Abstracts for CARPA8 conference

Published 31.5.2023 | Updated 23.8.2023

THURSDAY, 24 AUGUST

María José Contreras

Kaleidoscopic dramaturgies: building fluidity for decolonial artistic research

Drawing from an expanded notion of dramaturgy understood as the work of actions, I consider dramaturgy as a practice that enables a decolonial approach to artistic research. Conveying epistemologies of the South, decolonial theories and feminisms of the Abya Yala, I describe my notion of kaleidoscopic dramaturgies as a practice that contributes to creating conditions that might help transform still deep-embedded systems centered on transactional learning and doing in the field of artistic research. As devised theatre has taught us, multiple dramaturgies come into play when crafting a new performance: the textual dramaturgy, the dramaturgy of the actor, the dramaturgy of space, the sound dramaturgy and the dynamic dramaturgy create a complex and fluid system that sometimes in messy ways, produces new meanings and fosters new collective experiences. Applied to artistic research, kaleidoscopic dramaturgies acknowledge the power of individual creativity while also relying on the emergence of novel dispositions that do not respond to individual authorships. As a practice-based methodology, kaleidoscopic dramaturgies allow the development of crucial skills for performance research projects, such as creative collaboration, autonomous capacity to inquiry through art practice, and composition of divergent materialities. Overall, kaleidoscopic dramaturgies forward a politics of the artistic encounter that embraces an ethics of collaboration where creativity, craft, and technique merge together in an inspiring colorful fluid mosaic to mobilize undisciplined practices of knowing.

Biography

María José Contreras is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist/scholar working in the international field of theatre and performance, with a focus on artistic research. She is an Associate Professor in Dramaturgy at Columbia University. Her creative practice and scholarship aim to transform civic and academic spaces and collective imaginaries. Her engagement with decolonizing theatre-making, teaching, and research practice is recognized in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (London, Routledge, 2020), an international volume featuring the 73 leading global artists working with innovative approaches to performance. Contreras developed the methodology of kaleidoscopic dramaturgies for artistic research. Her devised theatre pieces, urban interventions, and performances have been presented in important venues and festivals in Latin America, Europe and the US. Contreras is currently working on her manuscript Rigorously undisciplined: decolonial approaches to performance research.

Léa Martin

Performance Différée: Renewing the Temporalities of Artistic Action

By creating and disseminating a body of performative works, this paper observes the creative and theoretical possibilities generated by mediation of artistic actions, especially through digital means. Led in a research-creation approach, this project combines non-hierarchically approaches specific to visual art’s theorization and creation. Like the dramaturg, the researcher assumes a variety of roles which inform one another iteratively. In the dominant discourse, performance art is partly defined by the criterion of the artist’s and the public’s co-presence. The accessibility implications of this criterion for art and culture shouldn’t be ignored. This subversively means that only a small, privileged group has the chance to attend, but also to appreciate and understand performance art, which only widens the gap between contemporary art and the public. Not to mention that historically, the most important performances have often been presented through photographic or videographic archives, since the number of people getting to attend the performance in real-time is restricted. This incoherently creates a gap between the appreciation and the discourse on performance art. Do we systematically fail to grasp the essence of a performative work by familiarizing ourselves with it in a deferred manner? Are the select few that have access to real-time performances the only ones who can truly experience the works? Questions on hybridity, multilinearity, as well as archives and accessibility, emerge. I postulate that the mediation of performance (through video or other digital media) is in fact very fertile ground for the exploration of current artistic issues, which leads to this paper’s main question: how can performance différée broaden and update the dominant discourses on artistic performance? The subtle, yet major interdisciplinarity of this research-creation lets performance and digital art come together to unlock new creative, theoretical, and social means.

Biography

Enrolled in a master’s degree in digital design at the NAD-UQAC school, Léa Martin (she/her) is currently interested in the renewal of the practice of video-performance in the context of digital arts. Guided by her bachelor’s degree in art history at UQAM, she co-founded and curated the ETC Festival (Expérimentations et Théories Contemporaines). Her poetic and academic writings can be found in several student lead academic journals, including Lieu Commun, Yiara, Artichaut Magazine and ExSitu, linked to various universities in Québec. Her work has been presented in several festivals, including the 6th and 7th Grande Rencontre des Arts Médiatiques de Gaspésie as well as the Post-Invisibles festival. She recently participated in the interactive fiction ExPhrasis, launched as part of the ELO 2022 conference. She also presented a communication as part of the Croisements multiples : enjeux théoriques et pratiques en art et design numérique conference, at NAD-UQAC in October 2022.

Jonas Schnor

Microdramaturgy: researching artistic practices from a co-creative position in search of evental utopias

How can the fluctuating position of the dramaturg be deployed to make sense of the subtle, relational dynamics between collaborating artists as they engage in experimental practices? What can we learn from the relational, embodied, and affective work within such processes in terms of how to co-exist in the chaos of contemporary global crises?

In this paper, I will flesh out the notion of microdramaturgy as a conceptual tool to address the impersonal forces in the deeply personal work of artists engaged in creative processes. The paper builds on my practice-based PhD research, where I participated in three artistic projects in the co-creative and co-thinking role of the dramaturg. The projects span across contemporary dance (Marcelo Evelin’s A ‘Invenção da Maldade’, 2019), participatory performance (Catarina Vieira and my artistic research project ‘The Night of the Night’, 2018-22) and experimental theatre (Lena Bondeson’s ‘Something Else Matters’, 2021).

Microdramaturgy refers to the attempting, erring, non-linear, and even non-causal ways in which the artists in question have created performances through experimental practicing. By way of relevant examples from the three projects, I will show how a microdramaturgical approach to collaborative thinking and making can be understood as artistic research into dramaturgies-in-the-making from an embedded and co-creative position. As the dramaturg becomes an artistic researcher alongside the artistic process in question, they are in a position to notice and articulate micropolitical potentials in the relational dynamics of artistic work. Through this, the artistic event can be understood as more-than the finalised performance – namely, as an ‘evental potentiality’ running across the entire artistic process.

Biography

Jonas Schnor (they/them) is a dramaturg and Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies. Their research is concerned with processual and evental dramaturgies as well as the micropolitical dimensions of experimental practices. They have collaborated with artist collectives and festivals across Europe and Brazil, most recently Moving in November 2022 (FI), Beyond Darkness (DK-LU), Demolition Incorporada (BR), and Sisters Hope (DK), and has served as a guest dramaturg at the Danish national School of Performing Arts, Das Arts Graduate School, and the Mime Department at Amsterdam University of the Arts. Recent publications include: Microdramaturgy. Between Practice and Event: A Performance Philosophy (PhD dissertation, University of Surrey 2022) and Imperceptible Bodies: Haptic Counter-Pleasures in the Work of Marcelo Evelin (Performance Philosophy Journal Vol. 7 No. 1, 2022).

Mads Thygesen

Dramaturgy and Artistic Research 

What are the dramaturgical potentials and challenges of artistic research within the theatre disciplines? What kind of possibilities does artistic research hold for the ongoing development of academic, artistic, and cross-disciplinary approaches to theatre and performance making? And how can we explore the convergence between dramaturgy and artistic research in our curriculums? The importance of knowledge based on artistic research and reflective practice has long been recognized by institutions of higher arts education, and with the paradigm shift from vocational training to artistic research, we are faced with new questions and insights. Furthermore, although a vast majority of theatre academies and performing art schools in the Scandinavian countries explicitly embrace a “research attitude” as being intrinsic to their strategic vision of education and art making today, many of them struggle to find a clear and common institutional, ideological and cultural framework for research.

In this presentation, I will address these problems and the convergence of dramaturgy and artistic research from an educational perspective. I will discuss how dramaturgical theory and artistic research can inform each other and have a strong impact on our understanding of art education and its relations to the professional field of the theatre.

In my role as teacher and researcher of dramaturgy, I have supervised a wide range of artistic research projects. What all of these projects shares is the ambition to explore different approaches to theatre and performance making (e.g., site specific theatre, sonic dramaturgy, movement material, dance and participation) and the aim to create new ideas and knowledge within theatre educations and disciplines. In this presentation, I will discuss how the discipline of dramaturgy can support the ongoing development of research based education and facilitate a better understanding of the role of artistic research within the academies.

Biography

Professor in Dramaturgy (Oslo National Academy of the Arts) from 2022. I hold a MA of Dramaturgy (2003) and a PhD in Contemporary European Drama (2009). I have written and published more than 25 book chapters and essays about contemporary theatre and playwriting.Board Member of Dramaten (The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm), Former Rector of the Danish National School of Performing Arts (2015-2021), Rector of The Danish National School of Playwriting (2010-2015).

Tero Nauha

The curatorial and financial narratives disrupting art 

The presentation examines how these narratives inform knowledge production in the arts and how curatorial, finance and art (practice, education and research) are speculative, temporal and future-oriented. These narratives are speculative and abstract, yet material-discursive and performative.

In contemporary curatorial practice, the exhibition is seen as a narrative space. Financialisation refers to how non-financial regimes – such as art, education and research – adopt financial schemes of thought, models and narratives. Both curatorial and financialisation change how the future is not only speculated about, but how uncertain futures are altered by these narratives. Curatorial and financial narratives are temporal and performative orientations towards the future – often as utopian discourses.

The four legs of the economy are production, distribution, consumption and finance. They are intrinsically linked, and my contention is that the knowledge production of the arts, i.e. artistic research, is ideologically linked to these schemes, interpellations and narratives.

The curatorial determines a new approach to the display and creation of exhibitions. Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) writes how the curatorial is linked to the financial, political, educational and social. The curatorial is opposed to curating. The curatorial is potentially disruptive to hegemonic knowledge, to art history. Both the curatorial and financialisation are opposed to curating and economics – cura and oikonomia. They are utopian and disruptive narratives; ubiquitous narratives that permeate everyday life.

In addition to a paper presentation, I would like to make a modest curatorial intervention in the space of the Theatre Academy during the CARPA colloquium. This intervention does not require the support of the organising team, but I will be self-sufficient in the management of this intervention.

Biography

I am an artist and postdoctoral researcher, and a professor in the Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) MA programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki. In my doctoral thesis in 2016, my research focused on the impact of cognitive capitalism on artistic research. This was followed by two post-doctoral research projects: a one-year project at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki (2017), and a four-year collaborative research project funded by the Academy of Finland, ‘How to Do Things with Performance’. Originally trained in the visual arts, where I graduated in 2000, my artistic practice combines techniques from media art, performance and language-based artworks to explore the interstices between immaterial forms and material cultures. Both my research and artistic practices emphasise the experimental ethos and non-standard methods in approaching the contemporary moment.

Hild Borchgrevink

Scores as social spaces: Dramaturgies of scores in multimodal music performance 

I will discuss the plural functions of scores in the dramaturgy of the multimodal staged composition KEINE IDEEN, KEINE NEUE PERSPEKTIVE (2022) by Norwegian composer Trond Reinholdtsen, a work I have been following from a dramaturgical perspective in rehearsals and through its first performance as one of three cases in my ongoing Ph.D.

Below its playful surface, this performance is regulated by more than 10 different scores. The scores are materially different and have different functions in the perfomance as it unfolds. Some scores are strictly synchronised, some partly interconnected, others run independently from each other. Some can be interpreted by performers, some inhibit their acting, some are completely automated. Some are accessible to the audience, some invisible. There are traditional musical scores (historical and brand new music), choreographic scores, prerecorded video, prerecorded stage texts, prerecorded audio, light plans.

I find it productive to understand these scores as interfaces structuring material and social dramaturgies, and to explore how artistic practice can be a starting point for reflecting around different uses and plural meanings of dramaturgy as a word.

The presentation is informed by my own participatory observation of the piece from the first rehearsal up to and including the first performance for the audience, as well as a group interview with the composer and the two main performers.

Biography

Hild Borchgrevink is an artist, musicologist, editor and writer. 2012-2017 she was the main editor of the online magazine Scenekunst.no for performing arts. She has an MFA in art and public spaces from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and an MA in musicology from the University of Oslo. She also studied creative writing in Bergen and Tromsø and performative criticism in Stockholm. 2020-2024 she is a research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Klaus Maunuksela

Moving in Ensembles 

Technical processes of sensor triggered sound modification and speech-to-text machinic translation possess dramaturgical agency of their own. Following Gilbert Simondon’s notion of ‘technical ensembles’ comprising of multiple technical elements and individuals, we could talk about ‘dramaturgical ensembles’ that combine human and extrahuman agents into a functioning whole.

With reference to my recent research performance Manuaali (2022) I will ponder some questions emerging from the process of working with sound technological systems as dramaturg and artist-researcher. In the kinetic audiobook performance movements of the human performer trigger changes in recorded narration, while algorithmic translation application translates synthetically granulated Finnish into English subtitles. In dialogue with Simondonian notion of technical ensembles, I observe how new kinds of technical, textual and sonic bodies unfold in the process.

“The machine remains one of the obscure zones of our civilization, at all social levels.” (Simondon 1958/2012, 257). The rise of autonomous and semiautonomous, automatic and augmented technical processes in art alter our focus when speaking about dramaturgy. How to understand interrelatedness of dramaturgy and research through machines, processes and ensembles in action? What kind of new agencies and knowledges can this composite notion of dramaturgical research inform and push forward? Could dramaturg be seen as a ‘mechanologist’ that Simondon longed for: a specialist who holds knowledge of the technical reality from a certain distance and grants technicity a cultural representation through enactment of dramaturgical ensembles?

Biography

Klaus Maunuksela is a dramaturg, writer and artist-researcher who is active in the fields of performance, literature and artistic research. Currently he is conducting doctorate in artistic research in the Theatre Academy of the University of Arts Helsinki. His research interests include materialities and processuality of language, extratextual writing practices with and through sound technological systems and dramaturgy understood as an expanded and transversal field of arts.

Karolina Kucia

Framed by a Robot – filming with robotic cinematographic device 

This presentation explains the apparatus and process of human/robot filmmaking and analyses its collaborative and visual outcomes against a theoretical framework. Between 2020-2023, I directed a short film WE BITES US (17′ 25”), a hybrid form between live action and animation. The cinematography used in the live-action scenes combines two different points of view: that of a cinematographer (Janina Witkowski & co) and that of an autonomous mobile robot (Omron L-60/90) equipped with a camera. At times, the robot is controlled by a wearable “prosthesis”, a glove with gyroscopic sensors, attached to an actor’s body. There is an element of juxtaposition in the film that shows the tension between a code of cinematic narrative and an unfamiliar “alien” perspective. While the former relies on the intentionality of a frame, the latter slips out of it. Both are meticulously constructed, precisely coded and well rehearsed. Both have spatial and economic demands and require a group of professionals to set them in motion and keep them going. One fulfils the cinematic dream as it was never meant to be anything else, and the other exposes itself as “artificial stupidity” that somehow still manages to do a good job at framing. Here, this division is not binary, they coexist in the same moving image. The sensor prosthesis, which allows an actor to control the robot, but only by submitting to simplified, communicable gestures/commands, further complicates the power relationship between human and robot. This paradoxical cinematic apparatus is a techno-feminist gesture to see technological innovation not as a grand futurist dream or a seductively sleek toy for the rich, neither as freedom nor as subjugation. Innovation here is a strange and joyful awkwardness that allows for a reorganisation of the familiar power structure of image production.

The film WE BITES US is the main element of the second artistic component of my dissertation: Monstrous Agencies – Resisting precarisation within the organisation of collaboration and authorship. The research oscillates around parasitic and monstrous relationships with the aim of recognising interdependence. It looks for a way to recombine the power structure of a working environment, conditions and format, including the human and non-human agencies involved. It proceeds by understanding the collective mutability within the patched work structure. It considers the multiple membership of singular elements of the work structure and the fuzziness of minor personal resistance within the larger organisational body.

Biography

Karolina Kucia is a visual artist with a background in sculpture and intermedia as well as in performance studies. At the moment she is also a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, developing organisational scores based on concepts of parasite, monster and slip in the context of precarization of labour in post-neoliberal capitalism and the current form of art institutions. Their research project is Monstrous Agencies – models and tools for redefining cooperation in the production of art.

Petros Konnaris, Mirko Guido, Rodia Vomvolou and Evagoras Vanezis

Feel free to take a nap

Our proposal for Carpa8 is based on the performance practice ´Feel free to take a nap´ that focuses on dialogical processes between movement, language, and text enacted by the Mirko Guido (IT/DK) and Petros Konnaris (CY) in collaboration with Rodia Vomvolou (GR) and Evarogas Vanezis (CY). The project was born during the European program Micro and Macro Dramaturgies in Dance and in 2023 is developing its research on embodied discourse and dramaturgical practices in the frame of a live happening.

This artistic practice is generated by a choreographic score with elements of an ongoing dialogue, a continuous figuring out between movement, comments, and reflections arising from tactile-kinesthetic experiences and memories. The team embraces the precariousness of what they construct, entrusting the process of uncertainty. The personal is shared with each other and simultaneously to a public gaze building a space of tenderness and consent. The work deliberately plays with streams of consciousness, unarticulated attempts at translation and language failures, severing the common and obvious connections between words and images.

During the conference, we will explore through our performance practice one of the announced questions of “how dramaturgy and artistic research together challenge their separate conventions, conceptualizations and working methods”. The discussion will happen for an hour throughout this happening allowing space for reflection, embodied understanding, critical discussions, and collective thinking.

The dynamic of the project manifests through the application of live dramaturgy that advances while the performance takes place. In this way, a living structure is created that evolves and adapts at every moment, bringing the dramaturgical function to the surface. The public participates in this ‘common societal event’ by watching, imagining, reflecting and eventually by actively participating. It proposes itself as a critical, collaborative interaction(s) with the spectator, denoting a practice of navigating through vital ambiguities, multiplicities, and contradictions.

Biographies

Petros Konnaris is a performance practitioner working between the fields of live art, participatory art, and dance and the artistic director of Dance House Lefkosia since 2022. His artistic practice manifests in the form of durational happenings, 1-1(one with one) performances, public interventions, performance scores, and process-based artefacts. Konnaris’ research focuses on the embodiment of care, the materiality of words, the audience as a witness, and feminist and queer discourse.  His work has been part of festivals, exhibitions, and research programs in Czechia (Micro & Macro Dramaturgies in Dance 2022), Cyprus (Open House 2021, Buffer Fringe Festival 2019), Finland (The Posture of Impermanence 2021, New Performance Turku Festival 2016), Greece (Thessaloniki Queer Art Festival 2019), and Thailand (Asiatopia Festival 2016).
Konnaris holds an MA in Live Art and Performance Studies from UniArts Helsinki and has published texts in books (Performing Silence /2022, Figures of Speech/2018).

Freelance choreographer and dancer Mirko Guido (b. Italy) is a choreographer and dancer. He holds a Master’s degree in New Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts. His choreographic works have been presented in several venues across Europe, and he has been supported by centres such as Summer Studios Rosas, Work Space Brussels; Uferstudios Berlin; PACT Zollverein; Dansens Hus Stockholm, among many others. As a dancer, he worked in various companies in Germany and later on with the Cullberg Ballet, Sweden. In his work Mirko explores questions of intersubjectivity and the performative potential of liminal situations. Often intrigued by themes of gap, interspace and transformation he moves between theatre, art galleries and public spaces, and by employing dance, voice, text, video, participatory and dialogical methods, his work crystallises in very different performances. Mirko is currently based in Aarhus, Denmark, and he is an in-house artist at Bora Bora – Dance and Visual Theater.

Performing arts dramaturg, PhD researcher Rodia Vomvolou (1993) is a performing arts dramaturg and PhD researcher based between Amsterdam and Athens. She is currently doing a PhD research on the self-positioning of the dance dramaturg, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker in Utrecht University. Her personal field of interest focuses on dramaturgical practices in the field of contemporary choreography and artistic research in the current sociopolitical context and knowledge economy. As a freelancer dramaturg and mentor, Rodia collaborates with institutions, dance houses and art academies in Europe as well as with independent artists in Greece, the Netherlands. Since 2019 she is the mentor and curator of the Artistic Development programme “Moving the New” of Dance House Lemesos (CY). Rodia holds an MA in Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy (Cum laude) from Utrecht University and a BA in Drama and Performance Theory, History and Analysis from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Cum Laude).

Independent Curator & Writer Working between the fields of curation, art theory and creative writing, Evagoras Vanezis’ practice engages with the production and contextualization of cross-disciplinary spaces and narratives. Through the mediums of project, exhibition, and text, his hybrid methodology incorporates events, ecologies, fragments, and footnotes from sources as varied as the history of aesthetics, the literature of 20th-century poetic materialism, feminist and queer theory, decoloniality, personal and collective experiences. Since 2016 he has organized various exhibitions, programs, and publishing projects in collaboration with communities, institutions, and other initiatives. Recent projects include Anachoresis: Upon Inhabiting Distances, the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (co-curator, 2021), and Formworks, Thkio Ppalies Project Space (curator, 2019 – 2022). He is currently a co-curator and fellow of A Natural Oasis?, Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM, 2022 – 3). He holds an MRes in Art Theory and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins.

Katariina Numminen and Mammu (Maarit) Rankanen

Listening to Listening as Dramaturgical Approach and Parallel Play Project

We propose an artistic research/dramaturgy workshop, which consists of an introductory dialogue and three practical experiments done collectively. This proposal is a step number three in our ongoing Parallel Play Project, in which we juxtapose and play together with our individual AR processes.

For this experiment we take as our starting point the psychoanalytic idea of listening to listening. According to Haydée Faimberg, listening to listening means how an analyst attunes to the ways in which the patient hears – the silences, or what was said – and how then new meanings can be retroactively built. Listening to listening can create space to realize that there is always more, in what was said in the first place.

What are the unconscious and preconscious patterns that generate, enable, and shape dramaturgy and dramaturgical choices? How do interruptions generate meaning – how is dramaturgy actually created with and by the pauses (non-actions) and not by actions only? What constitutes a pause/ interruption? In the workshop we focus on the interruptions/ pauses and how they generate dramaturgy. Making artistic variations based on listening to listening, we create parallel play with our respective artistic and AR practices.

From Mammu’s AR perspective pause is linked to Japanese concept Ma間 (interval in time and space), and it’s embodied understanding in dancer’s experience of space. It could be seen as a preconscious relationship with environment, co-dancers, audience, and the elements of space around. What happens in listening to listening? Listening to listening silence, pauses, in-between spaces? Echo of an echo, reflection of the reflection?

Katariina approaches dramaturgy from the perspective of interruptions, and the concept of s p a c i n g (Walter Benjamin’s understanding of Brechtian dramaturgy) is central in her research. The research and its completed artistic parts focus on live composition, and have aimed in making arrangements in which the dramaturgy – often understood as hidden structure – becomes visible or tangible.

Biographies

Katariina Numminen is a Helsinki based performance maker, dramaturg and playwright. She is currently completing an artistic research doctoral project on dramaturgy in the Theatre Academy, University of Arts, Helsinki. Her current interests include: dreams, grief, bodies; live composition; pauses & interruptions; psychoanalysis and performance; gesture in relation to dramaturgy. Her performance-making has ranged from autobiographical works to documentary performances and to the reworkings of dramatical texts. She is also a playwright, and has done radio features. She also occasionally works as a dramaturg for other makers /artistic processes. In addition to her artistic work, she has worked as pedagogue, teaching dramaturgy, dramatic and creative writing and contemporary performance practices. She was a professor of dramaturgy in University of Arts, Helsinki 2014-2019. She has written about dramaturgy, and has co-edited two books.

Mammu (Maarit) Rankanen is Helsinki -based performer, choreographer, and pedagogue and fourth year Doctoral researcher in Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. Rankanen’s artistic research is about the dancer’s embodied experience of space (inner/outer) framed with Japanese concept Ma間. Her long practice as a dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue, practitioner of shiatsu, yoga, meditation, and somatic practices (Somatic Movement Therapy) inform her research.

Bilge Serdar Göksülük

Digital Intervention Into Dramaturgical Thoughts

In 2021 right after the first COVID-19 crisis, I did ethnographical research in one of the physical training institutions that provide Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies in Berlin. Because of the Corona precautions, eight dancers’ training was held in a Hybrid format where some dancers were remote, and others were in the studio. Creating and improvising movement sequences was an essential part of the training. Yet, during my fieldwork, participants were challenged by communicating through telematics (Zoom) in the hybrid class setting. Having participants in person and online simultaneously allowed me to scrutinize the difference between interaction processes in the shared space and remote participation. I realized how that affects coordination dynamics. According to enactive theories (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009; Durt et al., 2017) bodily coordinating activities such as attunement, anticipation, verbal and vocal expressions (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009) generate temporal and spatial dynamics.(Durt et al., 2017) That constructs our shared sense-making process, therefore, our intersubjective world. During the training, online participants’ limited access to the studio environment and other dancers’ corporeality brought about different perceptual fields and, as a result, designated diverse coordination dynamics and dancers’ creative choices.

In my presentation, I take dramaturgy as a way of constructing meaning and generating strategies to shape audiences’, participants’ or artists’ experience by looking into the creative process from an enactive perspective as a shared sense-making. Based on my ethnographic research, I will form my discussions around those questions:
• How did communication technologies intervene in dancers’ experience?
• How does using telematics affect our sensorial experience and the shared meaning-making process in creative practice?
• What kind of new dramaturgical tools can emerge from digital interventions in artistic creation?

Biography

Bilge Serdar Göksülük completed her BA in mathematics education and finished her master’s degree and PhD at Ankara University Theatre Department. Recently, she completed two years EU funded Choreomundus – International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice, and Heritage program, which is run by four universities in France, Norway, Hungary, United Kingdom. In her latest research, she worked on the digitalization of dance and movement experience in a hybrid format class setting through ethnographical methodologies. Now, she is working as a post-doctoral researcher in the AMBIENT project at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo.

Harri Laakso

Happy is the image that moves

It might seem paradoxical to suggest that artistic research in the field of photography tends towards dramaturgy. But the seeming stillness of photography can hardly conceal the actions, events and movements hidden within images. There is something theatrical in photographic images, in the way they stage their play – how they propose, expose, pose.

Photography’s dramaturgy used to be that of trauma. Elements in photographs were ordered and composed to attest to past wounds and deaths. That story has now been replaced by the “spectacle of happiness,” which no one can escape. The idyll acts today as the understudy for the somber image.

The title ‘idyll’ denotes a literary genre and a state of being, where happiness, peace and harmony predominate. Idylls (from Greek eidolon, little picture) were short prose pieces or poems depicting happy pastoral life, lived in accordance with nature. An idyll therefore suggests a literary form as well as a form of life.

But the idyll I’m evoking here, the short story The Idyll, written by Maurice Blanchot in 1936, is not a happy one. Instead, it could be interpreted as describing the tension or rupture between the social world it describes and the imperatives of its own narrative form. Its narrative events are in stark contrast with the jovial demeanor of the characters. Very much like in the world today.

My performative lecture explores photographic images in this gloomy idyllic light. The presentation is a combination of video projection and voice, their dialogue.

Biography

Harri Laakso is an artist, researcher and curator interested in photographic images and theory, artistic research and word/image relations. He works as associate professor of photography research at Aalto University, Finland (2018-). Before that he worked as professor of visual culture and art at Aalto (2006-2018) and was also involved in developing the university’s transdisciplinary studies. He did his doctoral dissertation Valokuvan tapahtuma [The Photographic Event] in 2003, and has since published articles and texts on photography and contemporary art. His artistic practice is centered on artistic research experimentation. His curatorial work includes co-curating Finnish and Nordic pavilions at Venice Biennale 2013. He has led many research projects (e.g. Figures of Touch, Academy of Finland, 2009-2012) and was recently senior researcher in Floating Peripheries – Mediating the Sense of Place (Academy of Finland, 2017–2021).

Lois Brown and Thea Patterson

Moving with Ghosts

The relationship between research and dramaturgy is marked by a discursive vibrancy. Lois Brown (NL) and Thea Patterson (QC) explore their relationship to research, a way to crack open structures and peer between them; dramaturgy, a way to structure research; and movement, the location of their inquiry.

In their research over the last decade, Lois and Thea (together and separately) have explored shadow, spectre, glimmer and ghosts, leading them to wonder, if perhaps they had created their own hauntologies. Research for works like Thea’s “between the is and the could be” and “unnevering” and Lois’s “I AM A GENIUS does anyone here know me?” and “Comme si nous etions des fantômes” are haunted by theory and experience: the here and now of the unpresent in the present; sometimes a person or a disappearing history clings – perhaps an ancestor with a message or a ghost who cannot rest or as the physical place and trace of trauma or ecological turmoil. Using their dramaturgical experiences, and digging into the scholarship of thinkers like Derrida, Powell and Shaffer, and Glissant, they offer the lens of their hauntings as a place to describe, speak and perform dramaturgical transgression and transition.

Their work together began in Montréal in 2010, with parallel interests in democratizing corroded, corrupted and barely visible gestures and objects that emerged in the normative frame as they moved. Often what remained was a movement practice soaked in haunting, provocated by a question. What is the movement I cannot do that I am always doing? (Thea,“the dance I cannot do”) In this way inquiries have folded into practice and performances.

At CARPA8, Thea and Lois will attempt to build a dramaturgy of haunting. Weaving back and forth between discursive exchange, agreement, disagreement, interrogation and including provocations for movement that extend to the commons, their performance lecture will offer short, regular periods of time to move a little or a lot. They will offer this opportunity for a shared point of inquiry and creation, as an opening to practice, action and advocacy.

“I draw my index finger of my right hand along the side of my left hand. I smooth the skin, which in my case is wrinkled. I stop holding my breath.”

This tiny instance of movement, inside a haunting, a practice and a performance, advocates for pleasure. Thea and Lois use the pleasure and pain that identifies their somatic presence and inhabits the movement in their creation work, to respond to emergence in their hauntology. Does this research and dramaturgy offer a re/solution to personal and ecological loss? We can respond to this together as we move, because we move, in moving.

Biographies

Born in Newfoundland, Lois Brown (B.A UofA; M.Ed MUN) established her artistic practice in St. John’s. She is an original member of Neighbourhood Dance Works and from 1982 to 92 curator of its dance series and Festival of New Dance. She has received numerous recognitions for her work. In 2005, she was awarded The Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement in theatre by a mid-career Canadian artist by The Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2019 inducted into Dance Collection Danse’s Encore! Hall of Fame in Toronto. From 2010 to 2013, she was Artist and Dramaturg in Residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal. After an accident in 2008, Lois brought an exploration of disability aesthetics, especially modes of time, into her performances, dramaturgies and investigations into objects, improvisation, and islandness.

Thea Patterson is a Tiohti:áke/ Mooniyang/Montreal based choreographer, performer, and dance dramaturg. She often explores expanded choreographic methods usually through solo performances including the dance that i cannot do (2013) presented at, amongst others, Movement Research-The Judson Church and the Munich Dance Festival. In 2016, She completed her Masters at DAS Choreography (Amsterdam) with the solo project between the is and the could be (2016) which explored emergent choreographic forms, and methods for altering aspects of spectatorship. She has provided dramaturgical counsel for many independent choreographers including Peter Trosztmer, Andrew Turner, Nate Yaffe, Winnie Ho, Sasha Kleinplatz, Sarah Bild, Karen Fennel, Lois Brown and Katie Ward. Thea has several ongoing collaborations, as a dramaturg, and collaborator, choreographer and performer in Montreal, Portugal, Edmonton, and Newfoundland. Her work Silvering (2020) was presented at Mile Zero Dance in Edmonton. As well, she is a SSHRC funded PhD student in Performance Studies at the University of Alberta.

Bertie Ferdman, Peter Eckersall and Erika Latta

Intermedial Dramaturgies: Staging Play, Modes of Liveness, and Social Engagement

This panel considers intermedial dramaturgies in the context of the post pandemic era. The panel will feature discussions of works by artists negotiating between media: between theatre and the digital, between theatre and cinema, between stage and screen. Each member of this panel will discuss the formal and dramaturgical strategies that the artists employ to develop experiences that highlight modes of staging play, rethinking liveness, and expanding social practice. The contrasting tactics discussed by the panel will open a space for dialogue about political art in the contemporary moment.

Whereas before the pandemic a robust amount of artistic research centered around how technology interacts with theatre and performance, the pandemic lockdown impelled a shift in this relationship. Artists and institutions had to find ways of bringing theatre and performance to the technology, to the screens (quite literally). Theatre had to be re-situated in digital space. How to bring theatre to the digital realm? How to bring a stage to the screen? How to use the digital platforms to (re)create a (different) theatre or theatrical experience? How to generate community online? How to (re)distribute performance? How to negotiate between analog (in-person) and digital spaces? As the authors of New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New Materialism write in their introduction, “what we discovered from looking at the processes of making this work and talking with the artists was that the very technical elements […] were not simply scenographic elements or techniques but were in fact core components of the dramaturgy of the production (Eckersall, Grehan, and Scheer, 3).”

Works and processes discussed in this panel will include Theater in Quarantine by Joshua William Gelb, You Are Here: A Homebound Travelogue by Marike Splint, Strange Joy and Artificial Eden by Erika Latta, The Art of Assembly hosted by Florian Malzacher, The Things we Did Next by NYID.

Biographies

Bertie Ferdman is a contemporary performance scholar whose publications include Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (SIU Press, 2018, Honorable Mention ATHE’s Outstanding Book Award), Critical Companion to Performance Art, co-edited with Jovana Stokic (Bloomsbury Press, 2020), and Curating Dramaturgies, co-edited with Peter Eckersall (Routledge, 2021). Her essays have appeared in Theater, TDR, PAJ, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Performance Research, TCG, and HowlRound. Bertie is Professor of Theater at BMCC and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and has guest taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts. She holds a B.A. in Theatre from Yale University, an M.A in Performance Studies from NYU, and a PhD in Theatre from The Graduate Center. Bertie is a graduate of Lecoq School of Physical Theatre in Paris, which continues to influence all of her writing.

Peter Eckersall teaches in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York and is an Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne. He served as program chair from 2016-2022. Eckersall holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies and an MA – Asian Studies from Monash University, Australia. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy and theatre and politics. Recent publications include, Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre, (ed. with Barbara Geilhorn, Andreas Regelsberger, Cody Poulton, 2021), Curating Dramaturgies (ed. with Bertie Ferdman, 2021), and Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013). He is currently a member of the research team ‘Towards an Australian Ecological Theatre’ (Australian Research Council 2021-23). He served as Vice President of Performance Studies international from 2014-19. He is dramaturg and cofounder of the Melbourne based performance group Not Yet It’s Difficult. Recent freelance dramaturgy includes, Sheep #1 (Sachiyo Takahashi, Japan Society), Phantom Sun/Northern Drift (Alexis Destoop, Beursschouwburg, Riga Biennial).

Erika Latta is the artistic co-director and co-founder of WaxFactory, which nurtures a hybrid approach to performance, based on unconventional narrative styles, originally dramaturgy, visual and physical rigor, technological experimentation and site-responsive work. With the company, she works as a director, writer, actor, sound designer and educator. As an actor and director she has presented work in international venues and festivals throughout Europe and Latin America creating long lasting partnerships with artists and designers. Erika is also an associate director of the French trans-media company Begat Theater, with whom she co-conceived, directed, designed sound and co-wrote several productions, most notably Hidden Stories and La Disparition. Erika is Assistant Professor of Performance at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver. She holds a BFA in Theater from the University of Washington, and an MFA in Acting from Columbia University.

Maija Hirvanen

Perfoming interconnections: dramaturgies of response in artistic research

I propose a 60 min experiment under a working title Performing interconnections: dramaturgies of response in artistic research. The session explores dramaturgical processes of response and making interconnections in artistic practices, and particularly in relation to my current artistic research. The session is related to my artistic research direction Performing interconnections – ecologies of choreographic practice, that develops choreographic thinking emerging as expanded choreography and in relation to notions of “more-than-human”, ecology and performativity. 

The session includes 3 phases:

I will share and introduce a particular artistic research tool (or in this instance, a research spore), a series of choreographic scores entitled Mycoscores / choreospores, a part of Performing interconnections – ecologies of choreographic practice. I will also open the form and purpose of the session. (15 min)

I will present of pre-meditated short responses to the research spore by invited artistic researchers (pre-recorded material/performative interventions,.30 min)

I invite discussion based responses, to be worked with in small groups, from the participants of the session. Closing of the session. (15 min)

Biographies

Maija Hirvanen is a choreographer and performance maker based in Helsinki. Her work has been presented e.g. Tanz im August/Hebbel am Ufer/Berlin, ImpulsTanz/Vienna, Sadler’s Wells/London, SPRING Festival/Utrecht, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis and Dansens Hus/Stockholm, Zodiak, Kiasma, Baltic Circle Festival, Helsinki Festival and Moving in November Festival. Hirvanen has participated in and led through several international artistic laboratories, i.e. with Ong Keng Sen and Meg Stuart.

Maija’s interests include the relationship between art and different belief systems, questions of corporeality, ways of re-learning and creating connections with and through art. Maija is currently a member of the THIRD Research Cohort at the Research Department of DAS Graduate School/Amsterdam University of the Arts. For academic year 2022-2023 Hirvanen is a visiting professor at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.

Initiator and presenter of session: Maija Hirvanen + invited artist-researchers Alice Chauchat, Siegmar Zacharias, Ilse van Rijn and Sabine Zahn (pre-recorded presences as part of the presentation). The artist-researchers are connected to the THIRD, 3rd cycle research group at DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Alice Chauchat dances, choreographs, teaches, supports peers, makes up structures for thinking and developing together, writes, directs institutions, ponders through dance practice on politics and ethics of alterity and togetherness, processing the knowledge and complexity of collaborative practices, or simply being in the world with other people, into choreographic forms. She is based in Berlin.

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and trained death doula. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, her performances, immersive installations and discursive encounters address the ethical dynamics of transformation in ecologies of artistic and social practice through a queer feminist lense. She collaborates with humans and uncontrollable entities such as smoke, slime, saliva, the human nervous system, and grief. She is a founding member of the social body apothecary proposing regeneration of the social body by restoring the personal body, valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands. She was born in Romania and lives in Berlin.

Ilse van Rijn is a writer and researcher. Her stories, articles and performances speak of a deep interest in the entangled relations between word and world. Her current research furthers investigations into embodied forms of writing, reading them through the lens of feminist legacies, and their potential in today’s other-than-human world. Ilse holds a PhD in art history. She is Head of 3. Cycle at Zurich University of the Arts.

Sabine Zahn (Berlin) is an artist, researcher and educator, working with the fields of choreography, urban practice, aesthetics, the city as lived space and how they complement each other. Under the term of doing/city she explores a radical somatic physical angle towards space as produced through action. She is a fellow at DAS Research THIRD Amsterdam, member of Floating Berlin and AREAL Berlin.

Elena Peytchinska

Skinspace: Agency and friction of spatial dramaturgy

The agency of space within performance practices is a topic that has been abundantly discussed in artistic research. However, within the framework of spatial dramaturgy – the spatial organization in time and its narrative continuity – it is subject-centred decision-making which traditionally foregrounds the assumption that the site where a theatre event takes place is neutral and passive: a »black box«, ready to be animated by the liveliness of the performance and its human participants. In this talk, I argue that a performance space is an equal and active co-operator in a theatric production and explore practices of more-than-human spatial dramaturgy. I evoke Erika Fischer-Lichte’s distinction between two spatial articulations within a performance event: the pre-existing performance site, characterized as an architectural-geometric and rather static and neutral place, and the »spatiality« that emerges during the performance. Whereas I adopt Fischer-Lichte’s conception of spatiality, I would like to revise the notion of geometric space and offer (new)materialistic observations, exploring its potential as an active performance participant.

To question the traditional image of the black box and its inside/outside dichotomy, I propose the figure of »Skinspace«. A spatial inside/outside experience relies on a similar bodily perception: The skin is the envelope which protects the inside of the body from the outside world – a quality shared by most human and non-human animals (in contrast to other species, such as fungi, which, due to their »anatomy« do not experience the difference between inside and outside). However, the concept of skin as closure and limit appears not until the 18th century. Until then, the skin was perceived as a porous membrane – an interface of permeability, transformation, and friction. Thus »Skinspace« is a layer of productive friction, of porosity between spatial agency and spatial dramaturgy: a practice of embracing the Outside.

Biography

Elena Peytchinska is a visual artist and performance designer. She studied Violin at the Mozarteum University Salzburg and Stage and Film Design at the University of Applied Art Vienna, where she is currently a lecturer. She also holds a doctoral degree in Language Arts/Creative Writing from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In collaboration with poet Thomas Ballhausen, she co-authored a series of publications exploring the artistic research potential of Language Arts, the most recent of which is »Fiction Fiction: Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling« (2023). Current research interests include spatial events for multispecies collectives and entanglements of text and space in the context of digital and post-digital concretism.

Klaas Freek Devos

A somatic REACh. (research in expanding awareness through algorithmic choreography)

My artistic research investigates the impact of technology on creative processes in interdisciplinary dance arts. More specific, I apply electronic composition to somatic-based dance improvisation, a strand in contemporary dance where somatic sensations are considered creative materials in improvisation. The goal of this practice-based research is to examine to what extent computation can unveil the hermetic and introspective nature of embodied creativity in somatic dance. The aim is to achieve a method for (extended) embodied reflection that is, more than in conventional dance practices, integrated in the dance improvisation. My hope is developing an artistic method that makes somatic-based dancing more credibility and reliable as a collective, communicable, and interdisciplinary creative language.

Form and CARPA8 Themes:
I propose a performance-lecture, presenting (lecturing) and performing (dancing) two phases of my research: 1) Dynamic Databases and 2) Biometric Choreography. These are relevant to different strands of the CARPA8 themes as follows:

– The investigations challenge the introspective nature of somatic dance through notions of extended embodied cognition using digital technology.

– The research examines the dis/connections between verbal and embodied reflection in dance, the symbiosis between embodied and computational creativity.

– The integration of technological tools and methods (databases and EMG biometrics) in traditional somatic dance practices, bringing experimental technology into the dance studio.

Content:
1) Dynamic Databases
Dynamic Databases, is an open collection of somatic prose. These are figurative descriptions, similes, and experiential metaphors that express dance experiences. In my research, I adopted the ‘explicitation interviews’ (i.e. micro-phenomenology) as an alternative to conventional methods in verbal dance reflection. At this point the REACh. databases counts over 4,000 units, collected during participatory research in over 15 somatic practices from different lines of heritage. I introduce these data and follow up with a demonstration (live solo performance) presenting how I integrated the software (MAXmsp) in my dance and performance practice.

2) Biometric Choreography
I introduce my collaboration with LWT3, a Milanese technology laboratory. Together, we explore how to expand notions of embodied creativity in live performing arts through experimentation. Combining my Databases with their biometric interface – a smartsuit with 8 integrates EMG sensors for live processing – we aim at expanding the creative horizon of somatic dance improvisation and reveal a new way for scoring dance and interdisciplinary composition. REACh. thus aims at a live-scoring technology based on physical sensations, a technology that can contribute to more inclusive reflection and audio-transcription in dance.

Video, materials, and more: http://www.klaasdevos.eu

Biography

Klaas Devos (he/him) is a Belgian choreographer and artistic researcher focusing on perception and attention in dance. He completed studies at the Conservatoire Antwerp, PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) and a.pass (advanced performance studies) in Brussels. He further graduated with great distinction in theatre and dance studies at the University of Antwerp proposing a practice-based dance epistemology. Since 2020, Devos is a PhD. fellow at the Conservatoire and University of Antwerp. In his practice-based PhD. in dance, ‘Thinking Bodies in dance’, he researches expanding awareness in somatic dance through algorithmic choreography. He is a theoretical supervisor at the Conservatoire Antwerp, lectures ‘dance studies’ at the Brussels Academy and teaches ‘contemporary dance’ at the Academy Bruges. Based in Brussels, Devos coordinates Reach & Collabs., a network and residency space dedicated to embodied and computational creativity in live and mediated performing arts.

Irena Kukric

REHEARSING WITH NON-HUMANS, Performance Installation as a Research Tool

Considering the absence of the human performer within a ‘performance installation’, the research centers around what the audience perceives as ‘present‘, once the human is removed from the center of a performance. As humans today so often relate to people who are not physically present and to media governed by code, I propose that in a performance without human actors as intermediaries, the sensual encounter with the audience could be more direct and intimate.

I further consider the notion of a ‘landscape’ as the new paradigm in contemporary performance. Could it be that paradoxically relating the fast pace, information saturated world we inhabit today to an undetermined ambiguous space such as a landscape, is the way to navigate it? As a template for the critical imagination and organization of our thoughts and creative processes as well as elements in space, the term ‘landscape’ reflects, as well, the uncertainty that is embedded in the socio-political conditions of the 21st century. Performance space as a landscape devoid of human actors is a notion that can be difficult to grasp. Perhaps only through practice, can we rehearse and come to further understanding.

Through the methodology I choose to work with, such as rehearsals and feedback loops, I see each performance as a rehearsal for the next, as an ongoing experimental situation where I look closely into the automated movements I work with. Rehearsal is seen as a dynamic exhibit of thought. Closer to the understanding of the subject that is rehearsed and further from an impending event or performance, towards a possible way to navigate our being in the world through contemporary performance practice. I would like to present part of my research as a lecture performance, with the possibility of showing one of the automated movements as well. Video link: https://vimeo.com/691823331

Biography

Irena Kukric’s (1983) practice and research are related to the absence of the human body in time-based installation performance. Her performances focus on the balance between digital or mechanical dimensions of the works and on the poetics of human experience through non-human actors. Irena studied scenography at the Faculty of Applied Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, and Digital Media at the University of Arts in Bremen, Germany. She is currently a PhD candidate at the PhDArts Leiden (in collaboration with the University of the Arts Bremen). In 2012 she interned in the installation department at MoMA PS1, New York. In the past, she has worked as a stage designer in theater and production designer in film. Irena occasionally lectures at the University of Arts Bremen and is a coordinator and researcher in the research project The Dynamic Archive at the University of Arts Bremen. She was born in Belgrade and divides her time between Bremen and Berlin.

Christos Polymenakos

body/word Performance Writing as a communal dramaturgical practice for artistic research promoting a collectively more desirable being.

The proposed multimodal sharing aims to experientially open up proposals, failures, questions and potentialities on the links between dramaturgy, artistic research and communities, a hybrid being, time and space.

body/word Performance Writing is Christos Polymenakos’ open-ended methodology (2010) emerging from the field of Performance Writing as conceived and practiced in Dartington College of Arts.

This research sharing is initially based on processes and different roles in projects situated in the field of Performance Writing as conceived and practiced in Dartington College of Arts. It is also informed by past applications of body/word Performance Writing in online and in the flesh projects of different fields, locations, roles and modes of creation, research and education. Finally, the proposed research sharing feeds off ongoing, current and, importantly, designing of future processes exploring collective dramaturgical work and artistic research with different communities in Greece and abroad.

Research proposals, failures, questions and potentialities unravel from the following quests:

What if dramaturgy is a corporeal practice, perceived as a process sensorially engaging its human and non-human, living and not living entities?

What if artistic research is a process enquiring dramaturgy as the poetics of connection of communities (Koinotita) -rather than promotion to consumerist audiences (koino)?

How does this connection aims to reassure or update the connections between different corporealities constituting communities through an non hierarchical combination of extended notions of creation, research and education?

What if writing is the materialization, transmediation and/or translation of words in space, time, via different corporealities?

How does processing language as an event and an event as language, inform praxis, the theoretical investigations for the sake of practice and practical explorations for the sake of theory?

What is the pub version of the above?

The presentation is supported by Onassis AiR.

Biography

Christos Polymenakos (GR/US) creator, performer, researcher and educator, creator of the body/word – Performance Writing methodology (2010). MA in Performance Writing (Merit) from University College Falmouth Incorporating Dartington College of Arts(Hellenic Centre for Theatre and Dance scholarship).

Lee Miller and Joanne “Bob” Whalley

Cloudings: Spooky action at a distance

When Lola Olufemi in ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’ (2021) asks us to connect point A to point B, she also asks us to invoke the otherwise. With the emergence of volumetric and capturing technologies (LIDAR, structured light, photogrammetry, 360 video, light fields etc.), and virtual production contexts, these ‘otherwise’ approaches have the potential to shift significantly how performance work is documented, archived, and accessed. This multimodal presentation seeks to consider the potential impact that these developments might have upon dramaturgical strategies employed within ephemeral, process-driven performance practice.

While there might be little novelty in acknowledging the challenges presented in the documentation of live performance practice, or the close relationship between documentation and dissemination in the context of artistic research, there is nevertheless still work to be done on the dramaturgy of the document. The potential doubling afforded by the originary referent and its digital twin evokes the concept of quantum entanglement, forcing the artistic researcher to acknowledge the cleaving between the source and its document. Starting from our own ageing bodies and their digital doubles, we will explore Albert Einstein‘s idea of ‘spooky action at a distance’, alongside Freya Vass-Rhee’s concept of ‘boundary objects’ in ‘Distributed Dramaturgies’; objects which are not confined to or defined by a singular situation or group but instead take shape and are reshaped when moving through many different situations and groups.

Biographies

Lee Miller is associate professor at Falmouth University, where he works within Research and Knowledge Exchange as Head of Postgraduate Research. His research focuses on audience / performer interaction, body-based live arts, site-specific performance, and affective exchange. As a practitioner-scholar his research takes multiple forms, both as traditional textual outputs alongside performance outcomes. His most recent book was co-authored with Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and is entitled Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between (2017).

Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley is an artist, dramaturg, and acupuncturist, celebrating radical kinship and politics of care. In ‘staying with the trouble’, her approaches attend to spaces which cause an affecting, and bodies affected. She makes performance, installation, performance text and objects for international audiences. Her Ph.D. students explore grief narratives, empathy and affective exchange, concepts of with-ness and witness. Whalley and Miller completed the first joint practice-as-research Ph.D. to be undertaken within a UK arts discipline in 2004.

Alex Viteri Arturo and Cory Tamler

Dripping Web

The Dripping Web is a co-designed experimental session in collaboration with bodies of water. Waterways, watersheds, cycles of evaporation and precipitation, melting, and flooding weave a dripping web across faraway landscapes and seemingly distant geographical locations. From the poisoned fish in the Oder to the flooding in Pakistan to the disappearance of lakes in Germany and the drought of rivers in Colombia to all the world’s rainwater being pronounced unsafe to drink—water insists on our interconnectedness whether we want to listen or not. Through a perambulation toward an embodied encounter with Helsinki’s urban bodies of water, we will dive into water dramaturgies. What possibilities open up to our artistic research when we listen to how we are intertwined with water? How can we trouble our land-bound perspective and cartographic imagination? How does artistic research in collaboration with the watery worlds transform our understanding of dramaturgy? We will cruise Töölönlahti’s watershed with an eye on how global water networks affect the city and vice versa. Our perambulation will explore embodied techniques to encounter the watery community, moving through different locations in the watershed and attuning to how the lake co-shapes our bodies. We will consider water our collaborator, an interlocutor, teacher, creative partner, and, why not, a dramaturge.

The Dripping Web is driven by a desire for watery dramaturgical pressures to destabilize our physical and mental constructions. In 2019, we co-conceived and facilitated an artistic research/writing residency in Pittsburgh that explored bodies of water as dramaturgical inspiration. Since, we’ve explored forms of artistic research in collaboration with the Penobscot, Presumpscot, and Kennebec rivers in Wabanaki/Maine, the Südpanke in Berlin, and the Helenesee, a lake in Frankfurt (Oder)). Our contribution will begin with a brief introduction to water dramaturgies and what it means to us.
https://www.theschoolofmakingthinking.com/water.html

Biographies

Alex Viteri is a Berlin-based Andean performer and scholar. Viteri is a member of the dance collective MaCA and an ongoing collaborator of the choreographers Juliana Piquero and Marion Budwig. In 2019, they premiered “Fan de Ellas” at the Theater Sophiensaele. Viteri also performed for various iterations of “Apparitions sur le récif ” ICI CCN, Montpellier (2021), and 3bisF, Aix en Provence (2022). In 2021&22, they co-hosted the forum “About Dance” at Lake Studios, Berlin. From 2019 to 2022, they were granted The Saison Foundation Air Partnership, Japan. In September 2022, MaCA premiered its newest work at Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. Viteri received a DIS-TANZ-SOLO and RechercheStipendium from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media and is an associate artist at BAS, UdK. They are currently writing their Ph.D. dissertation on the authentic ways mountains, plants, and other living organisms participate in a dance’s meaning-making and composition at CUNY.

Cory Tamler (www.corytamler.com) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is a former Fulbright scholar and in 2021-2022 was a visiting DAAD scholar at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Gießen. Cory also makes research-based performances with In Kinship (Wabanaki/Maine, USA). She co-organized the second iteration of Performing Knowledge at the Segal Theatre Center (NYC, 2019), an experimental festival of lecture-performances, has convened two performance research residencies with The School of Making Thinking (NY/Pittsburgh, USA), and was the dramaturg and researcher for The Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge, License Nr. 11: End of Repetition (Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin 2022). Her first book, A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography, was published in 2022.

Esa Kirkkopelto, Pauliina Hulkko, Marketta Tikkanen, Sofia Smeds and Mikko Kauppila

Corporeal Dramaturgy as a Medium of Artistic Research

In this 60-minute workshop, we experiment corporeal dramaturgy collectively and in action. The workshop is realised in collaboration with a group of researching actor-performers, and together with the colloquium participants. By means of small exercises and assignments, we examine how it is possible to turn ourselves, and basically any material, into dramaturgical components and how these components could be used to generate artistic compositions. We enquire into the effects of these dramaturgical operations asking how they could be reused as an artistic research method for studying everyday life and practices.

The workshop is based on the creative use of embodied imagination and ethically aware affective work. While increasing the actor-performer’s artistic agency, this kind of work extends their domain of expression beyond anthropomorphic and anthropocentric framings, towards more-than-human phenomena and manifestations, and thus, exceeds the representational mode of conventional acting and performance. It enables the actor-performer to conceive of their body as a divisible plurality, and themselves as both a composer and a component, and opens a momentary and local dramaturgical horizon, where all beings and materials are treated in bodily terms, and where they may encounter and act equally in their heterogeneity and diversity.

The workshop is based on the presenters’ artistic research on corporeal dramaturgy. In this research acting/performing is understood as a dramaturgical process, capable of meeting the needs of “post-psychophysical” performance. The backdrop of the ongoing research lies in the multidisciplinary artistic research project Actor’s Art in Modern Times, carried out at the Theatre Academy Helsinki in 2008–2011.

Biographies

Esa Kirkkopelto is a philosopher, artist-researcher, and performance artist. He has worked as a professor of artistic research at the University of the Arts Helsinki (2007–2018) and the Lund University (2020–2022). He holds the title of docent in aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. He is the leader of a collective research project Actor´s Art in Modern Times on psychophysical actor training (2008–2011), the initiator of the International Platform for Performer Training (since 2014), core-convener of the Performance Philosophy association (2012–2022) and the founding member of the Other Spaces live art group (2004–). Having passed his Ph. D. in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg (2003), he is the author of Le théâtre de l´expérience. Contributions à la théorie de la scène (PUF 2008) as well as of numerous articles on the philosophy of performance, aesthetics and politics. His research focuses on the deconstruction of the performing body both in theory.

Dr. Pauliina Hulkko is a director, dramaturge, artistic researcher, and Professor of Theatre Work at Tampere University, Finland. She makes material theatre which combines different materials, languages, and forms of expression. Her research interests extend from dramaturgy and composition to ethics and the performer, always with a hint of musicality. Recently Pauliina commenced a research project entitled Primates: What do we do with hands?, which focuses on hands, manual techniques, and touch.

Marketta Tikkanen is a Helsinki-based freelance actor. After her graduation from Tampere University in 2019, she has worked widely in the performing arts field: in institutional theatres – e.g., Finnish National Theatre, Turku City Theatre, and Tampere Theatre – and in the free field, developing her own artistic practice. She is a member of a touring theatre company Saimaan Teatteri, which brings new performances to the countryside in Eastern Finland. In the fall of 2022, Marketta made a performance-happening called The Mysterious Life of Ada Aik together with the musician Karin Mäkiranta. This performance combined the dramaturgies of performing arts and music gigs. Tikkanen is also part of the artistic research group that studies Cornelius Cardew’s experimental and politically engaged choir composition The Great Learning, curated by composer Juho Laitinen.

Sofia Smeds is a Helsinki-based freelance actor. In her artistic work, Smeds explores actor’s corporeal dramaturgy and corporeal-artistic emancipation. She has worked in institutional theaters such as Turku City Theater and Tampere Workers’ Theatre, and smaller professional theaters e.g. Takomo Theater and Jurkka Theater. In her own performance process Kun on tunteet (Theater Jurkka, 2021) together with actor Inke Koskinen, she explored actor’s corporeal and affective techniques in the context of dramatic text and character. Smeds has Master’s degree in Theater Arts (Degree Programme in Theatre Arts NÄTY, Tampere University) and Speech Communication (Helsinki University).

Mikko Kauppila is a Helsinki-based actor currently working as a freelancer in theatre, film and television. Mikko has a Master’s degree in theatre arts (Tampere University, 2019) and gender studies (University of Helsinki, 2021). Besides working as an actor Mikko studies creative writing at the Critical Academy (Kriittinen Korkeakoulu) in Helsinki. Mikko’s expertise includes a variety of corporeal techniques, knowledge in feminist theory and Finnish literature.

FRIDAY, 25 AUGUST 2023

Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Sophie Osburg, Mads Thugesen, Katalin Trencsényi and Karel Vanhaesebrouck

Comparative Dramaturgy and/as performance research

In the year of 2017 the international M.A. in “Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research” has been established as a double degree program for students but as well as a shared project of five European Universities and Academies (based in Brussels, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Paris and Oslo) closely related to the theory and practice of artistic research in the realm of theatre and performance.

The CDPR project aims to stimulate transcultural perspectives both on theatre historiography, performance studies and on contemporary theatre practices, challenging established narratives on theatre history and contemporary performing arts which often take the context of the nation-state for granted or, the other way around, reduce the complexity of transcultural hybridization to postmodern globalization. The basic idea of the CDPR project is to – in light of an altered image of what it means to be a dramaturg – open up a new field that can be described as “Comparative Dramaturgy”. The idea has developed out of the past decades’ broadened concept of theatre. But most importantly, comparative dramaturgy both as a theoretical framework and as a practice tackles international and intercultural questions in the face of progressing globalisation and transnational aesthetics, aiming to understand the proximity of the other, often seen as threatening, as a chance.

Our project aims to stimulate the cultural exchange of expertise and practices, with special attention to processes of hybridization. Finally, CDPR should allow us to develop new, transnational perspectives on theatre history itself, by not taking for granted established narratives on the development of national theatre traditions within the framework of modern nation-states, and, consequently, by accepting that theatre and performance also functioned as a travelling object throughout its own history which can only be understood through a transnational perspective.

Our project responds to the increasing significance of international networks in the field of performing arts and, more generally, to the growing importance of cross-border collaboration in the arts.

In our proposed panel, we would like to both present our experiences and explore the potential of this new field of research and education opened up by our programme and discuss it in the context of the conference.

Biographies

Nikolaus Müller-Schöll is a professor of theatre studies and head of the M.A.’s in Dramaturgy and CDPR at Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M., Germany. He also works as freelance dramaturg, theatre critic and translator.

Sophie Osburg has been a research assistant in theatre studies at the Goethe-University Frankfurt/M. since 2018 and works also as a production manager for festivals and independent theatre productions.

Mads Thygesen is a professor of dramaturgy at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Former rector of The Danish National School of Performing Arts (2015-2021).

Katalin Trencsényi (HU/UK) is a dramaturg, award-winning theatre-maker, and researcher, working in the fields of contemporary theatre, dance, and performance. As a London-based dramaturg, she has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Corali Dance Company, Deafinitely Theatre, and many independent artists. She is a co-founder of the Dramaturgs’ Network (UK). Katalin is the author of Dramaturgy in the Making (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015) and editor of Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch (Oberon Books, 2016). Currently, Katalin is working as a lecturer in the Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor of theatre and performance studies at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and has worked as a freelance dramaturg for a wide variety of Belgian companies and artists (Theater Antigone, Sanja Mitrovic, CREW, etc.).

Miranda Laurence and Sara Živkovič Kranjc

Dramaturgy of Practice: a slow togethering

Collaborating as two dance dramaturgs, we are currently researching the autonomous practices of dance dramaturgy beyond the final product or artwork. In our research we explore generative knowledge exchange practices between dramaturgs using collaborative dialogue. We resist the dominant hierarchical nature of the exclusionary dramaturg-artist duo, in favour of asking what is it that dance dramaturgs can do together?

We propose to offer insights into methods of dialogic practice in the form of a 60 minute co-designed experiment, and an exercise in which conference participants can participate throughout the course of the conference. We will discuss our investigations using ‘slow togethering’ to create a set of conditions within which we focus on the dialogic and generative exchange practices of dramaturgy. We propose that such investigations can be a tactic for sidestepping the capitalist value systems which dominate our practice, as well as a tool to reflect on and create practices.

In the creation and the offering of our co-designed experiment, we will draw both on our work collaborating on an article for the Documenta journal (forthcoming 2023) and on our Dramaturgy of Practice Workshop, taking place immediately before the conference*. Strategies central to these activities are based on imagining dance dramaturgy as being together, thinking together, as a mode of collaborative questioning.

The co-designed experiment will therefore offer modes of exchanging dialogic thinking with each other across time (‘slow togethering’), and will be offered to the conference delegates throughout the conference and beyond. The exact nature of the task will be developed and refined in reference to practices emerging from the pre-conference workshop and collaboratively developed with the workshop participants.

*See our accompanying video (https://tinyurl.com/2p8wevwn) for background on our pre-conference workshop, and this document (https://tinyurl.com/525sh9cv). We would like to discuss collaborating with the conference team on this event, for example for help connecting locally.

We believe our proposal aligns with both the Transitions and Transgressions, and the Thresholds and Frictions strands of the conference.

Biographies

Miranda Laurence is a dance dramaturg and cultural producer, currently PhD Researcher in the ‘Mobilizing Dramaturgy’ programme at Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University and Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology, Aarhus University. Her work often focuses on generating and facilitating surprising meetings between academic researchers, artist practitioners, and lay experts, including as founder-director of Oxford-based academic and practice exchange programme ‘Dance & Academia: Moving the Boundaries’ and as Arts Development Officer at the University of Reading. She has published on dance dramaturgy practice in The Theatre Times and Oxford Dance Writers. www.mirandalaurence.co.uk

Sara Živkovič Kranjc is conducting her PhD in Performing Arts Studies at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, focusing on the relation between dramaturgy and silence. As a dance dramaturge she worked with choreographers in co/productions of Bora Bora – dans og visuelt teater, Dansehallerne, Skånes Dansteater, LANDERER&COMPANY, MUOVI/Fabio Liberti, Institute 0.1, Bunker, Flota/Matjaž Farič, and in artistic residencies at Performing Arts Platform, Dance & Dramaturgy EU Network, Aaben Dans, Riksteatern, Théâtre Sévelin 36 among others. In 2016 she co-established Institute for contemporary art practice and theory 0.1, where she also works as producer and curator.

Duška Radosavljević

On Coalitional Research

As a practicing dramaturg and academic, in my recent book Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (2023) I propose an artist-centred research methodology – a model that modifies, complements, and expands the critical apparatus – which can be deployed by an academic studying artistic process.
The Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (A/OD) project began with the intention to study a selection of four representative artistic processes through rehearsal ethnography but unexpectedly, due to Covid-19, ended up convening a digital space for ethnographic study – a network of documents providing insights into dozens of different artists’ processes, as well as relevant academic dialogues and ideas (www.auralia.space). Following Matthew Desmond (2014) and Bruno Latour (2005), the research is interested in conjunctions, intersections, and knots within the networked ecology of the field of contemporary theatre and performance-making. As a researcher, I am interested in the relational nature of authority itself, the way in which an individual artist’s creative agency can be understood as a dynamic and enmeshed entity contingent on networks of influence and (incidental) communities of practice. The relational approach ensures that the researcher sees the work of the artist on its own terms in relation to its conditions of emergence rather than selectively as a means of upholding a pre-existing thesis. The rigour of this approach is therefore not contained in the sharpness of the critic’s tools but in creating the conditions to fully apprehend the contingencies of the artist’s idiom making epistemological insight possible, and to effectively co-articulate the epistemic contribution of the artist’s work.

I have resisted assigning a single a catchy name for the reparative, relational, coalitional, artist-centred research methodology I am describing here other than to follow the example of Dorinne Kondo in qualifying it as simply ‘dramaturgical’. However, to qualify the relationship between the academic and the artist in this context, I settle for the term ‘coalition’ and ‘alliance’ drawn from Dorinne Kondo’s own considerations of the ‘politics of affiliation’ (2018).

Biography

Dr Duška Radosavljević is a dramaturg and Professorial Research Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Her books include Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age (2023), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (2016), The Mums and Babies’ Ensemble: A Manual (2015), The Contemporary Ensemble (20130 and Theatre-Making (2013). Her research website www.auralia.space has received the 2022 Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy and the 2022 ATHE-ASTR Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award.

Rodia Vomvolou

A purple, pink, rose, fluffy octopus: The adventures of a dramaturg-researcher

My contribution proposes a set of task-based dramaturgical structures, which explore academic research in relationship to dramaturgical practices. How can I transform my non-artistic PhD research on dramaturgy into an artistic research of dramaturgy? How can my identities as a practitioner dramaturg and an academic researcher cross-fertilize each other? This lecture performance stems, on the one hand, from my doctorate research in Utrecht University that focuses on unpacking the self-positioning of the dance dramaturg from the domain of the dramaturgical practices/dance studio (micro level), to the ecosystem of the performing arts field (meso), to the larger neoliberal project-based labor market (macro). On the other hand, it stems from my methods of working as a dance dramaturg and a series of residencies I do as dramaturg-in-residence in which I produce artefacts as bi-products of academic research that can stand on their own as autonomous dramaturgical objects. In this studio sharing, I will give an insight view into manifold processes: my dramaturgical practice, the actual content of the PhD research on the positioning of the dance dramaturg and a meta-level of reflection on the process, making visible the labor of a PhD research and transforming it into a creative process through dramaturgical tools. In that sense, dramaturgy becomes a practice of creating frameworks that trigger different kind of processes and responses, interrupting the normative processes of thought and production. This workshare is an exercise on dramaturgical thinking, task-based doing, questioning and playfulness as inherent components of both academic research and dramaturgical work. It explores the different bodies of the dramaturg and the researcher. It tackles assumptions, (re)presentations of research and ways of producing knowledge by using qualities such as the personal, the extra-linguistic and the embodied. It will include formats such as a wall exhibition, audio narration, songs, performative tasks, together with visual material, and creative documentation captured by architect Chryssa Georgiou who is functioning as my outside body/pen during my research residencies.

Biography

Rodia Vomvolou (1993) is a dance dramaturg and researcher based between Amsterdam and Athens. She is doing a PhD research on the self-positioning of the dance dramaturg, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker in Utrecht University. Since 2022, she is also a junior lecturer. Her personal field of interest focuses on dramaturgical practices in the field of contemporary choreography and artistic research in the current sociopolitical context and knowledge economy. As a freelancer dramaturg and mentor, Rodia collaborates with institutions, dance houses and art academies in Europe as well as with independent artists in Greece, Cyprus and the Netherlands. Since 2019 she is the mentor of the Artistic Development Programme “Moving the New” of Dance House Lemesos. Rodia holds an MA in Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy (Cum laude) from Utrecht University and a BA in Drama and Performance Theory, History and Analysis from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Cum Laude).

Tomi Humalisto, Meri Ekola and Nanni Vapaavuori

Does Pasolini perceive fireflies in the balcony of the universe?

“Does Pasolini perceive fireflies on the balcony of the universe?” is a multi-modal lecture performance in which three lighting designers Meri Ekola, Nanni Vapaavuori and Tomi Humalisto reflect on the nature of peripheral VR artwork and the possibility of light artwork to be experienced in a virtual environment. During her residency at Maison du Spectacle La Bellone in Brussels in 2021, Meri Ekola carried out a five-minute video experiment, which has been the basis for the iterative work of the working group since autumn 2022. The work has been hybrid in nature, with Ekola living in Belgium and Vapaavuori and Humalisto in Finland, with meetings taking place on the Zoom.

Since the first viewing experience with VR head-set by Vapaavuori and Humalisto, the working group has returned to view the work over and over again, observing and documenting the cumulative experience that has intertwined with Ekola’s own observations of the making of the work and its aesthetic choices.

Through repeated viewings and discussions, the five-minute work seems to expand not only into a spatial experience but also into a reflection on the boundary between the dark and the visible, the distraction of attention, human embodiment, immaterial embodiment, and the quality of the immediate choices made by the lighting designer.

The title of the performance refers to Pasolini’s metaphorical article “The Disappearance of Fireflies” (1975), whose firefly-like glow at the limits of visibility has been later explored in the writings of historian Georges Didi-Huberman. The play of light, interpretation and virtual experience has led the team to reflect on the rupture between digital and analogy, the dramaturgy of experience, and the rupture and continuity of conventions and perceptions of light design in a different mediated environment.

The audience will be able to try the work with VR head-set after the session.

Link to sample clip of the VR-video material source of this research: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9tk5dnki50zn7bt/short%20capture.mov?dl=0

Biographies

Tomi Humalisto (D.Arts) is Professor in Lighting Design at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy. He has extensive experience in performance design and production responsibilities for various art projects. His current research interests include, in addition to the aesthetics and dramaturgy of lighting design, the artistic and pedagogical possibilities of digital media and digitalisation and issues of ecological sustainability in performance design.

Meri Ekola uses light as her main medium of expression. She is creating installations as well as working in the wide field of performing arts as a lighting designer. She holds a M.A. degree in lighting design from the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Currently she follows emerging media studies where her main interest is to explore digital technologies as a new modality for artistic expression. In the performance context her collaborators come mainly from experimental performance art, music and dance.

In her practice as a lighting designer Nanni Vapaavuori combines installation and performing arts in relation to the space. Her approach to lighting design is both concrete and tactile, working in direct hands-on collaboration with the materials. Nanni invites the surrounding space to participate in the artistic practice of creation. She has been participating in several long lasting projects in Finland and abroad connected to the relationship between the human experience and the surrounding localities. In addition to works for the stage it has also led to several collaborations bringing different forms of dance and theatre performances in museums and galleries. Nanni has received her Master of Arts in Lighting Design at Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Performing Arts Research Centre at Uniarts Helsinki.

Adnan Hadzi

Interdisciplinary Research in European Extended Reality Labs

This paper analyses the use of Immersive Experiences (IX) within artistic research, as an interdisciplinary environment between artistic research, visual pedagogies, social and cognitive sciences. This paper discusses IX in the context of social shared spaces. It presents the European Extended Reality Labs (EXRL) interdisciplinary research. The paper discusses how EXRL combines and integrates three research strands that are part of a major, sustained artistic or scientific focus of the partnering European academic institutions. In those labs researchers, artists, film-makers investigate and create different kinds of IX. EXRL provides the opportunity to situate artistic research in the context of scientific.

1) Original development of the EXRL as being oriented towards practice-based research in Media Arts: Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Media Arts. Through a multi-year development process with the VNLAB at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Filmschool Lodz, the research group has acquired considerable expertise in IX Interactive Media, with a particular focus on surround sound (ambisonics/multichannel surround sound diffusion) and interactivity.

2) Second scenario and field of expertise is established through collaborative work with the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Malta, on Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Cognitive Sciences. For the researchers, the key element is that the subjective experience can be challenged using new technologies and IX media that induce perceptual bodily illusions.

3) Third scenario is the application of techniques, tools, and processes of EXRL in Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Social Sciences, such as Heritage Dissemination activities and finally an outlook on envisaged IX productions within migration studies.

Biography

Dr. Adnan Hadzi is currently working as resident researcher at the University of Malta. Currently Adnan is a participant researcher in the Erasmus XR strategic partnership research collaboration with the Immersive Lab University of Malta project.

Adnan’s documentary film work tracks artist pranksters The Yes Men and net provocatours Bitnik Collective. Bitnik’s practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms, formulating fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues.

SATURDAY, 26 AUGUST 2023

Marcela A. Fuentes

It ends, but not before: Constellative dramaturgies at the end of the world.

In 2019, Chilean protesters and activists publicly and collectively stated their determination to put an end to neoliberalism, a socioeconomic experiment that had started as a national project in their territory. It started here, it ends here, they claimed. They also added that they would not leave the streets until dignity became the status quo, an everyday habit. Both statements – one as finishing line, the other as horizon – are dramaturgical frameworks, ways of knowing and doing launched to sustain the extended temporality of social struggle in the making of structural change. At the edge of the end of the world summoned by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was another end. One performatively wished into making by a myriad of endeavors/actions that connected the dots between centuries of oppression, as in the case of the Mapuche people, and the issues affecting the no-future youth, represented by the kamikazes of the first line, those who confronted the police head-on to protect the right to protest. As a dramaturgical framework, it ends, but not before brings together the micro and macro politics that transitions as transgressions are all about: It is not enough to mark an end without attending to the structures that reside beneath. While transitions and transgressions evoke a notion of linear time (transition to, transgression of), that is, a before and after, this presentation/provocation will offer the concept of performance constellations to think about expanded dramaturgies and research processes that entangle sites, actions, temporalities, affectivities, actors/actants, and media to meditate on “the end” that lingers on and on and on. Artistic research will guide us into understanding what aesthetics – in terms of sensorial and formal composition – affords the project of thinking-doing/doing-thinking about multiplicities and entwinements beyond a shared and progressive time-space at the world’s end.

Biography

Marcela Fuentes is a artist-scholar whose works focus on the role and politics of performance and technology in transnational ways of being and worldmaking. Her book, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (University of Michigan Press, 2019), maps how notions that are central to performance such as embodiment and liveness are redefined in the era of remote copresence. Fuentes uses dramaturgy and choreography as central analytics to understand developing approaches to activism and social change from neozapatismo to transnational feminisms. Fuentes has also worked as a dramaturg for The South Wing in New York and has collaborated with dramaturgs in her productions of Julio Cortázar’s Los Reyes (The Kings) and Leónidas Lamborghini’s Eva Perón en la Hoguera (Eva Peron in the bonfire.) Her lecture performance Sujeto Transnacional (Transnational Subject) uses autoethnographic and documentary methods to address the biopolitics of immigration in the US. This shape-shifting piece has been presented at conferences organized by Performance Studies International and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and in the series My Documents curated by Lola Arias.  

Hanns Holger Rutz

Beyond self and other: Shifting research from automation to endomation

What is the machinic self that exerts a thought or will when put into operation, put into self-sustaining movement? Or speaking from the vantage point of humans that engage with such a machine: Where do we make out the boundary between our externalised self—for instance, as we instructed, programmed, configured the machine—and something proper to the machine perceived as an other? A machine’s spatio-temporal articulation running along our own, but not synchronised to our own, may be the precondition for the emergence of a dedicated algorithmic agency. This presentation proposes that human-machine ensembles become more interesting from an artistic research perspective when conceived as “running along”, rather than investigating them through a diachronic lens where control is yielded from programmer to programmed, or through a synchronic lens where human and machine are coupled through a tight temporal regime. A third position is identified with the notion of simultaneity, meaning that a “time-space” is established that enables and encourages contact, but without implying cause and effect, control and communication. Such a time-space, “within which” the activity of the ensemble unfolds, permits us to obtain a different form of collaborative making and practising.

It is argued, that in order to put ourselves into such movement/thinking/will within an ensemble, that in order to shift from concepts of automation to a concept of endomation, performative practices need to loosen the grip of dramaturgies tied to presence and narration, and they need to experiment with spatial dramaturgies, typified for instance by installation art and sound art. We may then extend this shift from human-machine ensembles to human-human ensembles, where simultaneous circulation-within can likewise overcome the divide between self and other.

Biography

Hanns Holger Rutz is an artist and researcher in the field of sound and digital art, based in Austria. His works in installation, improvisation and music composition span more than two decades, having extended to other digital (image, video) and non-digital media in the past decade. Most of his installations have been created in collaborative contexts, and he has worked in several interdisciplinary projects (e.g. with choreographers, writers, visual and video artists). His primary interests are the materiality of writing processes and the trajectories of aesthetic objects as they move and change across boundaries of individual works and artists. Rutz holds a PhD in Computer Music from Plymouth University, UK. He has worked on various research projects at the University of Music and Performing Art Graz (KUG), AT, including the FWF-funded artistic research project “Algorithms that Matter” (2017–2021). Since 2022, he heads the FWF-funded artistic research project “Simultaneous Arrivals“ (with Nayarí Castillo and Franziska Hederer) on novel forms of collaborative artistic processes. Since 2023, Rutz is Professor for Artistic Research at the Gustav Mahler Private University for Music (GMPU) Klagenfurt, AT, with a focus on sound and intermedia.

Synne Behrndt

Dramaturgy, devising and artistic research

In this presentation I reflect on the relationship between dramaturgy and artistic research with focus on facilitation of methods and process. The starting point is the research project ‘Dramaturgy, devising and artistic research’, a collaboration with colleagues from Stockholm University of the Arts and Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. Now in its final year, the project has generated different strands of investigations, and one strand has been concerned with the recurring argument within the discourse on artistic research that performance processes are by their very nature a form of research in and through action, practice and doing. To make this argument more concrete, and to understand how this may be illuminated, I will focus on devising, a performance-making process where, to use the words of David Williams, the dramaturgy is ‘uncovered, worked and articulated through the process of making and rehearsing’.[i]

In the presentation I will discuss the extent to which devised performances and hence their performance dramaturgies could be viewed as ‘outcomes’ or results of research-based processes. How may we understand research and what is the relationship between dramaturgy and methods? In devising, the process is akin a laboratory scenario where the artist or performance maker finds something out about a given topic whilst simultaneously having to invent potentially innovative strategies, tools or methods with and through which the material is created. It follows that methodological inventiveness is embedded within this approach to performance-making. In the presentation I will therefore reflect on the relationship between process, methods and dramaturgy.

The keynote address includes reflection on the previous days’ presentations within the strand.

[i] David Williams: ‘Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising∗’, CTR 20:2, 2010, pp. 197-202.

Biography

Synne Behrndt is a lecturer, researcher and dramaturg. She has published and presented papers on dramaturgy in professional as well as academic contexts. She is the co-author of the book Dramaturgy and Performance (Palgrave, 2008/2016) and joint editor of the book series ‘New Dramaturgies’. She is currently completing a research project on devising, dramaturgy and artistic research. As a dramaturg, she has worked within devising and dance, most recently with choreographer Milla Koistinen. She is currently Assistant Professor at the department for Performing Arts, University of the Arts, Stockholm.

SHORT FILM SCREENINGS

Lydia Touliatou

Fera Matter (recorded performance, 2023, 23 min. 25 sec.)

Drawing from the mythological narrative of the female character of Atalanta, Lydia is looking to distil transtemporal qualities of female existence through a choreographic exploration that suspends, hangs, glides, grips, levitates, sways (…). The myth of Atalanta is often seen as an allegory for criticising the societal expectations on women, highlighting the difficulty of retaining their self through societal norms. Lydia brings her training in Bharatanatyam into the composition. She specifically employs ‘abhinaya’, a storytelling practice found in classical Indian dance, and explores its potential to be practised and developed in an abstract way, even though it is primarily narrative tool.

Biography

Lydia Touliatou is a Greek choreographer and performer based in Helsinki. Her works dialogue between Bharatanatyam and her western dance training, with themes that derive from mythology, feminism, and history. She is currently experimenting with narrative tools from Bharatanatyam and their potential forms in the context of a contemporary dance stage.
See: https://www.lydiatouliatou.com

Choreography & performance: Lydia Touliatou
Sound design: Alina Ostrogradskaya
Music composition: Oh Jin Yong Derek
Lighting design: Anssi Ruotanen
Spatial design: Aino Kontinen
Costume design: Havina Jäntti
Sculpture: Xiao Zhiyu

Johanna Lecklin

Language is the Key to Everything (2012, HD video, two-channel installation, 12 min. 35 sec.)

The script is based on interviews with Sweden Finnish first and second-generation immigrants in Haninge, Sweden. The character of the young man, a second-generation immigrant, tells a fictionalized story in Swedish. The story is based on questions of identity and language that the interviewees had told. The older woman, a first-generation immigrant, explains the situation that a Finnish immigrant, who didn’t speak any Swedish, tackled in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden. Both the man and the woman participated in an art project about Sweden Finnish people that Johanna Lecklin made for Haninge municipality. The young man himself was one of the interviewees. The piece was first shown at Haninge Art Hall in Haninge Cultural Centre in the autumn 2012, where it was also filmed.

Minority Law (2012, 2 min. 58 sec.)

Three children from the Sweden Finnish minority in Sweden repeat concepts from the Minority Law after their nursery teacher. The piece has been presented as a three-channel video installation on three square shaped video monitors in Haninge Art Hall, Sweden 2012.

Biography

Johanna Lecklin works with moving image, participatory art projects, and photography. In her recent works she explores narrativity and storytelling. She is interested in experimenting on the border of documentary and fiction. She uses archives and recorded interviews in her research for her moving image installations. Her early works are performance videos with a feministic approach, which mimic gestures or habits that reveal power relations. She has also made interviews, video portraits of people. See: https://www.johannalecklin.com

Christy Poinsettia Ma

20211229 dance and film diary @ helsinki (2021, 4 min. 43 sec.)

Dance: Christy Poinsettia Ma
Film: Vincent Ip
Music: Phase 2 by Xylo-Ziko (licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

left the city that has almost lost its name embarked on an indefinite journey crossed 7,822 kilometres, arrived in this far northern winter standing on the empty streets meeting the unique seasonal melancholy so characteristic of the north

Broken Bike (2021, 18 min.)

This short film is based on my personal experience of the isolation and loneliness in the past two years. Difficult to pinpoint the singular cause of these feelings, this film seek to explore these interwoven matters —suicide, pandemic and politics of Hong Kong.

Script and performance – Christy Ma Cinematography and performance – Vincent Ip Music – Blue Digression by David Dellacroce (licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License)
Trigger warning: This piece contains references to suicide, which may be disturbing or traumatising for some people. If you would like to reach out to someone, the Crisis Helpline in Finland can be called on: + 358 9 25250116, or online: https://mieli.fi/en/

Biography

Christy Poinsettia Ma is a Hong Kong-born and raised artist who graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, majoring in Contemporary Dance. Currently she gained a double MA degree in Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research at Uniarts Helsinki and Goethe University Frankfurt. With a passion for exploring the nuances and features of different artistic mediums, Christy’s works incorporate various disciplines, including theatre, dance, aerial bungee dance, moving images and installations. Her works have been staged in Helsinki, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, China, and Malaysia, showcasing her ability to create thought-provoking works that delve into the complexities of the human experience. See: https://www.christypoinsettiama.com

Annette Arlander

Day with a Bog Birch (2020, 20 min.)

Day with a Bog Birch (with text) was recorded on 23 September 2020 with a birch near Mustarinda house in Hyrynsalmi every hour from sunrise to sunset (7 am to 7 pm). The texts were written after each session and recorded the following day.

Performance, text, camera, and editing by Annette Arlander.

The work was made as part of the project “Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees” https://www.uniarts.fi/en/projects/meetings-with-remarkable-and-unremarkable-trees/

The text in the video is included in a short essay “Day with a Bog Birch – Vegetalising” https://pinp2021.aalto.fi/essays-visual-essays/

The various performances recorded with the same birch are archived on the Research Catalogue https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/761326/999357

Biography

Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. Former professor at University of the Arts Helsinki and Stockholm University of the Arts. At present she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment. Her artwork moves between the traditions of performance art, video art and environmental art. See: https://annettearlander.com

Toisissa Tiloissa/Other Spaces

The Angle of Water 104.5 (excerpt) (2022, 8-part video work)

The video series in 8 episodes invites spectators to try out different manifestations of water, and to approach the particularities of water as a chemical substance through bodily exercises. Through the video series, Other Spaces places the investigation of the manifestations of water into a wider context. Of the molecules in a human body, 99% are water molecules. Through the cycle of water, we are connected to the origins of water and the Earth, as well as to the oceans, lakes, rivers and glaciers of the Earth.

To watch all eight episodes, see: https://vimeopro.com/user151025373/angleofwater

Concept: Timo Jokitalo, Minja Mertanen and Sanni Priha
Script: Timo Jokitalo & Minja Mertanen and Eeva Kemppi, Kati Korosuo and Heli Mäkinen
Physical exercises: Other Spaces Collective
Directing, editing and sound recording: Sanni Priha
Cinematography: Jaakko Ruuska
Sound design: Jarkko Kela
Music: Antti Halonen
Graphic design: Johanna Etelävirta
Web technology: Timo Jokitalo
Stills: Jenni Kokkomäki
Production: Jenni Kokkomäki & Hanna Romo
Performers: Antti Halonen, Timo Jokitalo, Eeva Kemppi, Esa Kirkkopelto, Kati Korosuo, Mikko Lehtonen, Kaisa-Liisa Logrén, Minja Mertanen, Heli Mäkinen, Maarit Myllynen

PART 6: H2O (10 min. 17 sec.)

Performers: Timo Jokitalo, Kati Korosuo, Minja Mertanen, Antti Halonen, Eeva Kemppi, Esa Kirkkopelto, Mikko Lehtonen, Kaisa-Liisa Logrén,Heli Mäkinen and Maarit Myllynen
Animation: Canadian Museum of Nature

The production has been supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and the City of Helsinki.

Tomi Paijo

Peili – elämäni kuusi kuvajaista / The Mirror – Six Reflections of My Life (2022, 17 min.)

Director & AV designer: Tomi Paijo
Choreographer: Hanna Pajala-Assefa
Dancer: Karoliina Kauhanen
Dramaturg: Maria Lindeman
Cinematographers: Mika Tertsunen, Antti Tuunanen
Costumer: Taina Niemi
Production coordinator: Mari Jormanainen
Producer: Seija Aunila

The Mirror is a live dance installation, based on chosen photographs from the performer’s life. Having had its premiere at Kiasma Theatre, this media performance seamlessly blends dance and advanced technology. The dancer’s real-time movements are transformed into mesmerizing visual narratives, complemented by a reactive soundscape. Memories, embodied in movements, are revitalized through holographic projections, crafting an immersive virtual setting. This recording by YLE offers a glimpse of a possible future symbiosis between performing art and technology.

Biography

Tomi Paijo is a digital artist immersed in interactive installations and complex media pieces. Drawing from media and game technologies, he uses performing arts to explore human-technology interactions. His works combine digital realms with tactile experiences, constantly redefining artistic engagement.