The Poetics Within Performance Art: The Developmental Nature of Artistic Creative Processes

Abstract

The relationship between human development and artistic creation is explored, through the concept of poetics. From Cultural Psychology, human development can be described as the movement of constant overcoming of uncertainties, through a process of meaning construction (Abbey & Valsiner, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 6(1):114–121, 2005). These meanings act in decreasing the uncertainty of developmental processes: uncertainty between the past and the present, the present and the future. Abbey proposed the concept of poetic motion (Abbey, The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) to make sense of the dynamic tension between these domains. That developmental concept is contrasted with the notion of poetics in the arts, then articulated with the experience of a Brazilian performer during the creation of three of his works. This chapter argues that a developmental process is a creative process—and vice versa.