Matthew's BAPP Blog

Throughout this module, amongst the stress of deciding on an inquiry topic, researching relevant literature, learning about ethical procedures, and filling out ethics forms, I found that the one grounding thought that helped to reset my brain when overwhelmed with technical jargon was to remind myself of the purpose of the research . Module 2 has been described as a "dry run" by my tutor, Helen. A chance to get to grips with the realities of conducting an inquiry and making sure the inquiry I propose to conduct will meet the ethical standard required by the Ethics board. The majority of this term has been a huge learning process, one that I have struggled with but ultimately grateful for for the opportunity to think in ways outside of my usual thinking patterns. The purpose of the inquiry is to  develop my understanding of and my relationship with my professional practice. After identifying an area of clear interest that I wanted to base my inquiry on, however passion

I recently had a 1 to 1 Skype session with Helen who reminded me that the purpose of this inquiry is to help me learn and discover more about my own practice. How will this inquiry help me conduct my practice in the future? I think with this in mind, I was able to start narrowing down my rather broad idea for a topic inquiry to a more personally relevant one. For me, my topic of interest of " East Asian representation " and the " experiences for East Asian performers " gave me the foundation to think more specifically about my own experiences. How I have made conscious decisions throughout my career to be careful with how I am portrayed on stage or screen and how I have always wanted to steer clear of playing certain harmful stereotypes. This led me to question how much freedom and choice performing artists actually have when it comes to what roles or characters are available to play? How can being picky with what you choose to do impact one's career or experi

Two weeks into Module 2 and having toyed around with a lot of BIG "world saving" questions, I'm beginning to realise where my interests are within my practice and thus feel closer to finding a topic of inquiry that I'd be interested in spending 12 weeks developing. At first, the challenge of finding a single topic felt insurmountable. I had no idea where to begin looking, let alone imagine finding something I would find intriguing enough to spend 12 weeks looking in to. After doing some mind mapping and general random scribblings of potential topic ideas, I decided to look back at my Module 1 assignments for inspiration. Where were my thoughts going as I was trying to articulate what my personal practice was? What were the areas that I felt drawn to and what were the areas I questioned the most with ethical considerations and reflections? (Said mind maps and random scribblings.) I looked at my 3 Areas of Learning and remembered that there was one specific are

TASK:  Looking at learning processes and considering your blog, what has making it told you about how you learn? What was your process for creating it? Do you see this process or learning style in your day-to-day practice also?  Before making my own, I took the time to look at a lot of other blogs first. I asked to see the blogs of friends who I knew had taken this course as well as blogs that they recommended. I looked at the list of blogs on the module page on unihub and also looked at a couple Module 2 and Module 3 student blogs too to get ideas on how to structure my own. Looking at how I approached making my blog reminded me of Kolb’s learning cycle and I found it interesting to use this as a tool to reflect on my learning process. I believe for this task I entered at the Reflective Observation stage as I knew that I wanted to see how people with more experience than myself had approached the task first before giving it a go myself. When realising this, I noticed that I

TASK: What ideas do you like? Think about why? This is a hard think to do (!), you may not be able to think of anything at first, keep coming back to asking yourself what the layers are behind the ideas you encounter.  Idea that I like: ‘ The older you get, the easier it is to find a work-life balance.’ I like this idea because I am now in my 7 th  season (7 th  year) with my company and I like to think that I am now more able to balance the pressure and demands expected from me at work and finding time to do things I enjoy in my personal life, like seeing family, friends, and loved ones. I like the idea of excelling in my professional life whilst not compromising anything from my personal life. I think this is more of a difficult thing for ballet dancer’s to achieve as our work demands so much from us both inside and outside of “work time”. As a ballet dancer in a touring company, I spend almost 60% of the year away performing in different citie

TASK: Describing you and your practice, take your current CV and rewrite as a profile for your blog (or as a short bio. for a programme). *Thoughts Although this was a relatively short task, I found it to be an interesting experience and wanted to blog about some of my thoughts. Writing for a blog bio felt like I needed to write in 1 st person as I imagined it almost to be like I was introducing myself to somebody visiting my blog, whereas writing for a programme bio I felt like I needed to write in 3 rd person as most programmes I have read write about the artists in this format. I found that when writing for a blog bio my gut feeling was to keep it short, concise, readable, and even almost informal. I wonder if this is because I saw my blog perhaps in the same light as a social media platform where usually content is aimed more for informal entertainment rather than formal/official job descriptions. However, I realised that in this situation I had mad