Adaptive Use Musical Instruments – KU InterArts

University of Kansas and AUMI-KU InterArts

“Globally, disparities in wealth, health care, education, political power, and social status threaten our world. Such divides are obstacles to human rights, human development, and political stability. Lack of community can root us in untenable situations. Specific answers to this global challenge will promote enhanced self-reliance and worth, stronger communities, and greater appreciation of the power of diversity and constructive discourse.”

KU Bold Aspirations Strategic Initiativesm Theme 3: Building Communities, Expanding Opportunities

AUMI-KU InterArts is committed to expanding opportunities and building communities across abilities through creativity. Because AUMI uses body movement to make sound, it has implications for dance and theater applications as well as music. We want to use the AUMI in settings that combine not only people of varying abilities but also artistic practices, training, and experience from various arts. By expanding the opportunities for group improvisation among people with a wide range of mobility, sensory perception, and cognitive processing, as well as across different modes of artistic expression, the AUMI helps us to learn how communities may build and grow across difference. Culturally specific hierarchies of sound, image, motion, and language may be challenged, along with societal definitions of “whole” or “normal” bodies. While the Disability Rights Movement has done much to address the disparities in political power and social status of people with disabilities, much more work is needed to explore the potential of interdisciplinary expressive cultural practice in transforming social consciousness and point toward new modes of inclusive sociality. AUMI-KU focuses on such possibilities in the areas of creativity and the arts.

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