School of Education, Western Sydney University, Australia

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[email protected]

Highlights

Focus redirected to the embodied dimensions of creative connection building.

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Embodied actions and connections shown as catalysts of group cohesion,

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intersubjectivity, creative connectivity and pedagogical transformations. Points toward the need to reconceptualise music education and music teacher

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Evidences the value of experience-centred pedagogies in facilitating creative,

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training.

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probing habits of mind.

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Abstract

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The study reported here is part of a research collaboration with the Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy of Music. Our research centres around the Kokas pedagogy, an experiential approach to music education combining music, movement and reflection. The paper contributes the Higher Education research strand, unpacking the relevance of this pedagogy in the context of music teacher education. Returning to the phenomenological roots of dialogicality (Merleu-Ponty,1968; Buber, 1958) and drawing on the key principles of Natural Inclusionality (Rayner, 2017) it investigates the nature and value of the embodied musical learning and co-creativity in this context. My aim was to capture the participants’ imaginative re-opening to self and world, expressed through i) synchrony between movement and music, ii) other-orientation, and iii) creative attunement, evolving from the former two. Using video recordings of the focal cohort (9 3-hour sessions with 10 students) and students’ self-reflective compositions, the study involved the qualitative analysis of action (movement data) and reflection. The analytic process combined the researcher’s inner and outer perception in exploring the nature of the phenomena in focus. The findings captured the infinitude of dialogic connectivity in the focal student cohort. The deep cohesion was largely experience-generated, whereby the participants’ awareness was gradually brought back to natural continuity through a fluid, mutually receptive-responsive bodily dialogue. This signifies learning which reaches beyond the knowledge and praxis of intellectually constituted thought and language. The musical encounters proved to be the fountain of new, creative forms of perceiving, knowing and relating in the observed HE setting. Keywords: embodied dialogue, experience-centred teaching, musical co-creativity, knowledge-asencounter, creative presence, creative attunement

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'Practice and perceive? Mind-stuck intellect struggles'Openness', holding, Sees.' (Kenneth Masters, 2018) 1

Introduction

In our efforts to re-imagine education we need to recognise bodily ways of knowing and experiencing

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as fundamental to learning. Powerful challenges to the Cartesian dichotomies have been put forward by the cognitive sciences in recent decades, with systematic efforts to develop an embodied aesthetics

of understanding. Although the turn towards the reconnection of the body and the mind has inspired

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educational science (e.g. Fenwick et al., 2011), our understanding of teaching and learning as embodied practice is still rather limited. The research reported here contributes to this important paradigm shift by inviting interdisciplinary knowledge to inspire educational inquiry. In particular, it

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turns to the arts – to alternative music education – for an explorative context. As its philosophical foundations, this research brings together Natural Inclusionality (NI) – the re-conceptualisation of the

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scientific study of nature (Rayner, 2017) – with the phenomenological roots of dialogism (Wegerif,

Embodiment, meaning and dialogue

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2017).

A significant shift in scientific inquiry is the increasing pervasiveness of the concept of embodiment.

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The second generation of cognitive science is primarily concerned with the embodied aesthetics of understanding: the conceptualisation and evidencing of the ways in which meaning evolves through our body’s engagement with its environment (Johnson, 2008). Particularly relevant for the current

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study is the enactivist approach to embodiment (e.g. Gallagher, 2017). Emphasising the somatic origins of cognition, it describes the constitution of consciousness as fundamentally determined and

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mediated by the processes of the body. Following from this, meaning itself is seen as essentially embodied: although there is cognitive capacity to develop meaning propositionally (e.g. using language), meaning cannot be restricted to propositions and concepts.

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The study of this “deep mutual interpenetration of mental and physical, interlaced fingers” (Gelernter, 2016, p. 113) has taken different routes across disciplines. Natural Inclusionality (Rayner, 2017) has special relevance for the growing interdisciplinary work on the embodied mind. Essentially, Natural Inclusionality is based on the central premise of evolution as a natural attunement and creative dialogue between self and habitat. This is not an adaptation process (survival of the fittest) but habitat making (survival of the fitting). According to Rayner, biological research has rich evidence for

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interdependence and natural inclusionality in natural organisms, indicative of inherent evolutionary creativity and dialogicality:

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"Natural inclusionality is a perception and emerging philosophy of reality that explicitly recognises the co-creative relationship between spatial receptivity and energetic responsiveness from which living, bodily form comes fluidly into being. This perception combines awareness of the space included within a material body with the space surrounding that body in a way that may come naturally to children as they individuate, but is prone quickly to be obscured by rigid educational praxis founded on definitive logic and language. The latter praxis is detrimental to human understanding of natural relationships between individual and group identities and their surroundings, making it of paramount importance to develop pedagogies that actively sustain and nurture receptive-responsive awareness in both mind and body."(A. Rayner, personal communication, Jan 2018)

In order to cultivate such receptive-responsive orientations, it seems crucial to legitimise and reintroduce bodily ways of knowing and experiencing as fundamental to learning. Although there is now a general recognition of the deeply embodied essence of language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) we also

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need to accept that meaning goes beyond – and most often does not start with – language. Analogies

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from NI help to grasp the nature of such embodied dialogicality: “a mutually co-creative, receptiveresponsive relationship between stillness and movement” (Author, year p. 59) which goes beyond the

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strategic, intellectualised negotiation of difference. From an NI perspective teachers – similarly to

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opposed to impositional presence.

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enzymes – can be envisaged as catalysts in the process: localities conveying receptive presence as

Dialogism – beyond the intellect

Socio-cultural theorising provokes us to discard the familiar notion of individual thinking in favour of

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the dialogic concept of interthinking (Littleton & Mercer, 2013), nurtured through the educationally

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valuable use of classroom talk.

Proponents of dialogism have primarily focused their efforts on capturing the links and relationships between language and thought, with an overarching aim to evidence the ways in which language transforms the way we think. This is an undeniably important concern in contemporary classrooms.

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First, effective classroom talk can support the appropriation of specific lexicon which is foundational for students’ verbalised sense making of the knowledge field (what we already know). Second, it helps generate new ways in which students can make sense of the world, leading to discoveries and new knowledge. The social and cognitive benefits of productive, co-constructive classroom talk have been extensively documented in the research literature (Littleton & Mercer, 2013), whilst the impact of authentic dialogue on school achievement has been evidenced through a robust intervention study by Alexander and colleagues (Alexander, 2017)

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Whilst advocates of dialogic pedagogies critique traditional Western classrooms for their monologic character, they are far less concerned about the deeply disembodied nature of these classrooms. This is especially perplexing given Vygotsky’s departure from a fundamentally linguistic pedagogy in his later writings (Hedegaard, 2016) and the visible phenomenological dimensions of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Indeed, the phenomenological roots of dialogism, powerfully captured in Wegerif’s recent writings (2017), point us in this direction. In particular, Wegerif (2017) re-orients us to Merleau-

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Ponty’s and Buber’s (1958) philosophy, arguing that dialogic encounters build on the opening and expansion of a shared space of mutual resonance – or dialogic space. This is a crucial argument,

which basically fuses the dialogic with the embodied. Essentially, dialogic encounters challenge

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participants to reorient to the ‘space of the in between’ (Buber, 1958). The knowledge and lived

experience of the other is at the heart of such dialogical opening (Bakhtin, 1990, 1986), which can be envisaged as a dynamic, unpredictable and transformative process of collective being and becoming. The participants’ openness to change (their dialogic orientation) does not however necessitate a shift

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towards homogeneity. The dialogic space of knowing constitutes an expansive web of dynamic

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interconnectivity: moments of resolve leading to new tensions, never complete or fully resolved, yet

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leaving a significant impact.

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A phenomenological vision of this relational reciprocity also recognises the lack of definite boundaries between the self and the world, between the inner and the outer. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “Inside and

Ponty, 1958, p. 474).

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outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside of myself” (Merleau-

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A more embodied and experiential perspective of dialogism – the expansion of dialogic space through mutual resonance – is congruent with the theory of Natural Inclusionality (Author, 2018). As I described elsewhere, “NI challenges the discontinuous perceptions of space and boundaries, proposing

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that distinctiveness (e.g. that of an individual within the group) is not an illusion, but it is dynamic and perpetually evolving. Just like living cells, individuals can be seen as centres of receptive stillness, which exist and evolve in a mutually inclusive relationship with their environment, constituting fluiddynamic localities and not rigidly self-contained units” (Author, 2018, p. 61). If so, the dialogic space

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(or interspace) is the source of continuity and potential connectivity, not an intervening distance.

This embodied notion of dialogicality provokes us to problematize the privileging of intellectuallyconstituted thought (e.g. the negotiation of difference based on explicit reasoning) in the development of intersubjectivity. It also shows how partial (as opposed to the desired impartiality) objectivistic thought can be, resulting in a rather narrow, third-person, outsider perception. Mutual resonance cannot be reduced to the artful articulation of reasons/arguments. On the contrary, when limited to

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objectivistic thought, which deliberately excludes subjective feeling, intuition, sensing, we experience a discontinuity. Thought is severed from its source, and insight is limited:

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“This can be described as dislocation, closing off or severance of self from the world, of the kind that comes from objectivistic perception. The 'dislocated self' is lost from its sense of place and begins to behave incoherently. What's needed, therefore is not so much 'reconnection to self and world' as 're-opening to self and world', which brings awareness of natural continuity…. Nature is not an object to attach ourselves to, Nature is the reality our selves are dynamically included within: hence the need is to re-open to Nature, while not going so far as to deny the existence of our bodily boundaries as distinctions between inner and outer.” (Rayner, personal communication, June 2018).

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Rayner posits that such reopening to the self and to the world requires second person perspective: a combination of outward perception and inward sensing. This has implications to both our conceptualisations of embodied dialogicality, and our methodological approach towards the study of

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dialogic encounters. Co-creativity and embodiment

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The role of the moving, interacting, feeling, perceiving and responding body is well-recognised in

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creative arenas of human experience (Anttila, 2007). Creativity theories often point towards the significance of unconscious mentation in new discoveries. For instance, creative analogy formation is

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described by Gelernter (1994) as building on low focus thinking – stream of consciousness or daydreaming. Such psychological states allow affect to become the glue between ideas, and it is

associations are formed:

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through such ‘affect-linking’ (Gelernter, 1994) that logically unexpected, yet still coherent

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“I hold, that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of Feeling, than on trains of Ideas… I almost think, that Ideas

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never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas – any more than Leaves in a forest create each other’s motion – The Breeze it is that runs through them; it is the Soul, the state of Feeling” (segment from Coleridge’s letter to a friend, cited in

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Gelernter, 2016, p. 167).

Similarly, Csikszentmihalyi’s (2000) description of the autotelic flow experience – a perceived sense of continuity between the self with the environment, the “merging of action and awareness” (p. 38) – is indicative of a significant, often transcendental, loss of self-consciousness. Undivided attention and day-dreaming may be different in many ways, but they both allow the mind to be liberated from the constraints of conscious control (Koestler, 1964). Thus, both may result in a state of consciousness where the mind simply takes over. Therefore, the trance-like flow-focus is rather similar to the diffuse

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thought processes that characterise day-dreaming in terms of the creative potentials it affords. (See section 1.4 for a related discussion of pre-reflective self-consciousness.) My research on children’s co-creativity has evidenced the salience of affectively constituted thinking in creative collaborations (Author, 2014, 2008). Research involving adult artists in improvisative contexts has also documented the establishment and maintenance of creative intersubjectivities. Such research introduced concepts such as creative attunement (Seddon, 2004), collective entrainment

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(Clayton, 2007) or group flow (Sawyer, 2007) to signify the emotional, intuitive, embodied dimensions of creative connectivity.

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Despite the pioneering work on embodiment by second generation cognitive scientists, our understanding of teaching and learning as an embodied practice of receptive-responsive dialogue is rather limited. Yet, the theoretical and empirical insights discussed above necessitate such broader

conceptualisations of dialogue, co-construction and co-creativity, which encompass considerations of

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collective being and becoming. Similarly, pedagogies promoting co-creative dialogue may want to

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include opportunities for co-experiencing with others. As I noted elsewhere (Author, 2018), such opportunities for collective experience are more than just a preliminary step towards learning. They

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may actually constitute learning. If so, “the translation of the experience into language is not an

superfluous” (Author, 2018, p. 62).

The Kokas pedagogy as research context

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unavoidable necessity: it may lead to valuable verbalised reflections, but it may also be, at times,

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The Kokas pedagogy – an experience-centred approach to music education – has become my research context for these considerations. The relevance of this music pedagogy for this research is twofold. On the one hand, music education settings (or musical experiences in general) are often described as

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optimal for the explorations and nurturing of the embodied mind. Art is an exemplary manifestation of our felt sense of the meaning of things, and it is not propositional in structure (Johnson, 2008). Therefore, music is not simply a re-enactment of an experience, but signifies and constitutes lived experience. As I noted elsewhere, musical encounters are often seen as similar to meeting and getting

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to know another person. “In human-to-human encounters, such intimate understanding requires unconditional communicative openness towards the other. Musical encounters initiate a similar openness, releasing the suppressed awareness of continuity into flow” (Author, 2018, p. 64). The unique essence of musical encounters is that they are not bound to a language-based modality. They are also transformative, with music’s power to instigate changes in our body-mind (Johnson, 2008). Importantly, there is a characteristic absence of conscious mentation in such musical encounters,

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which resonates with Gallagher and Zalavi’s (2008, p. 46) account of pre-reflective selfconsciousness: “…the self-consciousness must be understood as an intrinsic feature of the primary experience […] I can, of course, reflect on and attend to my experience, I can make it the theme or object of my attention, but prior to reflecting on it, I wasn’t ‘mind- or self-blind’. The experience was already present to me, it was already something for me, and in that sense it counts as being pre-reflectively conscious.”

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The other unique gift of the Kokas pedagogy for this research is its aim to sustain and nurture

students’ somatic, experiential understanding of classical music. It combines active music appreciation with Kodaly’s singing-based music pedagogy, mainly targeting the early and primary years. In doing

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so, it goes beyond the structural analysis (or ‘science’) of music that is prevalent in traditional Western music education. 1

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The sessions start and conclude with collective singing. There are two music-focused phases embedded in this framing: active music listening and collective reflection. Students are encouraged to

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respond to the music with spontaneous, improvised, free movement combinations. In the reflection

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phase children are invited to share their experiences through demonstration (showcasing their movement) or verbalisation (sharing thoughts and reflections). Alternative reflective contexts are

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regularly offered using visual modalities (drawing or painting). The aim is the “full integration of imagination, motion, and music into a single, unified experience” (Kokas, 1999, p. 31). As evidenced

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in my earlier work (Author 2018, 2015), children often signal a kind of metamorphosis through their movement improvisations, transforming themselves and the world around them as they respond to the metaphoric qualities of music. The pedagogy allows these musical experiences to remain fully

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movement-based, even though there are opportunities to share verbalised reflections.

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Previous research (author 2018, 2016, 2015) has documented Kokas-participants’ evolving somatic understanding of the short musical pieces used in the sessions. This visceral, dynamic musical knowledge is qualitatively different from the factual, analytical knowledge – constituting static, repeatable and repeated meaning – that is often prioritised in education (Author, 2018, Johnson, 2008).

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Expressions such as hiding the music into one’s body or wrapping the body around the music illustrate the inherently embodied dialogicality of these encounters, whereby participants move from the periphery towards the centre of experience. As Pásztor contends, “the movement serves as the leading

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Note that the music-movement sessions based on the Kokas pedagogy have been implemented in various settings over the past 50 years. Although the pedagogy has mostly been used in the early and primary years, it was not developed as an age- or stage-specific music pedagogy. Klara Kokas introduced it to older age groups too, including adults. For example, the postgraduate accreditation programme for the Kokas pedagogy itself is grounded in such experience-centred learning and teaching.

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thread towards deeper and deeper immersion in musical understanding” (2003, p. 2, translated from Hungarian) which was regarded by Klara Kokas (1999) as foundational for music education.

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Materials and methods

Responding to recent reforms to the Hungarian national curriculum, the Liszt Academy of Music has recently added a new elective unit to their music-teacher education programme on the Kokas

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pedagogy. This paper focuses on the third cohort enrolled in this unit: 6 female and 4 male students with a diverse specialisation (violin, cello, accordion, folk music, folk singing, singing, opera, and musicology). In line with the pedagogic framing of the Kokas-sessions for children, the Master’s unit

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built on collective experiencing and reflection.

As Figure 1 illustrates, the ultimate aim of the unit was to immerse students in the pedagogy, making its core principles accessible through direct experiences. The sessions were extended to include body-

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awareness exercises which preceded (and often fused into) the improvised singing. In order to facilitate the linking of the personal insights to the students’ pedagogic practices, each session had a

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brief pedagogic extension. The evaluation of students’ progress combined the assessment of

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participation with the assessment of self-reflection (presented in self-reflective essays).2

The study involved a teacher-dyad (one of whom also contributed to the research at the planning and data collection stage), and myself (an observational researcher). As an observer, I was on the

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periphery of the action phases but participated in the collective reflection phases of the sessions. The layeredness of our immersion in the session is summarised as follows (visualized in Figure 2): Facilitating teacher fully immersed throughout the session (except for the didactic extension)

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‘Didactic’ teacher (co-researcher) alternates between observations (used for the assessment of

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student participation) and participation (participates in the collective reflection, and often joins

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in for the conclusive collective singing phases). Didactic teacher also plans and leads the ‘didactic extension’ part of the sessions.

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Lead researcher is an observer of the action-focused phases (recording with a video-camera)

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but joins in for the collective reflection (including arts-based reflection through drawing), which they continue to record.

I took a quasi-ethnographic (classroom-ethnographic) approach to the study of ongoing teaching and learning processes. The data include video recordings of all sessions of a focal student cohort, creative This study has been approved by my institution’s Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number H11728) and the Ethics Committee of the Liszt Academy of Music. The participants’ informed consent was obtained for the use of small video segments and images in publications and presentations disseminating the findings. In order to protect the anonymity of the participants, fictional names are used. Images and video segments have been distorted. 2

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products (paintings, drawings). To complement the observational data I also used students’ selfreflective compositions. The video-recordings and the reflective essays lent themselves conveniently to a more traditional analysis from a third-person ‘outside’ position. However, the research evolved into a multi-directional inquiry combining such outward perception (my existing toolkit as an observational researcher / classroom ethnographer) and inward sensing (incorporating my own lived experiences of the sessions in the analysis). As the findings section illustrates, this shift was partially necessitated by the nature of the teaching-learning activities in focus. Much like improvisational

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theatre or contact improvisation, the activities drew the audience in with their dreamlike, magnetic quality. More importantly however, the methodological shift towards a second perspective was inspired by the Natural Inclusionalist approach to the study of nature, and the recognition that research

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on experiential learning – just like the experiential learning itself – should be redefined as an embodied practice of receptive-responsive dialogue.

Similarly, data collection and analysis could be re-envisioned as systematic, intellectually, affectively

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as well as somatically constituted meaning making. Thus, the researcher’s own lived, personal

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experience of the researched phenomena is not a hindrance but a central layer of experiential meaning making, allowing the researcher to gain direct, contemplative insight into the nature of reality. Inward

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looking inquiry is a precision tool for the scientific explorations of experience. These arguments echo

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William James’s critique of the Western psychology of the mind (articulated at the end of the 19th century), and his insistence that we go beyond the narrow objectivistic study of inner mental processes and place the emphasis on introspection (Wallace, 2009). Natural inclusionality challenges the

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primacy of objectivistic, abstracted perception in the study of the nature of reality, but also warns us against the simplistic binary logic of ‘objective science’ versus ‘subjective art’. Instead, NI directs us

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towards a co-creative partnership between these two seemingly incompatible perspectives, signifying a “comprehensive perception of the true nature of reality” (Rayner, 2018b). The methodology evolving in the current research aims to combine the outer and inner perception to bring deeper

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insights about the central phenomena. Research thus becomes an art to connect, or ‘dance in between’ the insideness and outsideness of experience. My previous work with the Liszt Academy of Music explored the adaptability and transformative

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potentials of this elective unit in Higher Education (Author, 2016). The current cohort exuded intense curiosity and playful energy, with an astonishing level of immediate rapport. My initial observations and lived experiences of the sessions inspired me to delve into the nature and significance of their intense connectivity and investigate the depth and richness of the embodied musical learning and cocreativity expressed by i) synchrony between movement and music, ii) other-orientation, and iii) creative attunement, evolving from the former two.

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I used a video-camera to record the action (movement data), and the collective reflection phases (during which participants, teachers and researcher shared their reflections on their lived experiences and observations). Importantly, the recorded spoken reflections captured the different perspectives of everybody present: their immediate, contemplative comments on inner experiences as well as their outward-looking observations of what they witnessed around them. This is a unique feature of the Kokas pedagogy, affording the corroboration of different perspectives as shared in the sessions, even though the ultimate fine-grained analysis of these perspectives was carried out as my own individual,

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retrospective analytic journey.

For the first phase of analysis, the video-recordings of the sessions (nearly 21 hours of data) were

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reviewed and transcribed (this included the transcript of the movement-narrative and that of verbalised

reflection). The transcripts were then coded to identify key moments relating to the three central phenomena (musical synchrony, other orientation and creative attunement). As noted earlier, this analysis evolved into a multidirectional fusion of introspection (using the data to elicit or revisit my

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own felt experiences and insights) and extraspection (an outward looking, detached exploration of

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participants’ actions and shared insights).

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Next, using the individual students’ reflective essays, I looked to see how these ‘key moments’ were

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reflected on retrospectively. Again, I worked with this data both to elicit my own recollections of my experiences, and to explore the data from an outsider perspective. I also used them to also corroborate the immediate, spoken reflections with participants’ written sense making in their essays. Figure 3 is

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used to illustrate these complex analytic processes towards comprehensive perception.

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My approach to the movement analysis was informed by Pásztor’s (2003) analytic model. Although a comprehensive music-movement analysis was beyond my scope, I aimed to make visible the nature and depth of participants’ musical attention, such as: the emergence of movement motifs, and their association with the music (movement

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signifying the global effect, the emotional qualities, the mood, important turning points, the

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The permanence and systematic return of these movement motifs (indicative of anticipation,

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points of emphasis, or the finer details).

movement-music synchrony, comprehensive musical memory, deep sense of affinity with the music, or transcendental musical encounter and metamorphosis).

Figure 4 shows how I used layers of concentric circles to visualise the students’ journeys towards dialogic affinity with music. This journey was envisaged as three-dimensional. Close encounters with

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music were understood as elevated creative presence (creative bodily disposition, being in the flow) in the musical moment.3 On the other hand, the video-recorded data were used to investigate students’ verbal and non-verbal expression of other-orientation (gaze, movement synchronisation, mirroring, etc.) and creative attunement (movement signalling collective story telling or imaginative transformations). I complemented this with the analysis of individual, retrospectively written reflective essays. As in the

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past (Author, 2016), the study of written reflections was informed by Silverman’s constructivist narrative analysis. As with the movement analysis, the initial analytic focus was on the identification

of ‘key moments’ as reflected on by the student participants. A more fine-grained analysis was also

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used to study how students’ retrospective introspection refined my understanding of key, memorable experiences.

Findings

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The analysis mapped out a unique and rich pattern of surprises and wonderments, which combined into a unique constellation of collective experience. In what follows, I introduce a number of key

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moments, in order to illuminate this rich map of connectivity.

The village fair - Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, Intermezzo interrotto [please link Audio file 1 here]

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As noted earlier, the aim of the immersive Kokas sessions was to encourage new openings (or reopenings) towards music through direct experiencing of the pedagogy in the HE context. The

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significance of the challenge, requiring young musicians and trainee music teachers to go beyond the technical expertise of their musical instrument, was well documented in our previous work (Author 2016). Yet, for the focal cohort, the analyses of the movement-based and reflective data converge on

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the almost surprising level of readiness to take on this challenge from the start. The students’ readiness can partially be explained by their orientation towards alternative music education, especially music therapy, evidenced in their reflective essays. The essays also report on some prior knowledge (6 out of the 10 students have heard about the pedagogy in musical circles, and 3 of these have actually seen

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Kokas sessions with children). Nevertheless, the essays capture how unprepared the students were for the demands of the immersive approach:

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Further details on the analytic design can be found in [Author, 2018].

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“It was a pleasant surprise for me that, instead of the explicit discussion of pre-determined curriculum content, our teachers simply created opportunities for us to gain first-hand, direct experience of the essence of this pedagogy.” (Gréti, reflective essay)4 “The course has shown me a path that I had been looking for for a long time. The approach was strange at first. What do they mean by not teaching the pedagogy? How can we learn about it then? Then it became obvious that the only legitimate learning path, in this case, is

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through direct experience, embedded in which rests the pedagogy, and the thoughtful design of the sessions.” (Kati, reflective essay)

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Whilst individual students in the cohort may have had different entry points, their unequivocal response to the immersive pedagogy was that of a childlike inquisitiveness, curiosity and oftentimes yearning. Their retrospective essays are very clear about the challenges – for example the initial

awkwardness – but these recollections gravitate towards students’ ‘readiness to play’, their insightful

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meaning-making, and the natural ease with which they found their place in the sessions. This open

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predisposition was already evident in the first session. Sharing her insights during the collective

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reflection phase, the facilitating teacher summarised her immediate reflections as follows:

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‘Some students jumped on the opportunity and were incandescent, whilst others needed to dip in the experience again and again… Almost everyone had a moment of complete abandonment. You followed the rhythm and the character of the music, but you could also

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‘step outside’ the room and imagined yourselves somewhere else.” (Session leader, Shared

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reflection, Session 1)

The facilitating teacher’s observations compliment on students’ deep musical attention and affinity. They also signal students’ quick progression towards the playful self-abandonment that is associated

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with creative flow and the ‘province of the imagination’ (Sawyer, 2013, p. 102).

My reflections on the first session were congruent with this, noting the tentative inquisitiveness expressed in body movement: a mixture of playfulness, exuberance and occasional hesitation or

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timidity. The analysis of the video-recorded movement data (using the analytic criteria outlined earlier) helps make these initial movement patterns visible. Figure 5 presents my movement analysis of Session 1. I used layers of concentric circles to visualise the students’ journeys towards dialogic affinity with music. (The yellow stars represent the students, and the orange star is the facilitating teacher.)

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Please note that all verbalised reflections are translated from Hungarian.

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The movement analysis confirms that the participants have already reached the point where musically inspired movement and centredness of attention characteristically progresses to deep, almost transcendental encounters with music, and where the potentiality of imaginative transformations appears. The focused attention captured in the movement repertoire has become the gate towards the autotelic experience of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), establishing the space for solitary or collective experiences of imaginative being and becoming. Whilst some students’ bodily expressions were more

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tentative than of others, the group was already on the verge of deep, collective, musical dialogicality (where they would remain, not exclusively but predominantly, for the rest of the semester). The images in Figure 6 illustrate this well; the systematic movement analysis makes the experienced (or

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observed) phenomena visible.

The images in Figure 6 showcase students’ expression of musical dialogue in Session 1. The first row of images signify the immediate resonance between participants. As a group, they embody collective

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symmetry and all-inclusiveness with their posture, fluid synchrony of movement and their use of

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space. There is vitality yet softness in these images. The second line of photos capture the intensity of other-orientation, the open, inquisitive and inviting gestures, gaze and posture. Everybody is facing

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everyone, not confrontationally but in an inviting way. The third set of images signify imagination-in-

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the making: the hurried, scared movements, furtive looks, a gesture signalling a threat or the confident closure-signal in the final image. They also signify moments of creative attunement: fleeting and

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playful openings towards others.

Leading back to introspection, the selected images also elicit my own felt experiences of the session,

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as I witnessed the unfolding, improvised action from the periphery. As I revisit the recording, my recollections of this session centre around a deeply felt sense of ‘irresistibility’. I recall the intensity of the atmosphere, so inviting that I felt a strong desire to stop filming, leave the periphery and slip into

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the context. My own felt experience of the unfolding action was that of collective fantasy which has also enveloped me. I shared the following inward looking contemplation with the group:

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“I felt as if I was in a ‘vurstli’ [a village fair or a small amusement park]. I saw a lion tamer, I saw a ringmaster, I saw animals being trained to do circus tricks. There were relationships forming. I saw a giant, inflatable blow up doll swaying back and forth in the wind. There were stalls where you could shoot or throw at a target. I saw people chasing each other, and I possibly saw people shooting at targets and winning prizes. Yes, I was in a village fair.” (Researcher, Session 1, shared reflection)

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In a spontaneous chain of associations, the students and teachers responded by adding further imaginary contexts which were congruent with the image I conjured up, such as music festival (Gréti) or a theatre on ice (didactic teacher). It is obvious that my felt experiences held relevance and meaning for the others present. It is also clear that my insights of this session went beyond that of an outside observer, and were enriched by my personal, sensory immersion.

My inward looking reflections have revealed to me how the features of the musical segment shaped

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my interpretation of the unfolding action. The musical piece – Interrupted Intermezzo by Bartók – contains a romantic, overflowing melody which is interrupted – and in certain interpretations ridiculed

– by the loud ‘laughter’ of the wind section (trombones, woodwinds). The segment from the

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Intermezzo selected for the session encapsulates this theme, combining the pleasant and the harsh or the romantic and the threatening, and has an overarching sense of grotesque. Retrospectively it is easy to see how the features of the musical segment invoked the vision of a circus or a fair. Equally, I was gaining access to the nuances of the musical segment through witnessing the participants’ reaction to

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it: the stomping, the marching, the bizarre gait of the clown or the gnome, the jokingly-provocative

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moves of the jester, the playful duels or the pretence of scaring others or being scared. In short, I have somehow become part of this musically inspired, imaginative being and becoming, entering into a

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dialogue with both the participants and the music.

The richness of these insights raises the issues of perspective and visibility. How can research make the intricate, inner, bodily ways of knowing and experiencing visible without the researcher’s

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immersive first person experience? And how can the researcher resist being fully drawn in and maintain (or regain) some space for extraspection? These problematisations confirmed to me the

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importance of introspection as a research tool. They also highlighted the need to cultivate a second perspective as a methodological orientation, whereby I can reconcile and mutually include the dialectic opposites of inner sensing and outward inquiry. So a perpetual analytic dance in between the

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different modalities of expression and different analytic directionalities ensued.

3.2

Capulet Ball - Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet5

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The movement data has shown that the relationships students developed with the musical pieces were both intimate, personal and collective. Their somatic affinity with the musical segments was well documented by the numerous, often surprising, episodes of musical anticipation. Session 2, using a musical segment from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, provided the first notable example of this. What was most striking was the level of anticipation and resonance with the music. Although students

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No sound recording available.

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identified the musical era and the potential composers, they did not recognise the actual musical piece. Yet, their evolving stories and narratives were all centring around the themes of love-and-anger or joyand-fear. Two students – Szilvi and Gábor – developed a powerful dance-encounter during the repeated listening phase. They appeared to dance a Minuet, moving together with delicate gestures but never touching. Unknowingly, they acted out the first encounter between Romeo and Juliet. (The musical

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segment for this session was from Scene 13 of the ballet: we find ourselves in the middle of the Capulet Ball, where Julia first sets eyes on Romeo.) As I was returning to this video segment again

and again, I was struck by the graceful and vivid expression of this romantic theme, which appeared in

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perfect alignment with the cinematography of Baz Luhrman’s film adaptation. (The improvisation finished with the male student theatrically collapsing, as if he was dying.)

This was an example of exquisite contact improvisation, synchrony with the music (anticipation and

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embodiment of musical features) and creative attunement. A perfect instantiation of bodily ways of

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knowing and experiencing. As the first two images of Figure 7 show, the partners were largely oblivious to the action and energy surrounding them. Their body language signified that they were

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fully removed from the here-and-now: a poignant moment of collective flow. They entered into a very

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intimate and personal dialogue with the musical environment and with each other, signalling uninhibited communicative openness. Just like children engaged in coordinated play, they displayed ‘willingness to go on an adventure with someone else, to influence and to accept influence’ (Gottman,

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1986, p. 156). The last three images of Figure 7 were taken from the dyad’s showcasing of their

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improvised dance to the rest of the class, with all the elements of their dramatic narrative crystallised.

The analysis of shared reflections allowed me to dig deeper into the experience. Following the

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demonstration, the facilitating teacher noted her surprise at how mesmerizingly close Gábor and Szilvi’s dance was to a plausible encounter between Romeo and Juliet. Although each session carries the potentiality of such musical affinity and imaginative power, these qualities cannot be expected, prescribed or planned for. The contingent nature of such moments of connectivity makes them

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particularly remarkable, commented the teacher. Resonating with the teacher’s reflections, Gábor and Szilvi reported on the fluidity of boundaries, the nature of give-and-take (who is leading, who is following, and how this is managed) and the wonderment of contact-without-contact (the powerful circulation of energy without the need to talk or touch):

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This was all very interesting for me. Because I had this feeling: it was like a song without words, our dance without touch. And I liked that we kind of held the other’s hands without holding. This was a unique connection. And, without the physical touch, our eye contact was better. (Gábor, Session 2, shared reflection) It was clear from the beginning that this was some sort of a dance. But the story only evolved much later. And the suicide… I did not anticipate that… It’s interesting that this is a shared thing. And because it turned into a dance, I relied on you [Gabor]. Because with me, intellectually and emotionally, men take the lead. And so I was waiting for you to lead. (Szilvi, Session 2, shared reflection)

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For Gábor, experimenting with the body has become an intriguing, overarching theme. For Szilvi, the memorable feature of this encounter was her embodied articulation of receptive-responsive presence,

which she saw as an instantiation of her personality and her positioning in romantic relationships. The

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students’ shared introspections illuminate the value of such inward looking for this research. When we bring these together with the teacher’s observations and with the movement analysis, we see beautiful continuity between Gábor and Szilvi’s inner reality – their experiences of imaginative being and

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Polyphony of imagination – Scarlatti, Sonata in F minor (466)

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3.3

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becoming – and its connections to the outer, observable, phenomena.

Over the weeks the cohesion of the group increased to a level that appeared to signify collective

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consciousness and the creative attunement of the whole cohort. Participants’ actions, stories and reflections intertwined both within and across sessions. Often participants would break up into smaller

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groups. However, these groups did not exist in isolation but seemed to maintain fluid continuity with the other groups, and feed off each other in their movement improvisations. There appeared to be multiple layers of connectivity in this dialogic space, which encompassed the whole class, but allowed

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the emergence of smaller ‘subplots’ connected to a musically generated, overarching theme.

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My own felt experience of these later sessions was an experience of polyphony: the polyphony of imagination translated into movement. In musical terminology, polyphonic musical texture combines more than one independent melody. These melodies are distinct yet mutually interconnected, without one dominating the other. Harmonies emerge as a consequence, and not as the driving principle for the

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composition. The polyphony of imagination sensed as well as documented (through movement and reflection data) could have very similar descriptors.

A key episode that emerged from the fine-grained data analysis is from Session 4: a session using a segment from Scarlatti’s Sonata in F Minor (K466). During the repeated listening small groups formed naturally. Interestingly, all groups remained seated, and mostly restricted their movement to the upper body, especially the hands.

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During the session my attention gravitated towards Zalán and Daniella (the dyad on the right hand side of the images in Figure 8). Their intricate hand movements showed near-transcendental togetherness with the music and with each other. The music seemed to generate and maintain some kind of fluttering vibration in their hands. Their movement repertoire developed over the repetitions of the musical segment. They finished their final listening with a beautiful prayer-like closure. As the session unfolded, I started to zoom in on Zalán and Daniella with the camera, exclusively recording their

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movement improvisations, aiming to capture this delicate encounter in detail.

The recorded movement data evidences deep synchronicity with the music. The perpetual cycles of

movement corresponded to the calm, pulsating musical qualities. The data also show heightened

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movement-synchronisation, they also mirrored each other’s gestures and engaged in subtle invitationresponse sequences. The video file captures their movement during the final repetition of the musical

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segment.

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[Please insert Video file 1 here.]

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In her immediate reflections, Daniella described her butterfly-like metamorphosis as euphoric. Zalán in both students’ retrospective essays.

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referred to the episode as the ‘morning catharsis’. The experience was lasting, and has become central

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I was something that was flying. And I was really interested in Zalán’s character. I tried to wake this creature up. And then we kind of got connected. And actually, the most beautiful one was the one before [referring to the episode presented in the video segment above]… It was complete, from the first moment… there you [Zalán] followed me better. And, quite accidentally, we finished with our hands touching like this. It was euphoric. (Daniella, Session 4, Shared reflections)

The significance of Daniella and Zalán’s collective metamorphosis was magnified by the themes of being and becoming that evolved in other groups. The shared, immediate reflections of the participants revealed the polyphony of voices and experiences. For example, Gábor and Gréti (Figure 10)

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described their experiences as transformations into newborn infants: “I thought from the very beginning that I was a little baby. And this was the first encounter of this baby with another baby. And there is this wonderment, wow, she has hands too. Alright, my feet are a little bit bigger, and I have bigger palms, but she is a baby too... and I was getting to know her.” (Gábor, Session 4, shared reflection)

Gábor’s comments resonated with Gréti’s general orientation, who often characterised her participation in the Kokas-sessions as a return to her childhood being. Without any premeditated

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thought or verbalisation, Gábor and Gréti developed their explorative journey with a new babyencounter for each repeated listening: starting with the hands and continuing with the meeting of the feet. In this sense, the two dyad’s shared encounters with/through the music were distinct yet attuned. The third group’s dreamworld centred around the idea of creation – not premeditated but evolving from their mutual receptive-responsive presence (Figure 11).

In their movement repertoire they

appeared to be gathered around an imaginary pot, cooking, creating and doing witchcraft. The body

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language was openly other-oriented and they picked up on and extended each-other’s movement ideas (mirroring, initiation-response, synchronisation, ritualisation and embellishment of movement

features). Movement-wise they were both individually distinct yet collectively cohesive: a polyphony

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of action.

As the group’s immediate, spoken reflections revealed, collective movement afforded individual layers or dimensions of the shared experience, which also combined seamlessly into a cohesive story.

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Norbert, for instance, explained that he was a lonely artist creating artwork. When the repetitive,

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rotational stirring movement (stirring a pot) entered into the collective movement repertoire, he interpreted this as both cooking and sharing food, and also creating and sharing his artwork, with

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gratitude being his closing feeling. For Fruzsi the cooking was also more metaphorical. She thought

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that they were taking little bits off of each other to use as spices, but she also felt that they were actually taking the burden off each other’s shoulders. Eventually they cooked the challenges and problems into something tasty. Turning the negative into a positive, they created the ’spring of life’,

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and then they bathed their faces in it. For Csilla the story was about self-explorations. She came to the revelation that the cooking motif actually denoted witchcraft (concocting something magical from bits

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of their own being), and as such it was a metaphor for teaching. The facilitating teacher’s experience was also an experience of collective creation, with the desire to combine the values and qualities of

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everybody in the group.

The shared reflections evidenced that the groupmembers were cognisant of their narratives diverging and converging, and were also sensitive to the need of balancing the individual and the collective flow. They described the tension they sometimes felt about following their individual dreamworld or

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that of the group. Their verbalised reflections revealed a constant, perpetual meaning making process which combined the first person perspective (introspection, focusing on their own inner sensations and feelings) and a third person perspective (looking outside, observing and interpreting the other’s actions and reactions). Thus, one could argue that the imaginative openings described above built on this dynamic fusion of the inner and the outer directionality of sense making. As the group members concluded, the essence of the felt experience was shared, without the need to have the ’same ideas’ or to categorise the experience in one particular way.

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My own felt experience of the session (which I also shared with the group in the reflection phase) was equally cathartic. Whilst working with the camera and recording the action, I also allowed myself to enter into a dialogue with the music. Responding to the pulsating musical features, I felt that I turned into a sea-creature, a jellyfish, swimming deep under the water, swimming towards the light, towards the bright surface. The water was blue, crystal clear, pleasant and calm. The sense of floating in the waves was transcendental and peaceful. Yet, there was something poignantly sad about this experience

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as well. The feeling of sadness, I observed, arose from the complete solitute of this creature I imagined myself to be. With no other living beings around, it was an experience of solitary floating in the ’silence’ of the musical waters. My immersion in sensory musical dialogue, coupled with the inward

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focus, brought along some uniquely deep insights about the research process. In my interpretation, it

signifies the researcher’s solitude and isolation from the unique collective engagement they are witnessing; the suppression of the visceral inclination to be part of the phenomena the researcher is

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looking into.

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Figure 12 shows the participants listening to my reflections intently (whilst the camera is still recording). In this moment, they are the observers of me, the researcher, and not the other way around.

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They are listening to me about my felt sense of the musical encounters. This image demonstrates the

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fluid boundaries between insideness and outsideness, between observer and observee, involved in a dynamic receptive-responsive relationship.

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Again, the comprehensive analysis of the movement features is beyond the scope of the paper. However, the key musical characteristics (the pulsating, vibrating, floating motifs) often found expression in the movement characteristics which evolved over the repeated listening of the segment.

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Interestingly, the movement features emerging in smaller groups were at times picked up by other groups, as if they were able to expand their intense focus and take in the whole vista. Rooted in deep

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existential themes, and manifesting profound interconnectedness, this session connected everything and everyone, with fluid physical, personal and temporal boundaries (Figure 13). This could be interpreted as a deeply creative, autotelic flow experience: a sense of continuity between the self with the environment which fuses awareness and action (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Individual patterns (for

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instance, Norbert’s characteristic orientation towards the divine – see Figure 5) found expression in collective action too.

Music and movement were clearly the medium through which the rich connectivity evolved. Intersubjectivities went beyond the rationally explainable, and were largely rooted in the body, as Norbert summarises:

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“During the first few sessions I felt that people were a bit tentative, checking each other out from the corner of their eyes. After a few weeks everything became more simple. In fact, sometimes it was enough just to think about particular people, and they came to partner up with me. There were more regular partnerships, but also, depending on the task, there were also other connections between people. Once I knew my peers better, I tried to choose people whose character resonated with the qualities and the mood of the music we were given on the day.” (Norbert, reflective essay) Nevertheless, shared reflections were crucial in the articulation of the felt experience, and were used to clarify, extend or embellish the bodily, visceral storytelling through language. These verbalisations

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enabled participants, teachers and researcher to discuss their insights of the nature of their experiences, work out the how and the why, and also contemplate on their perceived challenges and gains.

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3.4 The dark side of agape

The discussion in this paper has largely focused on the ways in which research can make the embodied essence and relevance of experience-centred musical learning visible. As our previous work (Author,

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2016) documents, the HE students characteristically identify their changed relationship with music –

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the oftentimes cathartic rediscovery of music – as the most obvious and transformative impact of the Kokas sessions. Movement enables them to rediscover the natural continuity between the self and the

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music, washing away the perceived barriers. The multisensory nature of these encounters is the key to

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this re-opening. For the focal cohort, this has become a central revelation, documented in their individual reflective essays:

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“When I entered into the music and the character I have adopted, the music carried me…. During the sessions we completely metamorphosed. It felt like returning to childhood.”(Norbert, reflective essay)

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“It [the course] brought up my old, almost forgotten, much more visceral musical receptiveness from childhood. There is a big difference between listening to music via kinaesthetic experiences and simply listening through hearing. As I am replaying the musical material used in the Kokas sessions, I sense that it is not just my ears but my whole body that remembers. And there is this visceral yearning in me to listen to the whole musical pieces, because unconsciously I may need to know whether the rest of the music will offer the same deep affinity as the bits that we danced to.”(Gréti, reflective essay) “One can encounter completely new dimensions of musical receptivity if there are opportunities for free, unbounded responsiveness ... It would have been good to start my music education with the Kokas pedagogy, instead of the anxiety-laden, tearful solfege lessons.”(Kati, reflective essay)

These powerful verbalisations capture the norm-breaking essence of the Kokas pedagogy in the field of music education. Kati’s juxtaposition is especially moving, indicative of a hidden yearning for this form of a musical relationship and the painful childhood experience of disconnect from music. The students’ retrospective introspections capture the dialogic, embodied, visceral essence of rediscovered

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musical affinity. This is a familiarity that they may have had but have lost. There is also a somewhat resentful realisation of the role of education in creating this sense of severance, with implications to pedagogic understandings. The relevance and value of this new learning appear almost unsurprising to the focal cohort, with several of them trialling the new ideas in their teaching practice. There seems to be a fluid continuity between their personal and the pedagogic sense-making.

However, a few significant points were raised in the reflective content which need further attention

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and analysis. These reflections show that the (re)opening to self and the world is not without risks, and it is far from easy or unambiguous. The observed activities were not just light hearted, leisurely fun,

but constituted pedagogic provocations, culminating in some sort of catharsis and metamorphosis.

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Given the open, inquisitive orientation of the cohort, they did indeed respond to the pedagogic provocations with a spectacular transition from initial tentativeness towards the loss on all inhibition,

ecstasy and collective trance. Both observational and reflective data evidence how participants journeyed towards more boisterous bodily expression and less inhibited physical contact with each

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other (hugging, wrestling, etc.). As the culmination point, the final session saw students behave like a bunch of unruly, madcap, rampageous kids. The students described this in their immediate and

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retrospective reflections as an ‘avalanche’: overwhelming, nearly uncontrollable joy and excitedness,

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the child bursting to the surface. My own felt experience of this particular session was that of a

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collective trance or rave: a carnival.

From the teachers’ perspective, the unfolding events were ambivalent, and constituted risks which

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needed to be problematized. Indeed, where do we draw the line between collective flow (a collective rave or trance) and the complete unravelling of a learning experience? How can students and educators

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manage the intensity and flammability of such cathartic experiences in a classroom context? How does one personally or professionally handle the experience of an emotional avalanche? In contrast, students’ shared reflections were unanimously positive. They saw this experience as the natural

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culmination point of the semester; a cathartic experience that they personally yearned for and professionally valued. Thus, students’ reflections signified transformative learning, which however did not seem to fit the institutional framing. Although the menippea (the Bakhtinian carnivalesque) signified deeply transformative reopening to self and to music, it was also interpreted by the teachers

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as ambiguous in its value: with the inherent risk of challenging institutional norms and rituals. As a result, this deep learning was not fully legitimised by the teachers. Future research may need to problematise such incongruence between personal and institutional perspectives.

The second point needing future exploration is the heightened sensitivity and empathetic orientation students reported in their immediate reflections and retrospective essays. The cohort’s tactful management of the occasional marginalisation of particular groupmembers is especially interesting,

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given that the group dynamics were restricted to movement. Linked to this is the issue of homogeneity or cohesion. Students’ retrospective problematisation reveals that their growing empathy did not correspond to assimilation. They were open to admit the experience of tension, the sense of rubbing against each other, and revealed their flexibility in accepting these imperfections. Overall, such openness and discernment lead to cohesion but not homogeneity: an aspect we need to explore further. Related to this, there is also a need to look into the ways in which plurality of meaning (or the experience of misinterpretation or subjective judgement) was managed by students in more ambiguous

Conclusion - If the body is an instrument of knowledge and understanding, how can we

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contexts. Figure 14 summarises the key themes emergent in the paper:

tune it well?

This paper explored embodied learning and co-creativity in the context of an experience-centred music

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pedagogy. It outlined the analytic orientations which were developed to make the nature and relevance

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of such embodied, collective knowing and co-experiencing visible in the focal educational context. The value of a multidirectional analytic process, combining inward-looking and outward-looking

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inquiry regarding the central phenomena, was discussed.

Resonating with our earlier work (Author, 2018) the paper demonstrated that the evolving connectivity cannot be explained as arising from the strategic, intellectualised, negotiation of

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difference. Instead, it was seen as largely experience-generated, whereby the participants’ awareness was gradually brought back to natural continuity through a fluid, mutually receptive-responsive bodily

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dialogue. This signifies learning which goes beyond the knowledge and praxis of intellectually constituted, language-based thinking. The musical encounters generated new, creative forms of

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perceiving, knowing and relating in the observed HE setting.

The Kokas pedagogy nurtures and sustains the art of (collective) being and becoming. The paper linked this to a most precious shift in mindset – students’ journey towards receptive-responsive relationships – which was reflected in their somatic affinity with music, their heightened other-

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orientation and evolving creative attunement. Thus, the Kokas pedagogy exemplifies the pedagogic efforts to re-define what we mean by learning, knowing and relating. Whilst a strong curricular orientation (towards music education) remains, the journey towards this is through a very unique modality of experience and expression. The pedagogy elevates the embodied modality to the centre of learning. There is, however, a clear recognition of the partnership between such exploratory knowledge and the more traditional conceptual ‘science of music’. This has special significance for

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the context of higher education, where students’ changed relationship with music can also signal their pedagogical transformation. This paper also exemplifies how imagination and creativity – the open-minded curiosity and authentic, co-creative relationship with the world – can flourish through the body. I argue that this is the very process by which knowledge comes into being. In this HE context, musician-students’ visceral musical affinity evolved from the emergence of such mutually co-creative relationships, and impacted

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on their vision of music education. The painting below (reproduced with the kind permission of Alan Rayner) captures to me the essence of this receptive-responsive reopening: the art of natural creativity

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and diversity.

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Funding The data collection phase of this project was supported by [ ] University’s Academic Development Programme.

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Conflict of Interest Statement I declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank my National Inclusionality companions – Alan Rayner, Kenneth Masters, Roy Reynolds and Phil Innes in particular – for the fruitful conversations which informed this paper.

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References

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Fig. 1 The architecture of the Kokas sessions in the elective unit

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Fig. 2 – Layers of immersion by participating teacher-researchers

Fig. 3 – Research as a multidirectional inquiry (receptive-responsive dialogue)6

6 Creative commons image of a koru (silver fern spiral) downloaded from

https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-spiral-plant-247413/ All photos on the site are available for commercial and noncommercial use (reproduction and modification), with no attribution required.

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Perfect a unement with music, transcendental musical experience

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Movement/play without musical focus

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Fig. 4 Re-opening to music – levels of musical immersion in the Kokas sessions

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Flow, creative presence

Centeredness of attention

Movement/play without musical focus

Sporadic attention

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Movement/play with musical focus

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Fig. 5 Movement analysis, Session 1

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Fig. 6 The village fair (photo collage) [please insert Audio file 1 here]

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Fig. 7 Capulet Ball (photo collage)

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Fig. 8 Polyphony of imagination (photo collage)

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Fig. 9 The closing gesture in Daniella and Zalán’s butterfly-dance

Fig. 10 The meeting of babies (photo collage)

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Fig. 11 The spring of life (photo collage)

Fig. 12 The solitude of the jellyfish (shared reflection in Session 4)

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Fig. 13 Layers of connectivity

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Fig. 14 Summary of key experiential themes

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Fig. 15 ‘Holding Openness’ – light as a dynamic natural inclusion of darkness continually brings an endless diversity of flow-form to life (Oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 2005, reproduced with the artist’s permission)

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