ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at ways artistic engagement that can facilitate connectivity through play, improvisation and an embodied awareness in a learning context. Engaging in the expressive arts is seen as a primary mode of inquiry and learning, combining creative imagination with embodied experience, understanding, thinking and feeling between mind and body in relation to self and other. In a learning context, where there is an aim to develop students as reflexive practitioners there is also a need to develop their ‘attunement’ in the non-verbal and implicit domain, so non-verbal communication through the arts is seen as an integral part of the learning process. The artist and the student within the learning experience can be seen to enter the intimate world of material, space, sound and a deep connection with viewers/audience/peers. By establishing a centre alignment, an individual can begin to engage with another on a more connected level and enter into an experience of attunement.
