Roots in the sky. An analysis of tightrope walker, a figure between performing arts and educational experiences.

This research, as a result of the first PhD Student year (University of Milano Bicocca) and a personal experience on the field as professional in educational circus arts, wants to investigate the implicit elements inherent to tightrope walking practice and its possible contributions to the field of education and training. Considering pedagogy of the body a discipline which favour each human being’s vital balance [1],[2] and tightrope walking an elective study [3], this project sees in the tightrope walker’s self-training and training the privileged path to be pedagogically investigated focusing on balance, as a constantly precarious condition, and on the possible contribution for those who work in education field. The tightrope walker’s discipline is able to rule over mind, making it actual in order to create a transformed body [4], glorious [5], a body of the art which needs authenticity and a live participation. During the performing act the performer’s body renews itself and “occurs” [6], causing a deep change even on audience’s usual posing which is no more frontal and controlling, on the contrary it becomes open to the unexpected and unknown. In order to prove this, the present research, will use different interwoven points of view: The performer and audience’s point of view reported through semi-structured interviews/ participant observation/ photographic documents/videos/ questionnaire for the audience. The trainer and trainees’ point of view reported trough semi-structured interviews/ participant observation/ photographic documents/videos/ questionnaire for the trainees. The researcher’s point of view: with her own tightrope walking training together with pedagogic documentary research and a self-investigating diary. The main aim is to investigate human development as an incessant, necessary and essential research of balance - never permanently reached - and as a consequence learning becomes an ethical transformation through aesthetic events [7]. The research of balance can be found in the process itself, as an actual dialectic, a creative force between educational practice and pedagogic theory, looking at the phenomenological-hermeneutical method [8] as a possible point of view on the data and finally the tightrope will be the symbolic link between scientific rigour and a new opening to the new and the unexpected.