Becoming musical performance artists – Challenging organisational norms and traditional Municipal Arts School structures

Abstract

Music educational researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out how municipal arts schools are organised based on, and tend to reproduce, anthropocentric values and approaches, and that such unequal norms and structures are to be challenged. Taking a border-crossing musical comedy project as a starting point, the specific aim of the current study is to illuminate how, and on what levels, organisational norms and traditional structures can be challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges that occur in a project taking place beyond the Anthropocene. To be able to grasp the aspects of becoming within the project and how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entanglement based on post-human theory. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors: humans with intellectual disabilities, musical performance students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys, and interviews produced material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that in turn challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.