Research Catalogue

Public Positions - looking into the works of MA PPS artists and their Public Spaces. With this new collective online publication, MA PPS curates past and current alumni artistic research processes and practices that encapsulate references and positions of public space discourse. The publication serves as documentation of artists who developed (part of) their research together with the programme, and that shares their valuable contribution to the field of Performing Public Space.

This is an archiving project initiated by Siobhan Davies Studios, UK. The Archiving of the performance work "Truth and Transparency" Questions what it means to archive dance as well as what happens when a dance is archived acknowledging that some types of choreographers' work have historically been archived while other types of choreographers have not. What does it do to a dance and choreographer to be archived? This project is also interested in the changes in the creative process of performing the dance which was first choreographed in 2007 and is now being given new life through this archiving project. Truth & Transparency (2007): a performance work for three (two performers and one dancer manipulating projected image onto the performance space using a mirror). The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing up their own children as two masculine presenting Black youth at the time. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms as well as foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

How can one learn to improvise convincingly within the context of the nineteenth-century piano repertoire? And why is it important to improvise on this repertoire in the twenty-first century? Taking the music of Robert Schumann (1810−56) as a departure point, Playing Schumann Again for the First Time proposes an answer to these questions through methods towards a pianistic practice that is driven by experimentation and strives to continually find more layers where improvisation can take place, both in sounding musical practice and in notation. These practice-based methods are contextualized by a discussion of the presence of improvisation in Western classical musical practice in the nineteenth century. They are then substantiated by an argument to use improvisation as a tool for rethinking the current performance practice of nineteenth-century music. Improvisation itself and the concepts driving this term will also be addressed: improvisation in musical performance will be described as a process guided by a feedback loop between mimesis and morphosis with which the practitioner engages using his or her individual cognitive and embodied approach to listening, forgetting, and conceptualizing; the results of which bear his or her own sonic signature. The knowledge gained in this project lies within the realm of what will be described as improvisation as practice, a category of improvisational behavior that circumvents the need to be presented as art and is rather intended for the development of one’s own music-making.

This paper proposes a reworking of scenes 4 and 5 from William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" through an interdisciplinary approach combining textual analysis and artistic production. The investigation begins with an analysis of key words extracted from the original text, conducted through the use of the AI KOBI platform. The reflections and suggestions that emerged from this phase played a key role in inspiring my creative process. The paper follows the research journey from its initial stage to its development and conclusion. The research culminates in the creation of a series photographic images transforming the concepts explored.

To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.

WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES is a workshop. It was delivered at Convocation II, Vienna, 2023, a gathering arranged and facilitated by the Language-Based Artistic Research Group. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research is to explore how, in the absence of vision, the body, language and landscape combine to form a particular type of cartographic, text-informed, mental image in the mind, that is both a record of movement and a score for future object intra-actions. Ordinarily, I fill the role of blindfolded navigator, with a colleague playing the role of the sighted interlocutor. This activity flipped these roles, enabling me to utilise the experience I have acquired through navigating many forests without sight, to assist participants in navigating blindfold through the landscape of Convocation II, Zentrum Fokus Forschung (ZFF). The blurring of physical site and temporal event is deliberate here, the activity of navigating blindfolded with the body generatively blending with psychic travel in the mind. This is an opportunity for participants to think about how vision enables a particular version of the wor[l]d, and to speculate on what other kinds of wor[l]d might be possible in vision’s absence.