Transforming Grief Through Dance

Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice,
Contributor Features


"I returned to dance, intuitively, instinctively. The dance of death was now my dance of life. As I danced, like a woman possessed, my conscious mind snuffed out the reality of my loss. While my world as wife and mother had been cruelly wrenched from me, I came to understand that my identity as a dancer had survived, an identity that no outside force could destroy."
Lata Pada





Lata Pada is Artistic Director of Sampradaya Dance creations, an award winning Canadian dance company recognized for its distinctive choreography spanning a dynamic range of classical bharatanatyam and contemporary dance works. Lata has trained with India's distinguished gurus, Kalaimamani K. Kalyanasundaram, Padma Bhushan and Kalanidhi Narayanan. Lata holds a Masters in Dance from York University and is currently an Adjunct Professor in York University's Master's program in Dance. In January 2009, Lata was awarded The Order of Canada. She has the distinction of being the first Indian artist to receive this national honour.

More about Lata Pada and her story here Toronto Star

Empathy Can be Taught Experientially

Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice,
Contributor Features


"The goal (of the inquiry) has a practical outcome; to develop methodologies whereby empathy must be taught experientially as part of the nursing curriculum."

"In the performance....we rehearsed the actions over and over but my initial emotional response to this action resolutely refused to be erased by professional discipline and remained, therefore, as a moment of empathic encounter in performance. We let it remain as it was in the piece...a moment of vulnerability, anger and uncertainty which was awkward and ungainly, charged with fear. As a performer I always approached this moment with trepidation because it made me feel like I was out of control, at risk..which was, of course, precisely as it should be."

April Nunes Tucker, Amanda Price

Graduates from the Performing Arts Degree Course University of Bedfordshire UK

April Nunes Tucker works as a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom. She holds an MA in Dance from the Laban Centre, London and a BA in Dance from The University of California Irvine. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Dance at Middlesex University, UK. Her research interests include: performance and reflective practice, site-specific choreography, Butoh and the influences of somatic practice such as yoga on contemporary dance techniques.

Dr. Amanda Price works as a Principal Lecturer in Theatre at The University of Bedfordshire in The United Kingdom. She holds an MA in Theatre from The University of Leeds and her PhD offered a comparative analysis of contemporary playwrights in Africa and the UK. She is a founding member of Famous & Divine, a theatre company committed to exploring our contemporary relationship to the "uncanny". Her research interests include performance and reflective practice, energy and transformation in performance.

Inviting the Emotions Into Research

Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice,
Contributor Features



"As educators, as researchers, we are often taught to not pay attention to our emotions, except to control them and keep them out of our teaching and out of our research. I do the opposite. I invite the emotions into teaching and into research. I believe that we need to listen to our emotions, that we need to pay attention to what they are saying to us, what they are showing us, what they are teaching us."

John J. Guiney Yallop Ph.D. from an article (forthcoming) by Day, L. and Guiney Yallop, J.J., "Researching teaching and learning through poetry: A shared journey".




John J. Guiney Yallop, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Acadia University. Dr. Guiney Yallop's research includes poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography and performative social science.

Embodied Learning Through Playbuilding

Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice,
Contributor Features




"Learning is often challenging to capture through text alone. For instance (through playbuilding) the diverse perspectives of the participants were able to physically come to life, and allowed for the intangible and/or unvoiced learning to emerge through embodiment and dialogue. As I read and re-read the pre-service teachers' journals, my field notes on the project...what continued to catch my attention was how their collective play and lived experience seemed to increasingly blend over the course of the playbuilding process...they played out their understandings during improvisations, and, in turn, progressively (and likely subconsciously) wrote themselves into the script."
(excerpt from article Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal, CCAHTE, June 2006)

Dr. George Belliveau is an Associate Professor and Graduate Academic Advisor in The Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His areas of research include theatre/drama education, research based theatre, teacher education, Canadian theatre and drama in second language learning. He is currently the Principal investigator, Co-Investigator on projects su ch as "Becoming Pedagogical through A/r/tography in Teacher Education", "Addressing the Role of the Bystander in Bullying"
and " Assessing Ethnotheatre as a Form of Educational Research."

George Belliveau is also an Advisory board member for The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, IJCAIP.