Choreographing collaboratories: studios of situated improvisations

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of situated improvisations. Drawing from two long-term collaboratories in Australia and Canada, the discussion focusses on improvisation as method to unsettle well-trodden pedagogical choreographies in early childhood education. Through co-labouring, we propose situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of ensemble practice for heightening emergent encounters that disrupt the hierarchy of linearity, progress and the false notion of ‘open-endedness’ familiar in early childhood art-experiences. Collaboratories are positioned as lively studio processes that make visible multiplicitous child-material-world relations.