Living Art
BTS Performance as Dionysian Celebrations of Art(ful) Creation: Empowering Youth to Individuation and Agency View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Fiedler
K-pop band BTS' song Dionysus plays on art as an intoxication metaphor in which fans can free themselves from oppressive societal expectations, echoing the frenzied worshippers of the Greek God Dionysus offering liminal spaces during transformative spaces for sexual maturity, fertility, and removal of inhibitions reaching ecstasy. The thyrsus becomes BTS' mic to initiate the celebrations for reception to the spiritual eye, or pineal gland in the brain, named for a pine cone, a symbol at the top of Dionysus' thyrsus. The mostly female followers of the outcast god of wine are described as frenzied, dancing in the forest, highly protective of their wine god, and presenting a sense of rebirth in a more powerful form after the festivities. The BTS ARMY fandom, mostly women but marginalized or mature fans of all demographics, describes the same transformative experience from BTS performative art.
We're Bad Company: Friendship and Creativity as Sustenance in Uncertain Times View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Younghee Park, Jeremy Neideck, M'ck Mc Keague, Nathan Stoneham
This paper explores how a transcultural arts collective sustains its practice through non-hierarchical collaboration and prioritising relationships. Company Bad creates performance work bringing together artists from Australia, Korea, and beyond. Rather than focusing on commercial success, the collective's small-scale and organic way of working nurtures well-being and care for one another. By cycling through creative roles and sharing tasks, the group supports each individual's strengths while cultivating understanding between diverse cultural backgrounds. Company Bad's practice enacts a vision of community life valuing diversity, responsive processes, and care over capitalist priorities like productivity and control. Through long-term partnerships crossing borders, the collective activates new works of cultural exchange and storytelling. Their work addresses social agendas by bringing people together in friendship through shared creative adventures. By sustaining this practice through trust and collaboration Company Bad demonstrates how the arts can thrive by living beyond mere survival and flourishing through human connection.
The Decolonised Pen: Teaching Creative Writing in Tertiary Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Muli Amaye
Teaching creative writing in an international classroom has a number of challenges. Especially when the lecturer is from the country that was once the colonial power in that space. Working against an educational system that was put in place prior to independence and which is deeply steeped in Victorian teaching practices adds another layer. This paper looks at how I decolonize the classroom when teaching creative writing with examples from Kurdistan in Northern Iraq and the Caribbean Island of Trinidad. There are wide-ranging differences between the two spaces, and yet there is an overlap in working with students who have been educated to believe that English literature and therefore creative writing must adhere to the Literary Canon. Within this classroom the teacher is learning as the students are creating. There is a necessity to be open and vulnerable in this setting and to be willing to shed your own preconceived ideas of what constitutes good writing. In Kurdistan the students’ writing leaned towards death and martyrdom, in Trinidad towards humour and myth. Yet within the classroom students in both countries are dealing with generational trauma through the creative medium of writing.
