In an attempt to summarize two years worth of work in one hundred and fiftywords... This reflection oriented document categorizes my project, “category FIVE”, into chapters of development and actualization. Accounting for the collaborative nature of the project, I advise that this specific document is only half of what the entire work saw through the eyes of Isabella Lepp. Beginning with background information, moving into making the work, and ending with production and reflection of the work, this document follows a mostly chronological timeline in telling the process of making, “category FIVE”, an immersive dance experience. Enjoy.

Architecture is known primarily as a physical form, with weight given to material and statics, and in this reductionist process, excludes experientially-based spatial dialogues. Dance and movement are used to reintegrate this embodied practice into architecture and space. There have been many investigations integrating western dance into architecture. Bharatantayam, an ancient South Indian, Hindu dance form, has not been recognized as equal to Ballet and other western art forms beyond labels of cultural dance forms. This thesis experiments with the philosophies and practices of Bharatanatyam to work through the design process of climatory resilient architecture installation. By combining dance movement experiments and community narrative investigations, this project ultimately became a community gathering space in one of the hottest regions of Maryvale, AZ. The illustrated process becomes an example of a generative process integrating and intersecting diverse ethnic philosophies with habitat and community oriented site explorations to promote a pluralistic architectural way of being.

Re:Vive is a written reflection, exploring the creation of a series of dance films, 迷/ MI, 痕 / HEN, and 寻 /XUN. It presents a journey of digesting the discomforts and unfamiliarity caused by the pandemic in 2020. The ideas behind these works are centered on storytelling, embodied reflection, and the application and development of creative choreography tools. By using experimental video art, dance movement, media design, hybrid event production, and the mixing of elements, I, as a movement artist, am experimenting with embodied ways to creatively inquire about my discomfort and create a new whole in order to record and communicate these ideas.

Like many other Southeast Asian American (“SEAA”) families who fled from war and genocide around the 1970s and through the 1990s, my family avoided discussing their trauma or addressing any resulting mental health issues. As I came to internalize patterns that stemmed from my parents’ untreated wounds, without any way of ever truly understanding those wounds, I inevitably developed symptoms of my own trauma, including depression and anxiety. Although the topic of intergenerational trauma (“IGT”) has been discussed in a growing body of research within the specific context of Asian American families that have resettled in western countries, the focus has been on the trauma itself: its development and manifestations in the first (parent) generation and its transmission and impact on the second (offspring) generation. Little has been researched or written about healing and recovery from IGT on an individual level. Due to this gap in the literature, and my background as a dancer and artist, I turned to autoethnography and arts-based research methods to explore pathways to understanding and healing from family trauma. Using a combination of movement-based inquiry and narrative inquiry, I examined both of the following questions: (1) What can performed autoethnography that draws on narrative research as well as inquiry led by movement improvisation and choreographic processes, produce in terms of deeper knowledge about one’s traumas and about new ways of expressing oneself or being in the world? (2) How can such a movement- and somatic-centered autoethnographic research methodology also serve as a recovery modality? Although my family strongly believed the arts, and dance in particular, to serve no purpose other than to get in the way of job security and financial stability, the following research contains implications regarding whether and how families similar to mine could benefit from these practices.

In this multi-media dissertation, water is used metaphorically to equate the process of learning with embracing change. Paradigm shifts needed for sustainability require transformative learning where one is open to being shaped by new knowledge and experience. Properties of water – such as molecular bonding and phase changes – uncover lessons for humans’ adaptability. Given that human bodies are comprised mostly of water – what implications exist for human capacity to similarly undergo continuous change? An arts- based research methodology is practiced to produce a four-chapter project. Artistic methods of data collection and communication retain subjective complexity of lived experiences central to learning processes. Each chapter is prepared for a target audience and addresses widening scales of creative learning for sustainability.

Chapter one is a narrative ethnography that focuses on a personal creative process for sustainability learning. Chapter two is a co- authored journal that covers creative learning tools and design principles for sustainable classrooms. Chapter three is an open-access and adaptive, online toolkit that shares creative methods to cultivate curiosity and critical contemplation. Chapter four is an interactive showcase event that explores how water can inform and inspire individual and collective learning for sustainability.

This four-chapter project addresses the power of creative learning for sustainability at the personal, familial, formal classroom, informal online learning community, and public scales. Arts-based methods harness aesthetic power, welcome subjective complexity, and allow multiple meanings to be interpreted from research results. This multi- media project stretches the conventional structure of sustainability dissertations. The bridge between the arts and sciences is strengthened as this project shows synergies between these two ways of knowing. This research invites what can be learned from the wisdom of water – to both change and be changed by circumstances.

Personal experiences with body image dysmorphia and an eating disorder necessitated that I do a thorough investigation into why they happened and why I felt this way about my body. For this project, not only was I motivated by my own struggles, but I noticed that these experiences were shared among my family, my friends, and my fellow peers in the dance community. We had been struggling since childhood. I began to realize that these behaviors and thought patterns were manifestations of apology, an apology that women have been learning, living, and spreading since our beginnings. Why do women apologize? How does this apology affect how we view, treat, and navigate our bodies in space? In what ways can dance be the mechanism by which we remove apology and individually and collectively find joy, freedom, and liberation? Not only was I interested in understanding the ‘why’, but I was deeply interested in finding a solution. Research for this thesis came from written materials, stories that the dancers and I shared, and choreographic research in the body. The final goal was to create a community-based performance of dance, spoken word, and storytelling that demonstrated the findings from each of those questions and catalyzed a conversation about how we can liberate ourselves. We used rehearsals to explore our own experiences within apology and shame, while also exploring how the ways in which we practice being unapologetic in the dance space can translate to how we move through the world on a daily basis.

Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.

Places That Shape You documents the development and experience of composing and presenting Places That Shape You, an evening-length dance performance examining the relationship between culture and urban spaces, inspired by the physical parameters that cities provide for our lives. In the performance, a blend of postmodern contemporary movement vocabulary, text, projection, a mattress, 12 phonebooks and an overhead projector were used to a tell a story through the contrast of objects both obsolete and current. Musical collaborator, Austen Mack, created an original score that worked in partnership with the movement, advancing the unfolding of concepts about public and private spaces, community, memory, expectation and abstraction. In collaboration with six dancers, the choreographer conducted movement and archival research investigating personal stories, urban theory, somatic experience, place-making, and memories left in the spaces people inhabit, culminating in an evening length performance.

The Imagination + Imagery model for design pedagogy is presented. Two studies were conducted to develop the model: (a) the visual imagery assessment of design students; and (b) a historical research on the concept of imagination. Results suggest the following implications as the components of strong imagination for design thinkers: (a) the ability to shape vivid images of objects in mind; (b) the ability to mentally transform the spatial representations of images; (c) to consider the ethical consequences of imagined situation; (d) to use imagination for resolving design wicked problems; and (e) to actively imagine for mental and emotional health.