Hello from Adelina
• view all posts by Adelina Ong
Hello everyone 🙂 My name is Adelina and I’m quite shy when it comes to blogging…so this is quite hard for me.
I’ve been enrolled on the Practice-based Research (PBR) course on NovoEd as well as the Site-specific Performance course on Coursera. I enjoyed the Coursera lecture interface a lot more than the NovoEd one as I liked being able to download the videos and watch them offline. However, I think the assignments for PBR were more engaging.
I am particularly interested in how youth cultures take space and make place and as an applied theatre practitioner, I find myself inspired by urban practices like skateboarding, parkour, graffiti and breaking and thinking about how these practices can give disadvantaged young people a greater sense of agency.
Some related questions I have been exploring are:
– how are new youth cultures formed?
– when do they catch on?
– how does this innovation affect the practitioner’s perception of agency?
– does this sense of agency translate to other areas of their lives?
– can this cultural innovation impact the larger society as a whole?
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Hi Adelina. Welcome to .Re/search. It’s “funny” to read about your shyness about blogging. I’ve become such a blabbermouth in the last years that I guess I forget that “being out there” isn’t a natural thing. I’ve been teaching for almost 9 years now and blogging steadily for almost 5 years now. Both of these activities do have a sort of “put yourself out there” quality. But I still remember how nervous I was when I taught my first huge college freshman lecture class. And when I first started blogging it wasn’t really even blogging. I had done a performance work and wanted to document it and sort of “flipped a coin” to decide if I should make a Blog or a Wiki. I do love wikis, but lucky me, the coin came up blog, and that has made all the difference. At first I only made a post after a performance work to document it. But after a while I realized I could also post about the ideas in an upcoming work. And a while later I realized you could even write about other things and, voila, a blabbermouth was born! 😛
IDK if you’re shy IRL, or only with things like posting your blog online. (ha, often it’s the other way around, shy people IRL find great voices online) I’ve always been shy. People are often surprised to hear that about me as I am such a blabbermouth, but, for example I suck at parties. In a classroom or a conversation about ideas or obviously, online, I just keep going. But I’m an introvert at heart. Anyway, I hope being here isn’t too stressful for you, but thank you so much for giving it a try.
I’m really glad you’re joining us Adelina! I hope over time you’ll post a bit more about your thoughts and ongoing work, and perhaps leave a comment or two on other peeps posts that you find interesting. There’s no rush or pressure on any of that. But I really want you to know how important I think your work is. My PBR team the Blueberries created our “Bespoke Rubric” a couple of weeks ago, each of the 6 of us choosing a different Word or Idea to contribute to a group document:
http://mediciuniversity.co.uk/evaluating-work-art/
The term I chose was “Urgency” and I can honestly tell you Adelina that I haven’t come across anyone’s work that has more urgency than yours. I’ve been trolling classmate profiles for the whole 10 weeks, posting a few mini-profiles here:
http://blog.virtualpublicart.com/tagged/classmates
and I find your considerations of urban, street, and youth culture to be so very powerfully of our moment. There are so many amazing and wonderful artists in our PBR circles, but I believe that your work uniquely examines the actual lived culture of this time. Have you ever read “At The Edge of Art” by Joline Blais & Jon Ippolito? It’s a wonderful book for a lot of reasons, but I thought of it vis-a-vis your work because of their consideration of a skater’s relationship to a city in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, vs a skater in, for example, the physical city of Dublin. There are so many powerful ideas of identity, empowerment, and cultural production here.
It seems like you’re less “shy” about posting papers on Academia.edu. Perhaps you’d like to share links to some of those works here, or post excerpts or summaries, or describe some of your findings from that work here. Just as people find it hard to believe that I’m actually shy, I was surprised to read that you’re “shy about blogging” when your papers seem so robust and confident.
Anyway, I should shut up already! But I really want you to know how happy I am that you’ve joined us here at .Re/search
Hi Adelina,
Welcome!
It is great that you’ve joined this international community of artists and I’m sure that your insights will enhance the discussion here.
Thank you Vanessa and Michael for the welcome 🙂
Re: Urgency – wow! Thank you Vanessa…that’s really reassuring…to know there are people out there who believe in what I am compelled to research. I’ve been working in the social sector for almost 9 years now. I started off helping organisations create more meaningful and impactful volunteer programmes and found myself drawn to help low-income children and young people in Singapore because I was really troubled about the fact that Singapore was listed as the country with the second highest inequality GINI coefficient by UN in 2010. I spent the next 5 years setting up and running an interdisciplinary arts school for low-income children and young people in Singapore. Apart from overseeing the curriculum, I also helped with fundraising, and devised the productions that were put on by the children and young people. Co-authoring and devising these performances with the children and young people was the best part of my job and that’s why I decided to pursue an MA in Applied Theatre…and the research has grown from that.
It is the young people, and their approach to the urban and the street, who inspire my research – and I am learning a lot from them every day.