Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper analyzes focus group interviews of participants in an embodied performance workshop of Echeverria’s play Picasso Presents Gernika, curated by Speer, taking place in Spring, 2021. This event is part of the University of California Riverside’s Center for Ideas & Society initiative on “Being Human” which integrates humanistic perspectives into the sciences. The script, which explores the child refugee crisis resulting from Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Basque town Gernika and Picasso’s artistic response (Guernica), operates as a through-line for engaging human rights crises today. The script will be the gateway to fact-based, embodied storytelling, i.e. the connections participants draw between the 1937 Gernika bombing and contemporary refugee and human rights crises abetted by scientific “progress” (e.g. advances in warfare). Embodied performance offers invaluable epistemological and pedagogical insights to cultural and community studies; engaging in the physicality of performance explores the connection between external modes of meaning making (speech and action) and internal modes (thought, imagination, and empathy). We will record the event and conduct focus groups examining how pedagogical performance can inform critical understanding of humanistic crises including refugee displacement, xenophobia, and recovering histories in an age of evidence deniers. The workshop will be interdisciplinary, including students enrolled in the course, “Beyond Science: Being Humane Amid Human Rights Crises,” and those in the University Honors program, whose pillars include “Promoting Creativity and Innovation” and “Celebrating Diversity and Global Citizenship.” This paper has particular relevance for this conference, given its setting in the same city that houses Guernica.