Waiting for Baubo; sounding multivalent performing bodies in trans-disciplinary art-projects in the community.

This doctoral thesis explores the potentialities offered by placing the intersections of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality in addition to race and class at the basis of devised and improvisational trans-disciplinary creative processes in the community. By placing improvisation at the heart of a series of trans-disciplinary creative workshops, this research attempts to challenge the self-contained individual and the objective-truth by underscoring intersubjectivity and corporeality. The trans-disciplinary nature of the workshops that will be designed and implemented, will lead to a series of extensive collaborations with self-defined female artists from the broader spectrum of performing and visual arts. Ultimately, it will not only be the culmination of the individual workshops in official and non-official performance opportunities for specific and non-specific audiences, the whole body of the creative process will lead to the construction of a hybrid creative platform dedicated to the representations and reworkings of gender in creative arts in the community through dissolving mind-body dualisms. This arts-based research, located in Athens, will combine methodologies and critiques from a range of different disciplines, such as philosophy, feminist aesthetics, music education, performing arts, and gender studies. Accordingly, I have been reviewing a diverse selection of literature and the work of performing artists to develop a critical framework for my artistic practice both as an enabler of collective transdisciplinary practices and as a performing artist. Arts theory and practice will complement each other throughout this research. Simultaneously, collecting, preserving, and utilising oral and written testimonies of the participants alongside with reflective journals will provide essential insights that will be vital for this topic. The findings and observations will influence the creative process that will be implemented during this research. Piecing together the different sources, both theoretical, ethnographic and artistic into a cohesive dissertation with substantial findings will contribute to the implementation of the trans-disciplinary hybrid creative platform described above.