Creativity and Culture

In our last Skype call, we talked about how ethical considerations of different cultures address our practice.
In this post, I would like to focus on culture as an influence on creativity.
My inquiry topic is around creativity (where creativity is a product or process of creating novel and effective work), throughout my literature review I discovered that ethical considerations of a specific culture group will influence this groups interpretation of creativity. In particular, this refers to criteria of effectiveness.
Within the dance world, these are some of the examples that come to my mind straight away:
-Muslim religion does not support controversial dance styles such as twerking, dance hall, any dance styles that include close partner work between a male and female;
-Male belly dancing is common in Egypt and Turkey, however, is not perceived in the same positive manner around the rest of the World;
- For a long time, hip-hop was considered as an art form for lower social classes and therefore did not appear in theatres.
- Vogue was once danced only by the LGBT community.

Although I believe that the modern world is a lot more tolerant and influence of culture on creativity interpretation is not as strong, it is still present. Within my practice, I have to consider my students' background/culture and ethical considerations that are associated with it, as these will address the choreography and costumes. For example, some male students would not tolerate too feminine choreography or girls would not be prepared to wear a certain costume.

Research terms.

In tonight's Skype call we discussed research terms, in particular, analysis, triangulation, and qualitative research.

Analysis- detailed examination of something. When we analyse we look at a range of elements. There was a great example made of analysing your journey home, it is not just the route you take, but also time, transport used etc.  Another example that comes to my mind is if you would analyse cake making you would discuss ingredients, the order of adding ingredients, time and so on. 
It is also important to remember that ethical considerations will impact the analysis.  If I go back to an example with the cake, my preferences in product brands, preparation techniques will impact my analysis of this specific cake.
 Within my inquiry, I am in the process of gathering data from YouTube videos that demonstrate the re-creation of a choreography piece.
 First of all, I noticed that I am already analysing videos in terms of ethical suitability for inquiry. I am looking at the age of participants, whether comments are allowed to be made and the total amount of views. These criteria have been discussed in my proposal as important ethical considerations when collecting data from YouTube.
My next step is to analyse videos in terms of background, participants, purpose, development of original choreography. This data will allow me to get a better understanding of whether re-enactment can stimulate creativity/creative performance.

Triangulation - putting all elements of the inquiry together, where all elements have the same value. Triangulation increases rliability of results. Within my research, I will analyse a range of sources, such as literature, Youtube videos, my personal reflective account. Data from these sources will be synthesized to create meaning. 
Qualitative research- focuses on depth rather than numerical data. In qualitative research data is collected considering thoughts, experience and feelings.