Sustainability in Performing Arts Production
(2024)
author(s): Johanna Garpe, Camilla Damkjaer, Markus Granqvist, Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin, Anna Ljungqvist, Anders Larsson, Synne Behrndt, Mihra Lindblom, Anja Susa, Anders Aare, Anders Duus, Jon Refsdal Moe
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The purpose of this project is to explore how we can minimize the climate impact through the way we plan, produce, and support performing arts productions.
The overarching research question was: How can we continue to create relevant and innovative performing arts with a smaller climate impact?
The faculty in performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts worked with Harry Martinson's Aniara from their various disciplines.
Into the Known, a Pathway to Dramaturgy
(2024)
author(s): Picalogy
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
A breakdown of how and why dramaturgy became essential for my artistic work. I go through the development of my dramaturgical thinking starting from the year 2000 when digitalization of media was making its final breakthrough. In this study, I touch on the media field, performing arts, and an online storytelling tool designed to gather and share my practical knowledge of dramaturgy.
NEPTUNE PROJECT: Transforming Personal Narrative Into Political Statement in an Autobiographical Play
(2023)
author(s): Vera Boitcova
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This thesis explores the ways in which personal narratives in dramaturgy can be read as political statements on the example of creating and staging my autobiographical queer play Neptune over the course of two years (March 2021-March 2023). My research questions include:
- What circumstances can evoke a creative desire to transform personal into political through art mediums? To what extent performance art can be effective as a tool to convey political messages?
- How to convey political messages through personal narratives in dramaturgy\playwriting? What makes a narrative political and what can be defined as a political narrative? What does ‘being political’ mean specifically for a queer artist\dramaturge?
- What methodology, aesthetical, directorial and acting choices can be made to further enhance and underline political message of a documentary narrative, specifically in queer context?
These questions will be examined in a detailed account of writing my own autobiographical play Neptune in the year of war and strengthening of oppression in Russia, and subsequent staging of this play. My play had three distinct layers: meta-level (where the narrator talked about her recent political experiences in the year 2022), memory level (subjective memories of a lost love), and fictional level (different characters acting in thematically-relevant vignettes). Therefore, I want my thesis to be reflective of the same structure: it will have three main chapters - Meta, Memory, and Fiction – with the overall reflection at the end.
Overall aim of this thesis is to trace the process of creating an autobiographical play from its creative conception (and reasons behind it) to turning it into a theatre production, and by doing so, to examine if it succeeded in its initial goal of conveying a certain political message, and if so, how this result was achieved.
Rewritable Creatures. Correspondence between Daniel Aschwanden, Vera Sebert and Lucie Strecker on Mimesis and Hybridity in Choreography
(2023)
author(s): Lucie Strecker, Vera Sebert
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Lucie Strecker (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) reveals the artistic working process preceding a production with the contribution "Rewritable Creatures", reflecting on mimesis and hybridity in choreography through an exchange of letters with the late performer Daniel Aschwanden (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) and the author Vera Sebert. As the three letter-writers search, speculate and ask each other questions, the text becomes a written performance, revealing an immediate, polyphonic approach to the subject that allows readers to become part of the performance. In this way, processes of hybridisation become manifest in writing. The performance, however, cannot be completed; Aschwanden’s sudden death interrupts the text, turning the contribution, in a sense, into a memorial to an artist, friend, and colleague and the readers into witnesses.
How to Use Gay Nazis in Job Interviews: Queer Media, Striptease-Lectures and the Art of Existential Sodomism
(2018)
author(s): Alexandros Papadopoulos
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
A video-performance on homoerotic nazism is transformed into a deranged guide of professional and erotic survival. Based on an actual interview with a gay Nazi, this project encompasses academic essays, lecture-performances and a series of digital and urban sensations. All these forms expression explore how social media can stage a horny war against fear, hatred and uncertainty. Physically and intellectually provocative, this is an analysis of the relationship between facebook, austerity-horror and queer desire. This polymedia project includes a short clip and ritualistic acts of self-exposure. This dialogue between storytelling and art-theory re-stages the shocking testimonies of the experimental short-film/video-performance (The Homonazi Effect). Centered on factual -- violent, flirty and cyber -- encounters with Athens-based gay neo-Nazis, the Homonazi Effect encompassed an alliance of platforms: blogs, queer festivals, popular magazines, academic writing and social media. Visual components of the artwork, and particularly, the author’s impersonations of his ‘homo-Nazi’ interlocutor were re-used and re-adapted with various storytelling and self-writing formats – co-creating a fragmented intermedia collage of confession and defeat. Social Media rituals twisted the meaning, context and impact of the initial story – re-situating its visual dramatics within an aesthetic backdrop of failed job interviews, zero-hour contracts and traumatic escapism. A cinematic narration dissolves into a project of self-writing, one that establishes an exhibitionistic archiving of failure. The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, history and imagination and digital and non-digital dramaturgy collapse. A new queer utopia is now disruptively staged on the performative intersection of precarious routine and austerity-age dreamland.
The Many and the Form - reflection and reference materials
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Edit Kaldor
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Reflection text and reference materials of the research project The Many and the Form
by Edit Kaldor
An account and reflection of the processes, phases and outcomes of the research project The Many and the Form, which explored in different contexts how lived experiences can be articulated in and through live performance. The text brings together the various strands within the research and some of the underlying connections between the different components. It aims to communicate about practices and provide insights that can be useful for those who are interested in contemporary theatre making, participation and social imaginaries, as well as for those who have or are curious about immigrant experiences and knowledges.
Reference and documentation materials created as part of the research:
- Digital online archive Inventory of Powerlessness
To accesss, click on http://inventoryofpowerlessness.org/
Interactive digital online archive that was made as part of the research, processing the accounts of lived experiences of 300 participants in the long-term theatre work that preceded and prompted this research project. As part of the preparation for the workshops I wanted to gather and organize these stories in a sharable format which reflected the processes within the performance project. It was important for the current research because it gave me a chance to touch base with its core motivation for creating working methods that allow people to translate lived experiences into live performative situations. Revisiting and reworking the range of experiences that were articulated during the Inventory not only recalled the particular context and the sense of purpose that the research originated in, but also the kinds of procedures I was working with in the Inventory, some of which served as basis for the working methods I have been developing during this research, which were shared in a range of workshops.
I collaborated on the archive with dramaturg intern Joseph Anderson, theatre maker Jurrien van Rheenen and computer programmer Joris Favie. The work consisted of bringing together recorded materials, transcribing them, translating them from one of the five original languages (Dutch, German, Polish, Czech, Greek), making a single version that most closely reflected the different oral versions, and placing them into the digital archive with the connections and categories.
The online archive is an important reference for the research project, as it situates the research in terms of the kinds of lived knowledges that it aims to bring into performance-making.
- Edited video documentation of workshop Ghost in the Machine, December 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAxdAD4kEv4&t=1429s
The video gives an idea of the new strand of the research within the project after Covid made physical presence workshops impossible and the focus of my investigation shifted to exploring situations of digital intimacy and presence through moblie devices. This strand of the research led to the development of the site-specific interactive performance Parallel Life, one of the practical outcomes of The Many and the Form.
Although it’s a short, edited version of a longer series of workshops, the video gives a glimpse of the practice-oriented working processes typical for my workshops.
The purpose of this project is to explore how we can minimize the climate impact through the way we plan, produce, and support performing arts productions. The overarching research question was: How can we continue to create relevant and innovative performing arts with a smaller climate impact? The faculty in performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts worked with Harry Martinson's Aniara from their various disciplines.open exposition comments (0)