Summary of the impact

Dr. Susan Haedicke's research focuses on the intersections of aesthetics and politics in contemporary street arts performances in Europe. It has developed a critical language to evaluate the art thus contributing to an increased legitimacy of street arts as a serious art form among professionals in the creative industries and funders. In addition, she has used her research to argue for the increased professionalisation of existing training programmes, such as those offered by universities, leading to the development of joint educational programmes between universities and professional street art companies. By offering a space for artists, directors and producers to critically reflect and discuss the wider implications of their work, Haedicke's research has directly improved the quality of performance in street arts throughout Europe.

Underpinning research

The underpinning research is Dr. Haedicke's scholarly and practical work on the aesthetics and politics of street arts in Europe. Associate Professor at Warwick since 2007, Haedicke has participated actively in the practice of street arts for over a decade: as dramaturg of several professional shows; as director of a summer study abroad programme where professional street artists trained undergraduate students in various performance techniques for street performance; as a judge of new street arts work at festivals and professional training programs; and as a participant/speaker in professional symposia and street arts network meetings.

This hands-on practice has informed her scholarly work that is unique in the English-speaking world. Her research has developed a critical language for examining what she calls an embodied aesthetics of public space, an aesthetics that thrives on the interplay of the occasion of performance, the social participation of the public, and the intervention into a public space. Her research looks at how artists appropriate public spaces, architecture and objects to alter their meanings, blur their boundaries, and invent new ways of using them. It investigates the ways in which street performances engage with and intervene into official and popular discourses on significant socio-political issues, such as immigration, discrimination and otherness (particularly in `The Outsider Outside: Performing Immigration in French Street Theatre', 2010), use of public space and urban renewal, community regeneration, and participatory citizenship. The research interrogates how the work can reinvigorate public spaces, transform public perceptions of the urban landscape and the activities taking place and encourage democratic activities and creative practices by providing the setting in which audiences can `rehearse' these civic acts. It explores how street arts can function as a form of activism that can change, even temporarily, how onlookers see public spaces and what they do there, and thus it questions street arts' potential impact on engaged citizenship and participatory democracy.

These ideas are explored in the chapters cited, but the research is developed most extensively in Contemporary Street Arts: Aesthetics and Politics (2013) in which Haedicke claims that fiction does not work in opposition to reality; rather the imaginary re-frames, re-interprets, confuses, subverts or challenges notions of the real. The book questions whether street arts acquire a practical and social significance as they offer the public the opportunity to view everyday life and familiar locations through a lens of art and thus potentially to re-evaluate the meaning and function of quotidian activities and urban spaces that, in turn, enables the public to rehearse democratic practices. It seeks to develop a critical language to interrogate the "rehearsal" of citizen activism and democratic action, whether recognised as a form of activism by the spectator or not, and it looks at how participation in the event constitutes a rehearsal of civic acts that can reinvigorate and re-form public spaces. Expanding ideas in the book's final chapter on community performance, `Opéra Pagaï's Entreprise de Détournement: Collages of Geographic, Imaginary and Discursive Spaces' analyses the work through a lens of community engagement.

References to the research

Details of the impact

Haedicke's scholarly work on the aesthetics and politics of street arts has established her as an acknowledged expert in the field among professional and scholarly colleagues. Her expertise benefits those outside the HE sector by offering analytic perspectives on the fast-growing area of outdoor entertainment thereby providing academic credibility and legitimacy to an entertainment sector often discounted as a serious art form. That increased legitimacy has had an impact on funding, cultural policy and the professionalisation of the practice. She has used her research to support the development of new forms of artistic expression, and to contribute to the professional development of street artists.

That her beneficiaries - creative practitioners, festival directors, independent researchers, and educators in professional training programmes for early career street artists - value the input of Haedicke's work is evidenced by the number of invitations she receives to judge and comment on new work at street theatre festivals and professional training programmes; to advise on challenges and opportunities faced by street artists for government-sponsored research projects; and to speak to general public audiences who are interested in the arts. Invitations to critique new work (MiramirO Street Theatre Festival, Ghent, Belgium, 2009 and 2010, and at FiraTàrrega, street theatre festival in Tàrrega, Spain, 2010) testify to Haedicke's positive impact on helping early career artists improve their work. In 2009, FAI AR (Formation Avancée et Itinerante des Arts de la Rue), the only professional street arts training institute in Europe, invited Haedicke to work with five young artists in the programme over several days, commenting on and evaluating various aspects of their work as part of Panorama des Chantiers, the five-day capstone event. Haedicke was invited back to Panorama des Chantiers in 2013 as one of three observateurs to examine and comment on the artistic creations of all the young artists in the programme. After her public presentation on the work before an audience including professional artists, journalists, festival programmers and students, one of the pioneering street artists from Générik Vapeur commented that she finally understood the shift from resistant work of the 1960s and 1970s to the more collaborative work of today. Artists in several street theatre companies, for example, Friches Théâtre Urbain, Opéra Pagaï, Jeanne Simone, Osmosis, Etxea and others, have acknowledged the impact of Haedicke's critical analyses of their productions on their creative processes. Sarah Harper, Artistic Director of Friches Théâtre Urbain, uses Haedicke's critiques of the company's productions to augment grant applications and in promotional materials. She has said that these analyses `enable her to understand intellectually what she has created intuitively' and that, in turn, helps her develop the work further. Frédéric Etcheverry of the artistic duo Etxea has asked for a continuing dialogue with Haedicke as he and his partner develop their new community-oriented piece, Transversales 13, as part of 2r2c's `Territoires et Questions' over the next three years. And choreographer and dancer Ali Salmi of Osmosis and Cyril Jaubert, Director of Opéra Pagaï, have expressed an interest in having Haedicke advise on productions as they are being developed.

Haedicke's engagement with street arts professionals, cultural policy makers and funding bodies has focused on improving the professionalisation of the craft through better educational provision and training programmes. She has long been an advocate for increasing collaboration between universities and professional street artists as a means for achieving these goals. She has been asked to consult on educational policy for determining pedagogy in professional street arts training programmes, in university/professional institutions partnership programmes, and within university programmes training students for professional street arts in the UK and Europe. She was invited to participate in the first Nomadic University for the Street Arts in Aurillac, France in 2008 where she addressed the role that Higher Education can play in training and legitimating street arts, two key concerns of practitioners. Funded by the European Commission's Cultural Programme, this initiative developed into the annual Street Arts Winter Academy, a symposium of street theatre practitioners, university educators and cultural policy makers reviewing the present state of street theatre education in Europe. Haedicke has been an invited participant since its inception in 2011. The theme of the symposium that year was to promote structured education in street theatre by identifying and developing specific pedagogical tools and curricula to help improve existing training programmes and to improve the integration of street arts into university-based training. These symposia have resulted in proposals to inform national bodies and government organisations in the development of educational policies for street arts throughout Europe, for example, the `Definitive Document' on street arts training in 2013 (following the guidelines of ELIA, European League of the Institutes of the Arts) to be published and circulated in 2014. And, in 2009, the Independent Street Arts Network (ISAN, UK) invited Haedicke to contribute to policy development related to street arts education and training. ISAN, an independent group of artists and promoters of street arts working to develop the art form, was commissioned by Arts Council England to map existing and proposed provision in both Higher and Further Education, as well as to identify gaps in training and professional development in the UK.

Haedicke has advised on partnerships between universities and street arts companies as well as creating modules to bring this into practice. In 2009, she was invited to develop `The Tocil Wood Project' and two units of `Ambienti' teaching module (an online e-learning platform for the community) in `Esperienze Culturali' for Facoltà di Architettura in Alghero, Italy. From 2010-12, Haedicke gave advice to the administrative director of FAI AR on educational models for professional training programmes in street arts and on partnerships between universities and professional training schools. FAI AR has developed a partnership with Aix-Marseille Université (starting in autumn 2013) so that the graduates receive a university degree and a professional diploma. This model has also been established for an MA degree (MA in Street Arts Creation) between FiraTàrrega, a professional street theatre festival, and the University of Lleida (both in Catalonia).

While Haedicke has done most of her work with organisations in Europe, and especially in France, where street arts are better developed, she has also worked to improve street arts in the UK. She advised on the challenges and opportunities faced by street artists in the West Midlands for `Making More of Outdoor Arts', a research project commissioned by ACE West Midlands and undertaken by an arts consultancy and an independent artistic director. It ran from Sep 2012 - Mar 2013 and was designed to set the future direction for outdoor arts development. Haedicke advised on the potential for linkages between HEIs and the professional street arts community and on the need for the development of a critical discourse which can play a role in advocacy and profile- raising.

Additional invitations to participate in popular festivals and professional conferences serve as further evidence of the influence of Haedicke's work in the practical field. Haedicke was invited to give public lectures to non-academic audiences, notably `Opéra Pagaï's Entreprise de Détournement: Performance Interventions and Community Engagement' at Coventry Mysteries Week (2012); `Can Performances in Public Spaces Find a Place in University Courses?' ArtVU Conference organized by Le Hangar, Amiens University, Picardie University and HorsLesMurs, Amiens, France (2012); and `Performing Otherness in European Street Theatre: Alternative Expressions of Politics', for the Iowa Council for International Understanding in Des Moines, Iowa (2011). She was interviewed for an essay on Friches Théâtre Urbain's Witness/N14 project for the professional magazine Stradda 15: Janvier 2010 published by HorsLesMurs, and she was invited to write about Ilotopie's production of Water Fools at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (`Ilotopie and French Street Theatre', 2009, http://www.chicagoshakes.com/main.taf?p=2,19,3,14,1,6). She was invited to appear as the academic expert on the BBC Radio 4 programme on street arts, `Doing It in the Street' (26 May 2011). As Haedicke is one of the few scholars writing about street arts in English or French, Christophe Bara, Director of Éditions L'Entretemps, a specialist performing arts publisher in Montepellier, France, has commissioned her book (Contemporary Street Arts in Europe) to be translated into French so that it is more accessible to the extensive street arts sector in France. It was reviewed in Stradda 27: Janvier 2013.

Sources to corroborate the impact

Written statements have been provided by:

• Research and Studies Manager (Chargée des études et de la recherche), HorsLesMurs, Paris France.
• Artistic Director, Opéra Pagaï, Bordeaux, France.
• Artistic Director, Friches Théâtre Urbain, Paris, France.
• Festival Programmer, MiramirO Street Arts Festival, Ghent, Belgium.
• Administrative Director, FAI AR (Formation Avancée et Itinérante des Arts de la Rue, an eighteen-month long professional training programme in street arts) Marseilles, France.

Invited participant/presenter for four symposia on European street arts:

• The First Nomadic University, Aurillac, France (2008);
  http://www.circostrada.org/IMG/Aurillac_EN_bd.pdf
• Street Arts Winter Academy, Ljubjiana, Slovenia (2011) organized by Ana Monró Theatre, Circostrada Network, FAI AR and the University of Winchester;
  http://circostrada.org/IMG/pdf/sawa-en.pdf.
• Second Winter Academy, University of Winchester (2012);
  http://circostrada.org/IMG/pdf/sawaII-en-net.pdf.
• Third Winter Academy, Marseille (2013); http://www.circostrada.org/IMG/pdf/SAWA_3_EN.pdf.

`Doing It in the Street', BBC Radio 4, 26 May 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011cffl (avg listening figures 794,000 RAJAR).

Making more of Outdoor Arts http://moreoutdoorarts.com/resources/.