AUMI-KU InterArts is a Member of the AUMI Consortium, an international research group dedicated to exploring, sustaining, developing, and sharing the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument. Each AUMI Consortium Member institution has a particular area of focus. Ours is interdisciplinary arts and improvisation.
We are 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 performance, composition, and therapy. 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.
