Meet Patrice Aubertin
Patrice Aubertin is the Director of CRITAC – Center for Circus Arts Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer, at École Nationale de Cirque, Montréal. He also holds the Chair of Industrial Research in Circus Arts, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Patrice has been working in partnership with Dean Kriellaars on research projects in Canadian schools which have produced quantitive data on the benefits of circus training for children when measured against standard PE. The results have been groundbreaking, showing an increase in co-ordination, mobility, comprehension and enjoyment of movement skills. They also showed that in children practising circus, boys began to read more, and girls showed improvement in mathematics. They presented their research results in 2015 at the CircusWorks Conference in Cardiff; this resulted in large scale projects teaching circus to PE teachers in the UK. A significant number of schools in West Wales now teach circus in PE lessons.
Dean and Patrice have continued to work on further research projects, some of which they presented for the first time in Europe at our 2019 Conference. Building on their previous projects, new subjects have included research into working with children with autism and creating tools for measuring creativity.
Patrice will be presenting two sessions: ‘Digitalization of Performing Arts – What Do We Gain or Lose?’ and ‘The Embodied Journey of an Idea: An Exploration of Movement Creativity Processes in Circus Arts’
