EDUARDO ABRANTES: TIME TO SPARE AND DARE - AN INQUIRY ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TEMPORAL DYNAMICS IN ARTISTIC RESEARCH
Artistic research requires time. More than that, it requires a certain malleability of time – it requires time to waste.
Short intervals in the daily tasks counting just few minutes, reclusive three month long residencies, digitally assisted multi-tasking while commuting or watching tv, periods of indefinite delay and wait, periods of manic production – all these different uses and experiences of time constitute a phenomenological horizon in artistic research.
They elaborate on the ancient dichotomy of the aesthetically driven endeavour – turning work into leisure and leisure into work in the context of some of its basic questions: is art necessary or superfluous? Can the aesthetical cross over into the ethical? Can an art form become a life form – something one radically invests his finitude on, meaning, his very own time span?
This paper seeks to investigate the way a certain fringe phenomenological approach, mainly departing from the notion of “crisis” as presented by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and the notion of the “fold” and “micro rhythms” developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, can cast a new light into the temporal dynamics at play in artistic research.
As a concluding case-study I present my own ongoing PhD research on the phenomenology of the acoustics of the human voice, and the way that my inquiry into phenomena such as vocal expression, inner speech and listening have contributed to an expansion in my consideration of the role of time and sound in the context of the interdisciplinary between philosophy and performance.
Eduardo Abrantes (Lisbon, b.1979) graduated in Philosophy/Film Studies at the New University of Lisbon. He concluded the Gulbenkian_Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin directing course in 2007, and he is working on his PhD in the fields of Philosophy and Film in the context of phenomenology of sound and acoustic presence.
LUDIVINE ALLEGUE: FROM MATTER TO BREATH
This paper will present some aspects of my recent collaboration with vocal artist Yvon Bonenfant as well as the transmission of this experience to undergraduate students. I will particularly approach two works: B(earth) that was partly created during a two months residency at the National School of Arts at Aubusson-France (French Ministere de la Culture) and Beacons, a video art work that will be screened within this presentation.
These works, that investigate the dialogue between visual and vocal textures and how they can embody each other, opened inner spaces for artistic experimentation that restored me to traditional painting practices, but also inflected life choices directly linked to my painting and human experience.
Dr Ludivine ALLEGUE
Visual artist
External researcher at the Institut d`Esthétique des Arts et Technologies
UMR 8153: CNRS/ Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Allegue`s painted and video pieces explore the nature and constitution of both individuality and conscience across visual arts, music and performance.
She worked for several years with sculptor Jaume Plensa. Her recent collaborators are Shahrokh Moshkin Ghalam (Theâtre National de la Comédie Française, Paris), British choreographer Rosemary Lee, Canadian vocal artist Yvon Bonenfant and Slovak composer Julius Fujak.
Her essays on art have been published internationally (l`Harmattan in France, Palgrave and Intellect in UK among other publishers).
RICHARD ALLEN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEATRETICAL OBJECTS
This paper will consider the practical and theoretical dynamics of a practice based PhD in performance through a selection of the objects that populate it. Often considered as passive participants in the theatre machine, objects tend to be read as inactive supporters of the evolving action. By thinking through objects as material triggers to specific moments of practice I will consider the personal relationship I have built around certain objects that I have utilised in my work and how, as weighty participants, they have taken on an agency within it
Richard Allen is based in Aberystwyth (Wales, UK) making devised object performance installation. As well as his individual practice he is a founding member of Showroom, an artist collective who curate and create live art and performance events. He is Research Assistant to Professor Adrian Kear at the Department Of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University (Wales, UK) where he is undertaking a PhD in Performance Practice under the supervision of Professor Mike Pearson
www.richobject.wordpress.com
ANNA ALLGULIN: RESEARCHING CHANGES
EEVA ANTTILA: ART, AESTHETIC QUALITIES, AND UNDERSTANDIG THE HUMAN CONDITION
During this presentation, I will discuss how the notion of artistic research may change the way we approach other human beings as researchers, and also, how we interpret social life. Paying attention and being sensitive to aesthetic qualities inherent in human interaction gives us qualitatively different information and understanding about the complexities of social life than traditional approaches. I will also discuss how these qualities may bring about a change towards a more communal, inclusive and ethically sensitive research methodologies, and how participating in artistic research may bring about learning and change within communities.
Eeva Anttila works as professor in dance pedagogy at the Department of dance and theatre pedagogy of the Theatre Academy. Her research interests include embodied learning, somatic approaches in dance pedagogy, dialogical and critical pedagogy. She has published widely in international and national journals and edited books, and is actively involved in international arts education and dance research organizations and networks.
CAMILLA DAMKJAER, SUSANNE RAVN & LEENA ROUHIAINEN: APPROACHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN DANCE AND CIRCUS: THE CHALLENGE OF 1ST PERSON METHODOLOGIES
In dance research, it is not uncommon that dance practitioners themselves gravitate into scholarly exploration of their professional practice. In so doing, they often search for means to allow for subjective experience, embodied knowledge, participatory and collaborative practical knowledge to infiltrate the exploration and to permeate the linguistic articulation of their investigations. A challenge in this practice-based approach is the dual role of the practitioner as researcher and its collaborative features. Not surprisingly there is an increasingly active discussion on phenomenology, ethnography and artistic research in the field of the performing arts. However, general methodological guidelines are still scarce and scattered. And - in addition, the nature, meaning and implications of 1st person approaches to artistic research continue to be unexplored. The presenters believe that 1st person methodologies open an avenue for allowing singular experiential material find articulation, which both has the potential to offer different understandings of the world and to shed new light on theoretical complexities between discursive practices and multiplicities of (subjective) experience.
The focal question to be presented in this paper/roundtable discussion is therefore: how to embrace the embodied knowledge of the artist or artistic practitioner in a manner that accounts for subjective thought and action inclusive of collaborative and contextual settings but also finds a more generalized articulation that has value for the discursive practices in dance and circus as well as other fields that investigate embodiment? The presenters are all artist-pedagogues in the field of dance and circus arts and have probed into the problems of how to address lived experience and be inclusive of artistic practice in their scholarly work. (e.g. Rouhiainen, 2003; Damkjær, 2005; Ravn, 2008) They will discuss the suggested issue by bringing together their insights and experiences and introducing their incipient collaborative project in artistic research.
Damkjaer, Camilla, 2005: The Aesthetics of Movement – Variations on Gilles Deleuze and Merce Cunningham, Theatron-serien, Stiftelsen för utgivning av teatervetenskapliga studier.
Ravn, Susanne, 2008: Sensing Movement, Living Spaces – An investigation of movement based on the lived experience of 13 professional dancers. The Institute of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark.
Rouhiainen, Leena, 2003: Living Transformative Lives: Finnish Freelance Dance Artists Brought into Dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology. Acta Scenica 13. Helsinki, Theatre Academy.
Camilla Damkjaer, Ph.D., research fellow at the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, Stockholm University. Received her Ph.D. withthe thesis /The Aesthetics of Movement - Variations on Merce Cunningham
and Gilles Deleuze/. Current field of research: contemporary circus.
Susanne Ravn, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Has published more books considering dance and learning. Received her Ph.D. with the thesis ‘Sensing Movement, Living Spaces’ in 2008. Current field of research: our sensing in (and of) movement; practice based research and apprenticeship learning in dance and martial arts.
Associate professor in dance and physical education (Norges Idrettshøgskole, Oslo) Leena Rouhiainen (MA in Dance Performance 1995 and Doctor of Arts in Dance 2003, Theatre Academy of Finland; MA in Somatic Studies and Labananalysis 2006, University of Surrey) is a dancer-choreographer and dance scholar. Her current research interests are in artistic research, somatics and bodily knowledge.
MICHELE DEL PRETE & MARCO GASPERINI: RESEARCH_RECHANGE
Feedback has a double nature: it is the transformation of something due to the addition of new elements (external feedback), and the growth of something because of its own reflection (internal feedback). These are the two sides of artistic research. We propose an electroacustic experiment on feedback:
a) the Colloquium will serve as acustic material. Musician A will make tape (1.a);
b) musician B will use tape (1.a) togheter with new recorded material to make tape (1.b);
c) musician A will use (1.b)+live source to create tape (2.a) etc…
At the end of the Colloquium a presentation of the results and a description of the processes will be given.
Michele Del Prete has studied Philosophy in Torino, Leiden, Utrecht; Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, Diploma in Composition and New Technologies at the Conservatory B. Marcello, Venezia. Conferences/ performances in Berlin, Roma, Paris, Cambridge (UK), Darmstadt, Mannheim, Jerusalem, Venezia, Pordenone, Roma, Milano, Fiesole, at Harvard University etc. Researcher at the Conservatorio G. Cantelli, Novara, Italy.
Marco Gasperini: Diplomas in Guitar and Electronic Music from the Conservatory B. Marcello, Venice. Masterclasses with Di Scipio, Dashow, Richard. He has worked with C. Di Pirro (Il tempo sospeso, Padova, 2007– Biennale Musica 2008) and R. Teitelbaum (San Francisco electronic music festival 2008). With Federico Costanza and Alessio Rossato he created (2007) M.A.S., an improvisation/electronic music group. He is now involved in the electroacustic project Laboratorio Arazzi (Venice, Fondazione Cini at San Giorgio).
EUNICE GONÇALVES DUARTE: “PERFORMING IN (THE) TECHNOLOGY: CONSIDERATION ON THE USE OF RESEARCH IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE”
Being theater a medium that, since its beginnings, used technology to communicate with its audience, how can one perceive the use of digital technology in the field of performance? Is it merely an ornamental element? An element of innovation? Does digital performance even make sense as a concept? And above all, how can digital performance be related to research, either artistically or academically?
Digital performance often evokes political issues, and is claimed as something that goes beyond the established boundaries of art, media and culture. Or, in other occasions, is stated as a way for the performer to create something “new”. On one hand, we may say that research methods are centered on the experimentation with technological devices, but, on the other, serve also as a quest for the “uniqueness” in each piece.
This paper presents two different research approaches on digital performance: the “low tech guerrilla” aesthetic developed by Igor Stromajer and the high tech performance in .txt, developed by Fernando Galrito, Fernando Nabais and Stephan Jürgens.
Eunice Gonçalves Duarte is a Portuguese stage director and performer. She has a BA in Communication and Culture Sciences and a MA in Contemporary Drama Studies in the University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland). Besides her artistic work, is a lecturer in Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias and Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação (Lisbon, Portugal).
Since 2003, she does research on digital media in theater and in performance.
KIRSI HEIMONEN: LOST IN A STRANGE LAND
I will present the ways in which my research has led me to darkness and discoveries. To give in to the unpredictability in artistic research has guided to unknown places that are different and the same, strange and familiar, there and here.
Writing and dancing are alive side by side; dancing turns some of the written material of my research into flesh. Thus a short film, “Routes from here to here”, was born in the midst of research and it will be shown. A dance film gives feedback of the dark pathways, and the only possibility is to accept and appreciate non-knowledge that belongs to the nature of artistic research.
Dance artist Kirsi Heimonen (Master of Arts in Dance studies, Laban Centre, London) is currently completing her PhD dissertation at the Theatre Academy of Finland. Her research focuses on bodily experiences in dancing.
PATRICIA HUION, GEERT KESTENS, CLAIRE SWYZEN, SILVIA VAN AKEN, ROSANNE VAN KLAVEREN & JAN DE VUYST: PLAUSIBLE IN ALL LIKELIHOOD
The Institute for Practice-based Research in the Arts of the K.U.Leuven Association (Belgium) aims at developing research projects in the arts by providing support to artists, by setting up projects, and by initiating doctorates. We will present two spearheads of our research in performing arts:
1) ‘Research by Narrative’ – Research Group Scheherazade - Media & Design Academy Genk (Belgium)
In three doctoral projects, the artistic researchers of Scheherazade focus on how narratives can generate ‘new knowledge’; how artists can create, tell and conceal lies; how their narratives can uncover and transform untold stories; which new and sometimes complex plot structures emerge in these narrative contexts; and how we can monitor the effects of these new plot structures on the changed interaction between the audience and the story-teller. Combining narrative inquiry and performance ethnographic research, they experiment with the creation of new/better narratives.
2) ‘Between verity and veracity’ – Research Group Drama – Lemmensinstituut Leuven (Belgium)
Oral sources can be used successfully as basic material for a theatre project. They combine personal truth and shared imagination. This artistic research aims at mapping how oral sources can be collected and transformed into autonomous theatre. It explores less obvious narrative structures to transform the voice of the oral source. A key question is how narrative structures and concepts determine our view of the portrayed.
The presentation will be made by:
Drs. Silvia van Aken (Research Group Scheherazade), researcher narratives, teaches at Media & Design Academy, Genk (Belgium), Limburg Catholic University College;
Drs. Patricia Huion (Research Group Scheherazade), researcher literature, philosophy and performance ethnography, teaches at Media & Design Academy, Genk (Belgium), Limburg Catholic University College;
Mr. Geert Kestens (Research Group Drama), philologist, teaches at Lemmensinstituut, Leuven (Belgium), University College for Sciences and Arts;
Drs. Rosanne van Klaveren (Research Group Scheherazade), media artist and researcher new ways of storytelling, teaches at Media & Design Academy, Genk (Belgium), Limburg Catholic University College;
Mrs. Claire Swyzen (Research Group Drama), research dramaturgist and philologist at Lemmensinstituut, Leuven (Belgium), University College for Sciences and Arts;
Dr. Jan De Vuyst, educationalist, Institute for Practice-based Research in the Arts of the K.U.Leuven (Belgium).
PAULIINA HULKKO & SOILE LAHDENPERÄ: BODY SPEAKS – BODY LISTENS
In this workshop we examine the relations between the perception, speech and embodiment.
We invite you to experiment with your own way of perceiving, speaking of it and sharing it with the others. Furthermore, we explore how the speech of the other touches us and moves us. And finally, we attempt to delineate how this speech could be re-embodied and turned into an artistic means.
Pauliina Hulkko, MA in Theatre and Drama, is a dramaturge and director, as well as pedagogue, who makes performances out of various elements – music, texts, dramatic scenes, sound, light, space. She is presently finishing her artistic doctoral studies at Theatre Academy. In her research, she examines the ways in which her stage is constructed. Her main concerns in the theatre are dramaturgy and performer, at the moment especially in their ethical function.
Soile Lahdenperä, MA in Dance, is a choreographer and Alexander Technique teacher. She is Research Associate at the Theatre Academy of Finland in Helsinki. Her artistic doctoral research is about the use of The Alexander Technique in choreographic process. Her research includes four of her own choreographic works and thesis about those processes. Currently she is working on finishing her studies.
TIINA JALKANEN: RADICALS AND PRINCESSES - EXPERIENCES ON GIRLS` RELATIONS TO GENDER, EMBODIMENT AND PEDAGOGIES
My research will take place in the context of the Girl trilogy - dance performance parts Pink Rebellion 2001, InExit 2003, Point of Power 2005. This dance trilogy took place in the context of Vantaa Dance Institute, which is teaching as the learning organization .
The essence of my research is about experiences on adolescent young girls in relationship to gender, to embodiment and to pedagogy. The core of my research is to create deeper understanding of girlhood as a phenomenon and “as a space of becoming an adult female” (Butler 2006, Sedgwick 1993).My method is phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective (Husserl 2006, Rouhiainen 2003) and multimetodological.
The challenge of dance pedagogy has been to develop pedagogic of today. Dialog with the students has brought some new thoughts and ideas, how to meet students in dance teaching (Buber 1993, Levinas) and understand to embodiment beyond the dichotomy body-mind (Anttila 2008). In Girl trilogy I have been looking for a dialog where themes are taken from the imagination and the contemporary life of girls. My keywords working with girls are female identity, borders of expression and co-operation within a working group. It is a story of a modern girl, who likes to play with femininity but still enjoys being powerful.
Tiina Jalkanen is graduated from the Dance department of the Finnish Theatre Academie (1990). In 90` century she was practicing as a freelancer dancer-choreographer doing solo performances and dancing as a campony member in Finland and Cerman. Since 2000 she been practicing dance with adolescent youngsters, both girls and boys. The focus is in a pedagogical process and a artistic thinking-doing.
"CLOUD COMMITTEE"
A performative cloud installation including two paper presentations and visual material.
Hanna Johansson: John Constable’s Cloud Studies as an artistic research and sky as the performer
My intention in this paper is to study the English landscape painter John Constable’s sky studies made in 1820ties as a process of artistic research. This argument has double consequences: it opens a new perspective for art history as well as broadens the ways we understand the artistic research. So my aim is historical but through the historical reading of Constable’s sky paintings I will handle Constable`s paintings in a new way. I make a counter argument for the positivistic endeavour by applying current materialistic and non-human actor theory to the reading of his cloud studies.
Dr. Hanna Johansson has a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Helsinki.
She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Her main interests have been environmental issues in the post 1960’s art and the input of Continental philosophy in contemporary art. Currently her research focuses on landscape representations, technology and nature in contemporary art and the early 19th century landscape painting as an interlocutor.
Her recent publications include Valkoinen lakana, säällinen enne ja poliittinen merkki. Pilven, ilman ja sateen kuvallisista tehtävistä (2009); Touches of the object: Contemporary Art and Landscape; The Black Mirror and the Peephole – Reverse Narratives in Landscape; Moving, Inscribing, Constructing. Dwelling as building an emptiness. She is an editor of /Hommage à Lauri Anttila/ (2008).
Tuija Kokkonen: Tuija Kokkonen: Acting with weather - the performance and non-human actors
A Performance with an Ocean View -live video: Sini Haapalinna
The underlying question in this presentation is the role of art and artistic research at the age of ecological crises. I will explore, what does it mean if we begin to perceive ”nature”, its beings and phenomena, as agents or actors - and how that perspective can possible change our understanding of the human and the performance. These questions, related to my artistic research ”The potential nature of performance. The relationship to the non-human from the perspective of duration and potentiality.”, are examined in a dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of non-human actors and HT Lehmann’s and Agamben’s writings on potentiality. As a material is discussed A Performance with an Ocean View (and a Dog/for a Dog) – II Memo of Time (2008), which focused on weather, time and potentiality. It explored relationships and connections to weather, and included f.e. A Cloud Committee. The presentation ends with probing the questions of the non-human spectator, exterior of the perfomance and potential exits from the performative society.
Tuija Kokkonen is an artist (a director and a writer, MA) based in Helsinki, Finland, working on a field of live art. Since 1996 she has been doing site-specific series of ”memo performances” as a leader of Maus&Orlovski - a changing working group of artists from various fields – exploring relationships to nature and boundaries of performance as esthetic-ethic-political questions. Her current (2006-) doctoral research project at the Theatre Academy of Finland is titled "The potential nature of performance. The relationship to nonhuman in the performance event from the perspective of duration and potentiality”. The work incorporates new series of performances called Memos of Time.
Sini Haapalinna is a Helsinki based live artist working with space, time, kinaesthetics and technology.
PÄIVI JÄRVIÖ: THE EMBODIED STUDY OF MUSIC - THE EXPERIENCE OF SINGING AS A METHOD AND MATERIAL OF RESEARCH
As a performer of so-called early music I approach my subject, the recitative of Messaggiera (the messenger) in Claudio Monteverdi`s opera Orfeo (1607), from the point of being of a singer, as a singer. With the French phenomenologist Michel Henry I understand that the music, the facts of performing practice and countless other things are continually entering my living body from the world and becoming an organic part of the whole of my living, singing body, sinking into me. Everything I know about this music and about performing it is in me as knowing of a singer, not as knowledge that could be shared by anyone.
The subject of my study is this knowing of my living, singing body. The material of my study is my live experience present in me at all times, not the articulated, re-presented words on experience. The study is an autoethnography as my experience is the only one I have this kind of access to.
A singer understands music - sung or heard - in her body in a particular way: as live movement and silence, as breathing and singing, as leaning onto the body and letting go, as friction and gliding, as being fast and being slow, as being careful and audacious. The embodied study of music means articulating music in a new way, making visible the way music is for the singer and the singular way it is for each and every one.
Mezzosoprano Päivi Järviö specializes in the music of the Baroque and Renaissance. She has performed as a soloist with numerous baroque ensembles and orchestras in Finland as well as abroad. She also coaches singers, choirs, ensembles and conductors.
LEA & PEKKA KANTONEN: VIDEO MEMORIES ALTERED
How does a video document and public presentation of it change the memory of past events? What do we watch and see in video documents?
“When the documented subjects becomes audience, change happens, knowledge happens: you see yourself and you assess and you reassess with the person documenting as well. I´m curious to know what do they (your children) think of your role? And what does she (Tyyni) think of your role? How did that watching change the dynamics? Do you think he should drop the camera and help?”
(A Malaysian art critic in our performance Asking for Advice, Lost Generation Space, Kuala Lumpur, 2005)
In 2005 we started to arrange screenings in which our home videos were watched and discussed. The comments and conversations have been filmed, and added to the next edition as a new generation of the video to be shown to other audiences. We ask the audience permission to film the event for our artistic research purposes.
Lea and Pekka Kantonen:
We are simultaneously working with various projects dealing with similar issues, combining art with fieldwork, teaching, research and political action. In these open ended co-operative projects both mediums and goals are discussed. Exhibitions, screenings and other presentations are reports of the ongoing processes or a means to submit our methods for revision and conversation. We have filmed video diary daily since March 1990.
RIKU KORHONEN
CECILIA LAGERSTRÖM & HELENA KÅGEMARK: TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITY
A performance-lecture which reflects on the identity of the actor within forms of Devising Theatre and the field of Artistic Research. Is the field of Artistic Research transforming set values and traditional identities?
Presenters: Cecilia Lagerström in cooperation with actor and masterstudent Helena Kågemark
Cecilia Lagerström is a theatredirector and researcher. She is working as Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Music and Drama at Gothenburg University and is supervising PhD- and Masterstudents within Theatre/Performing Arts. She has also recently finished a senior researchproject, financed by the Swedish Research Council, within Artistic Research.
Helena Kågemark is a performer with a background in circus (tightrope) and physical theatre. She is presently doing a Master Degree in Theatre at the Academy of Music and Drama at Gothenburg University.
RAY LANGENBACH: "ARTISTIC RESEARCH: DISCURSIVE AUTHENTICITY, POWER, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL"
I will present a work of artistic research carried out over the past few years in Asia. The work raises the issue of authenticity, performative writing as research, and opens a discussion into the politics of artistic research.
Ray Langenbach: Langenbach’s work is at the intersection of visual art and performance. His works have been presented in the United States, Europe and the Asia Pacific. His writings on Southeast Asian performance, propaganda, and visual culture have appeared in Performance Research, Afterimage, Oxford Dictionary of Performance, and several compilations. He co-convened Performance Studies international #10 Conference (Singapore, 2004), Satu Kali International Performance Art Symposium (Kuala Lumpur, 2006), and curated Performance Art at the 2000 Werkleitz Biennial. Langenbach holds professorships in Postgraduate Artistic Research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art, the Finnish Theatre Academy, and the Department of Performance and Media, Sunway University, Malaysia.
KAI LEHIKOINEN: IDENTITIES PERFORMED AND TRANSFORMED: DIALOGICAL CHOREOGRAPHY AS ARTISTIC RESEARCH – INTERTEXTUALITY OF SELF-NARRATIVES
This paper reflects a yearlong artistic research project during which I constructed a solo choreography for dancer Satu Tuittila. Quotations and Printed Images was premiered in an evening of three solos on aging, joy and farewell at the Tehdas Teatteri, Turku, Finland on 24th April 2009.
From a social constructionist perspective, I approached the overarching theme of the evening by focusing on the self-narratives of Tuittila as they emerged in close dialogues between her and me during the choreographic process. More specifically, I experimented with a set of devising methods to see how identity can be constructed and performed as a flow of embodied self-narratives. The process led me to identify and elaborate upon intertextual dimensions of the performed self.
As theories of intertextuality challenge the liberal humanist notion of the self as a coherent and stable whole, in this paper, I analyse the act of tracing intertexts from self-narratives in our choreographic project. Further, I discuss the transformative potential of that practice at the personal level.
Kai Lehikoinen, PhD
Head of Education and Development, Theatre Academy, Education and Development Services, Helsinki, Finland. Previously he has been Vice-Director of IADE at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and Senior Lecturer in Choreography at the University College of Dance, Stockholm, Sweden. He has also been a regional artist at the Arts Council of Southwest Finland. Lehikoinen’s research interests include identity, performance, professional development and arts-based service innovations. His publications include Stepping Queerly? (Peter Lang 2006) and Business Bodies (IADE 2008).
ANNE MAKKONEN: ...NOT AS IT WAS, BUT AS WE RECALL, IMAGINE, PRESENT, INTERPRET, DANCE...
The construction of dance history is both intellectual and physical endeavour and activity. In my lecture-demonstration I share my latest experiments to explore how does dance history exist and how it could exist. My examples are relating to the past of Finnish dance in the 1980s. Dancer Leena Gustavson is with us, at least on the video.
Anne Makkonen Ph.D (University of Surrey) and affiliated researcher at the Theatre Academy. She is devoted to expand the notion of dance history.
ANTTI NYKYRI: VISUAL AND AUDIOVISUAL DOCUMENTATION IN PERFORMING ARTS ARTISTICt RESEARCH - REFLECTION, EVIDENCE AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION
I will approach the title of the presentation as an ongoing question and a challenge to discuss integrating visual and audiovisual documentation as part of artistic research practice, particularly in context of performing arts and sound design. I will use some of the documentation created and used in my artistic doctoral work as a case to discuss its reflective, evidential and knowledge construction related qualities.
Sound designer and doctoral student Antti Nykyri has been working with music and sound compositions in different contexts including contemporary dance, exhibitions, interface research, theatrical plays, band projects, joint conference presentations and other collaborative forms of art and research. His research concentrates on adapting real time expression as an integral part of sound design practice.
ARI POUTIAINEN: FROM INNOVATION TO IRRELEVANCE: CHANGES OF PERCEPTION TO RESEARCH OBJECT WITHIN A PRACTICE-BASED DOCTORAL RESEARCH PROJECT
During the many-sided research process concluded in the doctoral dissertation called "Stringprovisation - A Fingering Stretegy for Jazz Violin Improvisation" my perspective to jazz violin improvisation changed radically. Like common in other practice-based or -led research projects, I also faced challenges in compressing my research results originated in creative work (i.e., an innovative fingering
strategy) into a formal, academic document. At the end, due to conventional academic requirements, the research came to modify the researcher as an artist in various ways and, consequently, to alter the actual research object (i.e., violin fingering technique).
Regarding an artist’s perspective, scholarly customs often lead to communication and actions that may appear irrelevant, inapt, or at least remote to the practice-based research object and content in question. Although it can be argued if all the alterations within my project were beneficial and satisfactory in respect to my artistic expression, the process did considerably advance the creative work per se and was unexpectedly influential in some interesting and rewarding ways.
In this presentation I demonstrate and discuss these particular changes of artistic expression, reflect the status of practice-based research mode within present academia, and share some reflections of relevant, recent literature on the particular research mode. The presentation includes live musical examples performed on violin by the presenter.
Ari Poutiainen, PhD (b. 1972) is a Finnish contemporary jazz violinist and composer. He has performed around Europe, led various small groups and string ensembles, and composed scores for films, dance performances, and theatre plays. He appears on approximately 20 CDs. In his dissertation (June 2009, Sibelius Academy), he presented a jazz violin fingering strategy based on
his wide experience in violin performance and pedagogy.
CECILIA ROOS: ”FROM MOVEMENT THROUGH REFLECTION -BECOMING: THE DANCER AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS”
( Från rörelse ur reflektion i tillblivelse: Dansaren och den skapande processen)
I will present and discuss the research project that we are starting in January 2010. The research will be done by Cecilia Roos and Cecilia Sjöholm.
The research I will pursue encompasses my practicebased investigation in the rehearsal process with a new creation by the choreographer Ina Christel Johannesen. The aim is to, through a practical and a theoretical perspective, approach an understanding and a conceptualisation about the artistic process.
This is to be done through the dancer’s perspective from inside the process (Roos) but also through an outside observer (Sjöholm). These are not deadlocked perspectives, they both contain an interaction between a pre-reflected and a reflected action. My idea is that we through this double motion, and through a continuous dialogue between the participants, will be able to formulate conceptions about embodied knowledge and creativity.
Cecilia Roos was inaugurated professor at the University College of Dance in 1st January 2008. She gives courses on repertoire, interpretation and artistic methods. She started her education at Balettakademin and the University College of Dance in Stockholm. She continued her studies in Paris, New York, London and Rome. She has worked as a dancer and rehearsal director with among others Per Jonsson, Mats Ek, Margaretha Åsberg, Vindhäxor, Cristina Caprioli, Kenneth Kvarnström, Björn Elison, Susanne Jaresand, Reich/Szyber, Birgitta Egerbladh, Tim Rushton, Twyla Tharp, The Royal Ballet in Stockholm, Carte Blanche and Folkoperan.
Cecilia Roos is artistically responsible for the heritage production of Per Jonsson. She has also made film for children and been employed as a dancer and actor at Stockholm’s Stadsteater (The City Theatre of Stockholm) and Dramaten.
She has been honored with several scholarships and distinctions from among others, Konstnärnämnden, Svenska Akademien, Stockholms stad, Carina Ari, Rolf de Maré and Sandrews stiftelse. In the year of 2006 she was the guest of honour at the Dance Biennal in Gothenburg and was later that year rewarded with Swedish Theatre Critic’s Danceprice.
Cecilia Roos teaches regularly at The University College of Dance, The Dramatic Institute and The Royal Swedish Ballet School. In the year of 2005 she wrote her MA thesis about Dance Interpretation, “Dansarens blick – den inre och den yttre” at University of Stockholm, Institution of Theatrical History. She has published a number of articles on the subject.
Cecilia Roos has had a number of commissions of trust in Kulturrådet and Framtidens Kultur. At present she is a member of a working group for stage artists in Konstnärsnämnden.
Cecilia Sjöholm is the researcher and a professor at Södertörns högskola. Ph.D., filosofi, Radboud University of Nijmegen, Holland. - Fil. dr., litteraturvetenskap, Stockholms universitet.- D.E.A., U.F.R de Science des Textes et Documents, Université Paris VII.- Fil. kand., Stockholms universitet. Cecilia Sjöholms forskning rör främst frågor kring gränssnittet mellan litteratur, konst och filosofi, särskilt den fenomenologiska traditionen. Hon är för närvarande projektledare för Making sense of aisthesis; the return of sensibility (finansierat av Östersjöstiftelsen), och deltar även i ett projekt om teknologi och nihilism, lett av Hans Ruin (ÖSS). Hon har deltagit i flera samarbeten kring konst och forskning med konstnärliga högskolor och utvecklar för närvarande ett samarbete med bl.a. Bonniers konsthall. Sjöholm har varit gästprofessor vid bl. a. Köpenhamns universitet, Oslo universitet, University of Minnesota, och DePaul University i Chicago. Hon har också undervisat vid University of Essex.
PER ROAR: AN UNFINISHED STORY – THE DANCING OTHER/DANCING THE OTHER
The presentation will address ethical implications of artistic research based on the experiences from making the performance An Unfinished Story (2006). The performance was a study in the neurology of loss. The specific context was the aftermath of the Bosnian war in former Yugoslavia. The intention behind the performance was to create a rehearsal situation for putting to rest the irretrievable, while faced with the impossibility to translate the enormity experienced in such situations.
The performance resulted from a fieldwork-based and a process-oriented approach to choreography, and made in collaboration with the five performers in the piece, who were coming from Oslo, Belgrade and Sarajevo. The work was made in four stages, and mainly in Belgrade and Sarajevo with its premiere in the latter, and later restaged in Bijeljina, Belgrade and Oslo. A critical process of examination both of the artist’s role and position in the context as well as the actual context itself resulted in a more specific response with regards to the artistic strategy for embodying the situation. Hence, the movement exploration probed into the functions of the vestibular system, or our physical sense of balance, the struggle to maintain in balance & control, and the physical manifestations of strategies for avoiding or escaping intrusive memories, which meant exploring psychosomatic strategies for coping with post-traumatic stress.
The staging went from an installation mode via representation and presentation mode, to extending an invitation to the audience to cross the borders between seeing and doing. Not as a resolution, but as an acknowledgement of our common presence in time and space: There is no other future than the one, which begins here.
The presentation will draw on theory related to trauma theory and Hal Foster’s Return of the Real (1996) while critically reflect on the process of making art based on ethnographical research, questioning how artistic research may change our understanding of the art as such, and hence our existential and political outlook as artists.
Per Roar is a choreographer, who has worked professionally since 1991 when he graduated from the choreography department at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He began by making several productions queering and challenging the notion of intercultural performances and concept of ‘the other’. One of these productions was ‘White Lies / Black Myths’ (1996), which later become the pivotal piece in the doctoral dissertation by Anne Britt Gran, University of Oslo (2000).
An inversion of this exploration of’ the other’ followed in his trilogy ‘ The House of Norway’ (Det norske hus) (1997-2000). Here he explored Norwegian stereotypes and identities with productions like ‘A Christian Lesson’ (1997), ‘From the valley beyond’ (1998) and ‘Shot in the deck chair - The Art of camping’ (2000) . The latter toured caravan sites in Norway as a low-tech interactive camping happening.
Per Roar studied contemporary dance and performance at N.Y.D.I. and at Susan Klein’s School in New York. He received a Fullbright scholarship and earned a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU (1999). His work as an artist rests also on his background from studies in History and Social Sciences at the University of Oslo (Cand Mag) supplemented by graduate studies from Budapest and Oxford University.
Per Roar has received the Norwegian Government fellowship for artists (2000-2003) and became then the first research fellow in choreography at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2003 – 2006). He latest trilogy, ‘Life & Death:’ looked into the realm of grieving and the implications of a contextual understanding of choreography. Issues he is presently addressing in his doctoral studies at TEAK in Helsinki. His next larger project ‘Dyrsku’ (‘Livestock’) is based on remote controlled toy-animals as the main performers. It will take place in 2010.
RASMUS ÖLME: A ChoreoGRAPHIC by-product
The presentation will focus on a specific part in my research concerning alternative ways of presenting choreography. It proposes, through drawing, another outcome from a choreographic assignment than the actual performance of movement. This relates to a research topic that questions the performance as the result of an artistic process, advocating instead a mode of presentation that aims to reveal the process rather then summing it up.
