Performance Studies international #23 / Hamburg, Germany / 8 – 11 June
2017
Excess and Abundance
of Artistic Research
A project of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi
Contributions consist of 1) ten-minute
reports of on-going artistic investigations or artistic research projects,
presented onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online on the Research Catalogue in advance
of the presentation; and 2) thirty-minute project presentations or
participatory workshops, performances or events, conducted onsite in Hamburg
and augmented by material shared online on the Research Catalogue in advance of the event.
Preliminary Program
Preliminary Program
Thursday June 8 at
10-11.30
10-10.20 introduction
and presentation
10.20-10-30 Bruce
Barton 10 min.
10.30-10.45 Matteo Bonfitto 15 min
10.45-11.15 Birgitte
Bauer Nilsen 30 min
11.15-11.25 Beau
Coleman 10 min
11.25-11.30
Friday June 9 at
9-10.30
9-9.10 introduction
and presentation
9.10-9.20 Johanna
Householder 10 min
9.20-9.30 Sarah
Blissett 10 min.
9.30-9.40 Natalie
Garrett Brown 10 min.
9.40-9.50 Katherine
Mezur 10 min.
9.50-10.00 Gry Worre
Hallberg 10 min. (via
Skype)
10-10.30
Anne Robinson 30 min. (walk)
Saturday 10 at 9-10.30
9-9.10 introduction
and welcome
9.10-9.20
Annette Arlander 10 min.
9.20-9.30
Hanna Järvinen 10 min.
9.30-9.40
Pilvi Porkola 10 min.
9.40-9.50
Tero Nauha 10.min
9.50-10.00
Mark Harvey 10 min. (via Skype)
10-10.30 final discussion,
future plansNew members, visitors and all interested are warmly welcome!
The proposal in full is included here below. Please note that changes are possible and probable:
Performance Studies international #23 / Hamburg, Germany / 8 – 11 June
2017
Excess and Abundance
of Artistic Research
A project of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi
Inspired by the announced theme for PSi #23 – “OverFlow” – the Artistic
Research Working Group proposes to build upon but also exceed the ambitious but
contained model of the “Porous Studio,” its established practice over the past
several conferences. An open invitation to PSi member artists and local
practitioners from the shifting conference locations, the Porous Studio has
always been seen as a space of intermixing, contamination, and multiplicity. For
2017 we are overflowing the fixed spatial and temporal zones of PSi #23 through
extended sessions in Hamburg and pre- and post-conference online (and,
potentially, actual) exchange and collaboration via the international Research
Catalogue database (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal).
Artistic Research is meant as an umbrella concept that
includes a range of approaches that use art, creative practice or performance
as a primary means and method of inquiry. These include the distinct approaches
'performance as research' (PaR), 'practice-based research' (PBR), ‘practice-led
research, ‘creative arts research’, 'research-creation', 'arts-based research',
and numerous other associated practices. In many cases, the subject of study is
artistic practice itself, as in 'artistic inquiry’. In others, creative
practice is used as a way of investigating non-artistic (or not exclusively
artistic) subjects. Our aim is to invite a broad spectrum of these approaches,
drawn from within and beyond academic and institutional contexts, to reflect
the diverse and vital overflow of orientations, perspectives, and approaches to
research in contemporary art. Through presentations, performances, articulations
and conversation, we aim to showcase vital examples of this activity
internationally, and to expand our collective horizons through the sharing of
knowledge(s) and experience(s).
Contributions consist of 1) ten-minute
reports of on-going artistic investigations or artistic research projects,
presented onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online in advance
of the presentation; and 2) thirty-minute project presentations or
participatory workshops, performances or events, conducted onsite in Hamburg
and augmented by material shared online in advance of the event.
All contributors will be invited to register on the Research Catalogue
and establish an individual page on the Artistic Research Working Group site
within the database. This will be a closed forum for exchange prior to and
following the conference, and we can explore the option of publishing some
materials after the gathering as a form of public conference proceedings. Members
who will not be able to attend in Hamburg can also submit online presentations
or contributions that will be uploaded on the Research Catalogue and shared
with the other WG members on an on-going basis.
The theme of “OverFlow” will be served by the very diversity of our collected
approaches, but members may also choose to address it directly through some
aspect of their conference participation.
Mark Harvey, University of
Auckland.
In the way (30
min)
‘In the Way’ will be a participatory performance where
participants will explore what it means to continuously 'be in the way' of
other people in the site of the conference context. The notion of over-flow is
interpreted here in terms of spatial stresses on population and urban contexts.
The project aims to ask what can be the thresholds of interruption by being in
the way, either physically or symbolically. It will use G. Deleuze and F
Guattari’s notion of the swarm as an institutional excuse for its behaviors.
This project is also intended to ask in what ways can being in the way generate
conversations about how we see over-flowing?
Bio
Mark Harvey is a New Zealand-based artist mostly
working in performance and video drawing on political, psychological and social
approaches and physical endurance. Some of the galleries related events he has
presented in, include: The 55th Venice Biennale for Visual Arts
(2013), the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (2012), Umeå Art Museum,
(Sweden, 2016), the Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2012), the New Performance Turku
Festival (Finland, 2014 and 2016), Te Uru gallery (Auckland, 2016),
Laznia Contemporary Art Centre (Gdansk, Poland,
2015), Prague Quadrennial (2015), Hitparaden (Copenhagen, 2014),
Te Tuhi Gallery (Auckland, 2012, 2014 and 2016), Window (Auckland, 2008), the
Govett Brewster Art Gallery (Taranaki, NZ, 2006), Gallery ZET (Amsterdam,
2011), Blue Oyster (Dunedin, 2009), Auckland Festival of the Arts (2005 and
2015), Physicsroom Contemporary Artspace (Christchurch, 2002 and
2006), City Gallery (Wellington, 2005), Canary (Auckland,
2005) and Enjoy Gallery (Wellington, 2003). His writing has also been published
in a range of publications such as the UK Performance Research Journal (2006
and 2013) and the South Project (2013). Harvey is a Senior Lecturer at the
Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries at The University of Auckland and has a
PhD from AUT University related practice. He has recently published a book
on a sample of 14 years of his practice titled Play Book (Index Design
and Publishing). Some links:
Natalie Garrett Brown, Coventry University, UK.
Moving &
Mapping; knowing communities through dance practice – reflections on
a interdisciplinary UK funded research project. (10 min.)
Reflecting on the first phase of a 3 year UK funded
research project I will explore how the sensate performance body can
be a conceived as a knowledge generator within the frame of Practice as
Research. Specifically the discussion will focus on the project’s aim to
create, a ‘Manifesto for Change’ co-created with inhabitants of City, town
planers and artists proposing that a corporeal engagement with place and
space can inform and lead city creation for the 21st Century.
Bio
Dr Natalie Garrett Brown, BA, MA, PhD is
Head of School for Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. She is
associate editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits
on the editorial board for, Research in Dance Education and is vice
chair for Dance HE (Standing Conference of Dance in Higher Education).
Natalie undertook her Somatic Movement Educators Training in Body-Mind
Centering with Embody Move Association, UK and is co-convener of the
International Conference for Dance and Somatic Practices, held biannually at
Coventry University. She is also a founding member of enter and inhabit,
a collaborative site responsive project and the Corporeal Knowing Network; an
exchange between theatre and dance artists and scholars interested in embodied
writing practices and processes. Her current research and artistic project
flockOmania, explores collaborative practice across dance, sound, film and the
visual arts.
Matteo Bonfitto, State
University of Campinas, Brazil.
PERFORMING NICHOMACHEAN ETHICS
(Ten-minute report of on-going artistic investigation)
In this artistic project, called “Performing Nichomachean Ethics” I try
to turn the considerations produced in Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, into
actions. In this respect, the question raised by the Greek Philosopher - How should
human beings best live? - functions in this case as a sort of performative
trigger that can generate different kinds of material and narrative layers:
actions performed in real time in different contexts; these actions, once
recorded, produce audio-visual material; and the account of such actions
produce, in turn, written material. Besides the question referred to above,
other aspects which appear in the original text by Aristotle are explored in
this project in order to create a variety of relational dynamics, in which it
is possible not just “to talk about ethics” but also “to talk through ethics”,
that is, “to experience and embody ethics” on different levels.
This proposal is part of a bigger project called “The Philosopher as a
Practical Philosopher” which is partially sponsored by the Brazilian
Government.
Technical Requirements: a Datashow Projector.
Bio
Matteo Bonfitto is an Italian-Brazilian performer, theatre director and
an interdisciplinary researcher. PhD: Royal Holloway University of London,
England. Master: State University of São Paulo, Brazil. Undergraduate:
Università Degli Study di Bologna, Italy. He is one of the founders of the
Artistic Collective PERFORMA TEATRO (www.performateatro.org) and he is
currently teaching at State University of Campinas – Drama Department, in
Brazil. Besides the performances presented in Brazil, Chile, France, England
and Italy, he is the author of various articles and books: The Actor as a
Composer; Between the Actor and the Performer and The Kinetics of the
Invisible. Acting Processes in Peter Brook’s Theatre, the latter recently
published in English by Peter Lang.
Katherine Mezur, University of
California Berkeley, CA.
J-POP Kawaii (Cute): Attraction, Estrangement,
and Addiction in the Super-Saturated Performances of Live and Virtual Girls
In contemporary Japanese popular culture, girl bands and 3D girl idols
dominate the live and virtual stages of urban Japan, global J-POP festivals,
and online performance cultures. They play on the super-cute girl, kawaii shôjo, aesthetics of visual and
kinaesthetic super-saturated sweetness, soft-porn attraction, and untouchable
adorability. Their performances of deafening sound and blinding projections,
matched with driving repetitive gestural choreography, expose how their gush
and glut of sensuous overload, casts their audiences into trance-like patterns
of calls, waves, and sighs. On the most extreme ends of girl performance, the
3D virtual girl vocaloids draw deep devotion from their fans. These kawaii shôjo acts raise questions
concerning overload in the current social and political vacuum. Drawing on
Donna Haraway's cyborgs, Thomas Lamarre's anime machines, and new media
dramaturgy, how do these vocaloid and J-Pop
kawaii shôjo expose a disturbing vacuum and fragility in society? Is this
addiction to overloaded sweetness liberating or suffocating? Is this another
failed future?
Bio
Mezur, Katherine. Lecturer, Departments of English, Comparative
Literature, UC Berkeley; Assoc. Researcher, SF Museum of Performance and
Design. Critical Choreographies and
Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, with Emily Wilcox, (2018), "Stranger Communities: Art Labour and Berliner Butoh." "dumbtype's
Wonder Women: Corporeal Affect and Medial Precarity," (Eckersall and
Fujii, ed.), Beautiful Boys/Outlaw
Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-likeness.
kmezur@sbcglobal.net
Beau Coleman, University of
Alberta.
High Tide (performance)
For the Artist Research Working Group, I propose to do a thirty minute
presentation (w/discussion) of my performance High Tide, in which I will use the Hamburg harbor, site of Festival Theater der Welt as the source
for stimuli; each day absorbing the sites, sounds and vocal fragments located
at the festival. I will then bring these memories back to PSi #23: Overflow and use the mediums of words,
movement, drawing and tracing to create the performance. What sifts through and is left in the space? What
is forgotten?
High Tide can be performed
either as a one-time event or as part of a daily practice, i.e. returning to
the studio each day to create anew and build upon the memories of the last
performance. Ideally for PSi #23: Overflow I would like to present High Tide as a daily performance
practice. If that is not possible, a
one-time presentation will also be effective.
Bio
Beau Coleman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work
has been performed and/or exhibited across North America, Europe and in parts
of Africa, Australia and Asia. She has made works for a diverse range of
locations and contexts, whether they were situated in galleries, theatres,
suspended over rivers or projected onto buildings. Previous creations include
theatre, live art, digital media, site-specific performance, dance, video and
new media installation. Themes of isolation, suspension, intimacy and loss are
interrogated in her work. Recent performances and exhibitions
include High Tide Canada, Let Me
Tell You That I Love You (Distant Islands) (Copenhagen, Denmark, Torshaven,
Faroe Islands & Nuuk, Greenland 2015), Let Me Tell You That I Love You (Nuit Rose, Toronto, 2014), These
Are Not My Mother’s Hands (Trinity Square Video, Toronto 2013) and Clock
Piece (GlougAIR, Month of Performance Art Festival, Berlin, 2012), The Gertrude Stein Project (University
of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada). She is currently working on a series of
performances focusing on the ‘act of forgetting’. Beau received her training at the
National Theatre School of Canada and is a graduate of the Yale School of
Drama. She is on faculty at the University of Alberta where she is the Coordinator
of the MFA Directing Program and specializes in theatre, interdisciplinary
performance and live art.
Birgitte
Bauer-Nilsen, University of Stavanger, Norway.
Siku Aappoq/Melting Ice – a performative intercultural installation in
the meeting between Scandinavian and Greenlandic artists. (30 min)
The focal point is the Greenlandic and Scandinavian
perspectives of the consequences of the melting ice in relation to global
climate change. Bodily experience and knowledge about the climate change have
been leading elements in the process and the investigation to make the
installation.
In the creative process, a cross-artistic dialogue has
taken place. In dance, music and installation and through the physical
presence, we have created a trans-local dialogue. We have worked with shaman's
songs from Greenland, the iceberg related to the Inuit culture and the human
imbalance with the nature and the response from the nature to this imbalance.
The development of the intercultural space – a performance – contributes to
create a frame and articulate a dialogue for a community, a trans-local
temporal space. This means that frames are created during the course of the
process. In other words, the frame changes with the temporary community it
defines and creates new global dialogue. I will address this intercultural
artistic dialogue. Its content is a complex cultural meeting within the
concept, the experience in the dynamic, as well as time and space for the
artist and the audience.
I have collaboration with professor Pam Burnard and
her team from University of Cambridge about performative questions to climate
change and the research in Melting Ice.
Melting Ice; Concept and choreographer: Birgitte
Bauer-Nilsen, Composer and musician: Casten Dahl, Vocal: Aviaja Lumholdt,
Dancers: Thomas Johansen and Alexander Montgomy-Andersen, Installations artist:
Marianne Grønnow, Light design: Jesper Kongshaug.
Bio
Ph.D., associate professor, choreographer Birgitte Bauer-Nilsen has made
intercultural performances in India, Vietnam, China, Tanzania, Greenland and
Europe with her dance ensemble, Yggdrasil Dance. Furthermore Birgitte has given
workshop/lectures at universities in Europe and Asia. Birgitte is an associate
professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. For more information
Yggdrasildance.dk
Anne Robinson,
Middlesex University.
If I Sleep, I May Be Caught
If I sleep, I may yet dream. If we sing,
we may be heard. The sea, always in motion: and voices
fluid. Borders in the sea are an impossibility and we may
overflow them.
Wakeful
is a new, experimental work in progress, which aims to
commemorate peace 100 years on and facilitate participation in discussions
about loss, trauma, war, songs, inter-generational memory and pacifism. In the
international space of PSi at the sea port of Hamburg, I wish to discuss and
get feedback for this work in progress and also engage in a song ritual at the
port.
'If I Sleep, I May be Caught’ was the
motto of a ship named Wakeful on
which my father was ship’s cook,
built on ‘Red Clydeside’ in 1917 and sent off immediately following the WW1Armistice,
to engage the 'Red Navy' in the Gulf of Finland. My
father was traumatized but largely silent about his war experience, apart from
one single, stark memory of Russian sailors in the ice… his revulsion at the
destruction of others resonates now with Tolstoy's work of 1893: The Kingdom of
God is Within You. On Xmas Day 1918 in Tallinn harbor, a concert took place on
board Wakeful. Museum-archived
journals recall sewing sequins on frocks for sailors and music-hall songs.
Amidst cold, hunger and the threat of bombardment, the ship’s crew played and
sang. In the handwritten programme, I found tunes remembered from my father
singing. I can hear them now: resonance in flesh and bone. Leading in to 1918,
I will work with Russian, Estonian and German performers to
explore the effects of cold and trauma on the voice and the percussive sound of
shipbuilding. One hundred years on and our seas are still the site of conflict
and prejudice, still carry refugees through contested waters.
Bio
Anne Robinson’s experimental practice is
concerned with the perception and politics of time passing: duration, frame,
exposure, sound and movement. She holds a practice-led PhD on temporality and
art. Recent projects include: Inspiral London: a walking project on occupying
urban space, Inside Out Blues for ‘Capital of Culture’ Marseilles, Thrashing in
the Static in Pool at CGP London, Deptford X and Folkestone. Ghost On the Wire
a Bermonsdsey Project Space and Objectifs, Singapore. She has participated in
PSi since 2012, presenting: Enlarger Than Life: Song-Films and Irrational
Gestures at PSi20 Shanghai and Phonogenie for PSi21 Fluid Sounds, Copenhagen
with an audio paper for Seismograf journal. Recent publications include: See
Red (Four Corners Books, 2016). She is currently Programme Leader for Media
Foundation at Middlesex University.
www.annerobinsonartwork.org
Gry Worre
Hallberg, independent artist.
Sensuous Learning and The Poetic Self
Sisters Academy, Radical Live Intervention into the
Educational System. Sisters Academy is a performance experiment in search
of a society and educational system that values the sensuous and the poetic – A
1:1 experimentation of the school in a potential future world that we term
Sensuous Society. When we manifest we take over the actual leadership of a
series of upper secondary schools, which we transform completely through
immersive and interventionist strategies. We work from a
performance-methodology of developing a ‘poetic self’. The poetic self is not a
character, it is not a fiction; we define it as our inherent poetic potential
that we might not unfold in our everyday life but that we discover, give an
image and donate our flesh to. By doing so we experience an expanding spectrum
of possibilities, new spaces in which we can be. We don’t change; we liberate
new potential; we expand – Overflow, perhaps...
Bio
Gry Worre Hallberg operate in the intersection of performance art,
research, activism and future studies continuously executed in 1:1 co-created
experiments such as Sisters
Academy, Dome
of Visions, and In100Y. Currently work
on the project The
Sensuous Society: Beyond economic rationality – Suggesting a sensuous mode
of being in the world. For many years she has aimed at enriching environments
with an aesthetic dimension through interventionist, interactive and immersive
performance art strategies. Gry is the co-founder of a range of organizations
and movements within the field of performance art applied in a series of
different everyday-life contexts, among them Sisters Hope (ongoing project: Sisters Academy), House of Futures, Fiction Pimps, Club de la
Faye, Staging
Transitions and The Poetic Revolution.
Gry is a member of the global, urban network Theatrum Mundi initiated
by prof. and urbanist Richard Sennett (NYU and LSE) and have completed several
projects, articles and publications on intervening and relational performance
art and new societies. Also see here.
Gry is currently conducting a practice-based PhD at the University of
Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Culture, Theatre- and Performance Studies, and is an
external lecturer at Performance
Design at Roskilde University. She carries a MA in Theatre- and Performance
Studies from The University of Copenhagen and Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro.
Gry is also curating the performance-art program at the Roskilde festival and is the artistic director of the Dome of Visions.
Sarah Blissett, University of Roehampton, UK:
Tidal Tea
A performative food-based sharing, joining together a range of
ingredients, human and nonhuman, through the pouring and eating of seaweed
broth. An invitation to taste the ocean and reflect on ecological
narratives around human consumption, marine ecosystem collapse and the role we
play in these processes. This 10-minute sharing is part of my PhD research,
investigating Food and Ecology in Performance, focusing on interspecies
connections through food webs and exploring algae organisms in performance.
Bio
Sarah Blissett is an Artist/Researcher and Performance Studies PhD
candidate at University of Roehampton. Her PhD research investigates Food and
Ecology in Performance, through a study of algae organisms and ecosystems,
engaging with posthuman notions of performativity, intra-activity and
transdisciplinary performance practice. blissets@roehampton.ac.uk|http://sarahblissett.wix.com/work
Ray Langenbach, University of the Arts Helsinki
Performance Paper: Hyper-connecting the Mnemosyne Atlas
Between 1927 – 1929, Aby M. Warburg
developed his Mnemosyne Atlas in his circular library in Hamburg. The Atlas
included around 2000 images, which were mounted on black cloth-covered boards
in “visual clusters” based on the associative affinities between specific
iconic art works and nodes of visual culture, substantially presented without
the intervention of the spoken word. Warburg was interested in visual and
historical contiguities, cultural continuities/discontinuities: the
hyper-connective tissues of sensibility cohering cultures, signs, images.
Warburg’s work was picked up in a different register by the idiosyncratic
late-structuralist Russian Jewish historian Leo Bronstein in his Fragments
of Art, Metaphysics and Life, and other works. All of Bronstein’s
works maintain a thread of archaeological performativity strongly evident in
Warburg’s Atlas. A reading will be presented of the psychotropic
excesses of consciousness in Bronstein’s Fragments and Warburg's Atlas,
as part of a broader consideration of the immersive cognitive complements of
order-disintegration, memory-dementia-dismemberment.
(This paper may be presented in either
in either a 30-minute or 15 minute form.)
Bio
Dr. Ray Langenbach, professor of performance art and theory, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy and Star Foundation Professor, Faculty of Creative Industries, Tunku Abdul Rahman University, Malaysia, a performance artist, event convener and scholar who is dividing his time between practice and theory in Finland and Malaysia. He served as Co-convener of the Asian Performance Research Workshop in Penang (2003), and the Performance Studies international Conference in Singapore (2004). He has curated several other Performance Art festivals and Biennales in Asia and Europe.
Dr. Ray Langenbach, professor of performance art and theory, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy and Star Foundation Professor, Faculty of Creative Industries, Tunku Abdul Rahman University, Malaysia, a performance artist, event convener and scholar who is dividing his time between practice and theory in Finland and Malaysia. He served as Co-convener of the Asian Performance Research Workshop in Penang (2003), and the Performance Studies international Conference in Singapore (2004). He has curated several other Performance Art festivals and Biennales in Asia and Europe.
Hanna Järvinen, University of
the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy.
Excess and
Abundance in Documentation
I will present on a 2015-2016 choreographic research project based on archival
materials – documents of not only a past performance but of plans for a past
performance, documents describing a performance prior to its first performance.
This performance about the re-performance of a past performance disturbs the
chronology of what was first, event or its documentation, and questions how we
define documentation and its role vis à vis performance. Although the archive
is usually seen as insufficient for any re-creation of a past performance, in
the process of re-imagining what might have been, the collaborators in this
project found that even the few traces that remain create an over-abundance of
possibilities. At the same time, creating a new performance of a performance
about a performance inverts the relationship of document and performance asking
what is the significance of past performance and documentation in the present
and what is the role of the absences and silences in allowing for
epistemological inquiry about performance, documents, and re-performance?
Bio
Dr Hanna Järvinen is a Senior Researcher in the Academy of Finland
research project How to Do Things with Performance? 2016-2020 and a University
Lecturer at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the University of the Arts
Helsinki, Finland. She holds the title of Docent in dance history at the
University of Turku and is the author of Dancing
Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) as well as articles in journals such as Senses and Society, Dance Research, and Dance
Research Journal.
Pilvi Porkola, University of
the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy.
Performance and
Institutions
This presentation explores how the performative turn can be understood
in the context of public institutions: in a library, an elementary school, and
an art museum. I am interested in what kind of performing, performances, and
actions these institutions produce; how institutions can be understood as
experimental places; and what performance art can do in that context. In this
presentation I focus on my project Library
Essays, a series of audio performances taking place at the Maunula Library,
Helsinki, in 2016-17, and on questions of public and liminal spaces in real and
imagined places.
Bio
Pilvi Porkola has a Doctor of Art (theatre and drama) and is a
performance artist, writer and the founder of magazine Esitys. Among other things she has taught performance, contemporary
theatre and performance studies as well as written and directed several
performances and short films.
Tero Nauha, Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Thought of
Performance
This presentation connects with schizoanalysis and posthuman philosophy.
My aim is to investigate the non-philosophical reading of ‘the decision’ in
relation to performance art practice and political theory. The decision is a
gesture of thought, which cuts matter through analysis, reduction, and
withdrawal. Through decisional devices jurisprudence and philosophy allocate
meaning for the exception: a victim, refugee, migrant, etc. In short, a crisis
is a decisional operation. The presentation focuses on 1) how a decisional cut
produces an event and 2) how performance as a practice may produce excess and
exception.
Bio
Tero Nauha, performance artist and visual artist, holds a Doctor of
Art (theatre and drama). Nauha’s doctoral dissertation at the Theatre
Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki took a critical look at the
relationship between artistic work and immanent capitalism. Nauha’s artistic
work has been performed at several theatres and festivals both in Finland and
around Europe.
Bruce Barton, University of Calgary.
Excessively
Intimate / Intimate Excess: The Trace That
Remains (and Doesn’t)
Trace (2014) was a
ghost telling, a highly intimate exchange between 2 performers and a small
group of audience participants (10 – 40), a structured sharing of
sensory-triggered memories that engaged each audience member individually,
leading to an always unique and thoroughly collective narrative experience. Trace (2017) will share many of the same
characteristics as its 2014 counterpart—with the critical difference that it
will be performed to/for/with up to 125 audience participants in an
international festival context. My company, Vertical City, is currently
attempting to reimagine the 2014 understanding of the performance for 2 or 3
times as many people without sacrificing the highly individualized orientation
of the original configuration. As one of the performers has framed it, “We have
to learn how to fall in love with 125 people at once.” My presentation will
introduce the strategies employed in the original production and explore how
these are being modified, expanded, and reinvented to embrace the production’s
current mandate.
Bio
Bruce Barton is a
creator/scholar whose practice-based research and teaching focuses on physical
dramaturgies in devised, immersive and intermedial performance. He has
published in a wide range of scholarly and practical periodicals, including Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Journal,
and Theatre Topics, as well as
numerous national and international essay collections. His book publications
include At the Intersection Between Art
and Research (2010), and Collective
Creation, Collaboration and Devising (2008). Bruce is also an award-winning
playmaker who works extensively as a director, writer and dramaturg with many
of Canada’s most accomplished physical performance companies. He is the
Artistic Director of Vertical City, an interdisciplinary performance hub
located in Calgary. In January 2015, Bruce became the first Director of the new
School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. For a full
bio see http://brucewbarton.com/about-3/. For information
about Vertical City, see http://brucewbarton.com/vertical-city/.
Johanna Householder, OCAD University, Toronto.
Live Streaming
Taking into account the ubiquity of live streaming
attempts (if not successes), this performance-studio-action-interaction will
encourage a reconsideration of screen space through small performance gestures.
Bio
Johanna Householder works through performance, dance,
feminist theatre (The Clichettes), video and intermedia art. Her interest in
how ideas move through bodies has led her largely collaborative practice. She
recently performed at Performancear o Morir in Chihuahua,
at undisclosed territory in Java, at M:ST in Calgary, AB and
reset her 1978 solo on dancers at Toronto Dance Theatre and the Art Gallery of
Ontario (AGO). She is a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of
Performance Art which held its 11th biennial in October. She has two books
edited in collaboration with Tanya Mars: Caught in the Act: an anthology of
performance art by Canadian women (2005); and More Caught in the Act: an
anthology of performance art by Canadian women; Artexte, Montréal /
YYZBooks (2016) and with Selma Odom contributed to Renegade Bodies: Canadian
Dance in the 1970s (2012). She is a Professor at OCAD University.
Annette Arlander, University of the Arts Helsinki,
Academy of Fine Arts.
How to do things
with performance – Performing with plants (first attempts)
To perform and co-operate with plants and especially trees is an artistic
research project, which develops and specifies the question How to perform
landscape today?, a question I have worked with in various forms during several
years. The question is not rhetorical; our relationship to the environment has
dramatically changed due to global warming and other more or less manmade
disasters, and demands new approaches. A
posthumanist perspective prompts us to rethink the notion landscape and to
consider how the surrounding world consists of creatures, life forms and material
phenomena with varying degrees of volition, needs and agency. What forms of
performing, realizing or activating landscape could be relevant in this
situation? One possibility is to approach individual elements in a landscape,
such as specific trees, and explore what can be done together with them, for
instance how to perform for camera together. This presentation will briefly
describe my first attempts within this project, look at the role of repetition
as a key strategy in performance, and demonstrate how the simplest digital
documentation produces an overflow of material over time.
Bio
Annette Arlander is an artist,
researcher and a pedagogue. She is one of the pioneers of Finnish performance
art and a trailblazer of artistic research. She is educated as theatre
director, Master of Arts and Doctor of Art (theatre and drama). She was
professor of performance art and theory (2001-2013) at the University of
the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy and professor of artistic research
(2015-2016). At present she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts,
University of the Arts Helsinki and artist-researcher at Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies. See https://annettearlander.com
Technical and
spatial requirements:
For the purposes of these sessions we need a studio space (a room with
free floor space to move in), the ability to show video and image presentations
on a screen or monitor (including sound), and internet access for accessing the
online Research Catalogue.
We plan for three separate sessions of minimum 90 minutes each. All
sessions will be open to anyone interested; all artists and artist-scholars attending
the conference are invited to join us and give short reports/presentations.
On behalf of the working group,
