Ground
Works

Borrowing the Spanish word for “dinner,” CENAS is a transdisciplinary working group of scholars and artists developing, implementing and evaluating innovative approaches to healthy eating at the individual and community level, with arts practices at its center. Since 2012, CENAS has been involved with training, workshops, curriculum development, and research into the following questions: (1) Can the arts in general, and theatre-making in particular, empower individuals and communities to take charge of their health? (2) How does theatre-making relate to individual attitudinal and behavioral change? (3) What role does culture play in health? (4) Are the arts more effective in the long term than more traditional educational practices? Our research with young people and community health workers suggests that cooking together, combined with theatre-making activities, is linked positively to “I can do this” attitudes. We believe making theatre, more than merely watching it, is the key. We link the various components involved in making theatre together to factors identified by health scientists as necessary for attitudinal and behavioral change to occur. A growing body of research suggests the importance of culturally informed interventions in health promotion, yet most definitions of “culture” are pretty narrow. We are working to develop a more robust and nuanced accounting for cultural background as health asset, initially through embodied storytelling practices and theatre-making drawn from participants’ experiences of home cooking.

“Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork” was a two-year research project that explored the construction of identity through the act of singing. The heart of the project was a six-month laboratory period in which the three of us worked closely together, on a full-time basis, as skilled performance practitioners investigating the cultural and epistemic potential of songs. In response to critical work in the humanities and social sciences calling for greater recognition of embodied knowledge and practice in emerging research paradigms, the Judaica project implemented a new type of laboratory, in which interactions of technique, identity, and place gave rise to new forms of knowledge. Drawing on critical theories of identity, as well as studies of laboratory research in the sciences, the project offers a model for the post-technoscientific laboratory as a “place of making” in which bodies, songs, actions, objects, and concepts come together in unexpected and generative ways. Among the key discoveries of the project was a new method for sustained, experimental, embodied practice, grounded in critical theories of gender and racial identity, as well as a new approach to the editing and co-authorship of video works generated through this process. These video materials are both data for cultural researchers and research outcomes in their own right.