Faith- religion- spatiality - coping- hope
(2021)
author(s): Vastavikta Bhagat
published in: Research Catalogue
We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed.
We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time.
Faith- religion- spatiality - coping- hope
negotiating the space in between
(2021)
author(s): Jonas Frey
published in: Research Catalogue
This research was conducted to reveal a deeper understanding of my artistic practice that moves in between redefining my urban dance practice and an opening to ideas of contemporary choreography.
Based on studio sessions, interviews and reflections and using a variety of modalities for documentation, this practice-led research expands my artistic practice, bringing in sources of inspiration from dance, pedagogy, sociology and philosophy.
The main outcomes channeled into an emerging methodology that provides strategies to develop co-creative contemporary choreography.
This methodology can serve diverse creative contexts that foster the wish to collaborate and be imaginative.
Embedded in an upcoming artistic community of urban dance based choreographers this research seeks to define my space within the landscape of contemporary choreography.
Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice
(2021)
author(s): Marie Fahlin
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The purpose of the artistic research, Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice, has been to consider choreography and curating in their similarities and differences. Thus, at different phases of the working process, choreography and curating were treated as one and the same artistic practice; while, in other moments, as practices that are distinct from each other.
Curating has been implemented as a ‘taking care’ principle and a relational activity impacting the production, presentation and documentation of choreography. Choreography has undergone a process of self-reincarnations, or rather, of trans-carnations, whereby the entire body of work has been scrutinized and altered. Key figure/body/agent of these trans-carnations has been the horse, or rather, the assemblage of human and horse, women and horses, here called ‘Centauring.’
Curating and choreography have been integrated to a scrutiny of the art of riding, specifically, the choreography of dressage. In dressage, the research has identified the rigor needed by the research to both steer and unleash the working process.
The research has been pursued by purely artistic means, within a circumscribed field. Different perspectives and the making use of ramifications and loose ends, has proliferated into a plethora of intra-related works, objects and choreographies within which research result and artistic result coincide. The research har proceeded in consecutive phases. Each phase has developed its own specific artistic methodologies.
The overarching methodology has provided for a clear navigation of undetermined directions and dramaturgies. The concept of ‘One’ has produced and collected both core outcomes and residual manifestations. The exhibitions and the exhibitor have carried, pursued and embodied the works and otherwise choreographies, throughout the research process.
Tree Encounters – Berlin Series #takecare
(2021)
author(s): Carmen Raffaela Küster
published in: Research Catalogue
Tree Encounters – artistic dialogues of human and non-human bodies / #Berlin Series –
is the title of an Artistic Research project around the development of special movement forms of the body in suspension. The focus lies on the mutual interdependencies with nature/ the trees (in the urban sourrounding of this specific Berlin Series). In contrast to traditional movement concepts, especially in the classical aerial acrobatics, where an objectified body has cognitively been forced in 'preplanned' forms – in this work the Physical-Intuitive, the body-immanent knowledge is assigned more agency and a leading role. The practical artistic research is documented in this exposition mainly by video.
The ‘elsewhereness’ of post-genre: utilising playfulness of cross-genre references as a compositional device
(2020)
author(s): Joe Cutler
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University
This set of three works individually and collectively examine the ‘elsewhereness’ of post-genre composition. Through this research, I seek to develop a hybrid compositional aesthetic through the absorption, integration and referencing of a highly personal set of ‘influences’, many from outside the sphere of classical music. A fundamental concern is the examination of the role of ‘compositional play’ or ‘playfulness’ in unifying a multi-faceted compositional language. This is often manifested through intertextuality and the juxtaposition of diverse elements that are made to function at a structural or conceptual level.
Through practice-based research, I obfuscate notions of genre, performance practice and content. Using the referencing of other musics as a compositional tool, I identify playfulness as a filter through which models of influence are transformed into something personal in an attempt to define what post-genre means to a 21st century composer. On a meta-structural level, reference becomes a parameter in its own right.
The Freestyle Orchestra: Questioning Norms in Classical Concert Performance through Ross Edwards’ Maninyas Violin Concerto
(2020)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart
published in: Research Catalogue
The Freestyle Orchestra is a performance collective of classically trained musicians exploring and questioning the limits of how an orchestra can express music in performance. They strive to create an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk on stage, incorporating physical movement, aerial arts, staging, lighting, costuming, and fire manipulation in live music performance. Building on contentions regarding the inherent physicality of musical performance as well as precepts within Embodied Music Cognition Theory asserting that meaning-formation is corporeal, they themselves research, train and perform as interdisciplinary artists, constantly experimenting with novel ways to communicate the movement and gesture they experience when listening to music more immediately to their audiences.
The collective is convinced that this aspect of inherent physicality is something which has been sacrificed to the work-centric focus of classical music (and therefore neglected within conservatory training), and believe manifesting the movement they perceive within some music is a natural process which can itself generate meaning for both performer and audience. They envision the body as an instrument and strive to amplify musical gestures and meaning through physical movement, simultaneously enhancing and more deeply expressing their own understanding of musical compositions.
This exposition introduces a 2019 collaboration with Australian composer Ross Edwards which resulted in a choreographed performance in City Recital Hall in Sydney of the composer’s Maninyas violin concerto. It combines audio-visual footage, photos and texts contextualizing the research process, which included contemplation and re-enactment of Edwards’ own musical journey in creating his Sacred and Maninyas styles, a way out of a personal musical crisis. Edwards’ perspectives on the ecstatic and fundamental connections between nature, dance, ritual and music/sound fed the physical and stage treatment as well as the processuel, experimental research of the Freestyle collective as they constructed their own, interdisciplinary performance of the concerto.
