Jazz / Pop Singing at the Crossroads of Movement and Musical elements
(2024)
author(s): Daniela Fanelli
Limited publication. Only visible to members of the portal : KC Research Portal
Research question - How can focusing on the connection between body movements and the key musical elements of rhythm, lyrics/mood, pitch and dynamics positively affect the expressiveness and vocal freedom of jazz / pop vocalists?
When considering the attributes of captivating performances, jazz and pop singers often tend to underutilize their bodies on stage. This observation prompted a deeper examination of the interplay between body awareness, singing, and movements, resulting in the question “How can focusing on the connection between body movements and the key musical elements of rhythm, lyrics/mood, pitch and dynamics positively affect the expressiveness and vocal freedom of jazz / pop vocalists?”
The research aims to address this question through a series of investigative stages. Firstly, the analysis of my 2023 end-of-year performance revealed a clear correlation between gestures, expressiveness and the four musical elements mentioned. Further research supported this finding and led to the development of movement-focused singing exercises, whereby vocalists sing while consciously engaging their bodies in alignment with each key musical element individually. This methodology underwent testing with six vocalists, yielding valuable empirical data.
The data shows that this set of exercises can be a helpful, holistic tool in increasing expressiveness, enhancing awareness and improving embodiment while singing, as I have also experienced for myself. By sharing this research, I hope to encourage all musicians to deepen their connection with themselves, their instrument, and the audience through movement and body awareness.
I lost time and space. Where am I? – Erzählen von chronischen Schmerzen
(2021)
author(s): Tabea Rothfuchs
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Was passiert mit der inneren und äusseren Welt eines Menschen, wenn kein medizinisches Verfahren den Ursprung des erlebten Schmerzes (mehr) zu entziffern vermag? Wenn der Schmerz zum eigenständigen Krankheitsbild 'Chronischer Schmerz' geworden ist?
In einer Dialogserie mit Schmerzpatient*innen und Schmerzspezialist*innen erforsche ich in dieser Untersuchung – als Künstlerin und Schmerzerinnernde –, wie chronische Schmerzen das Leben beeinflussen, verändern und welchen Raum sie im Leben der betroffenen und behandelnden Menschen einnehmen. Oder als Kernfrage formuliert: Liegen Menschen mit chronischen Schmerzen im Leben anderer Menschen, in unserer Sozialstruktur und dem politischen System überhaupt drin?
––––
What happens to a person’s inner and outer world when no medical procedure is able to (further) decipher the origin of an ongoing perceived pain? When pain becomes an independent clinical picture called 'chronic pain'? In a series of dialogues with pain patients and specialists, I investigate in this study – as an artist as well as someone who remembers an episode of chronic pain – how chronic pain influences and changes lives and what space it takes in the lives of people affected and those providing treatment. Or expressed as a central question: Is there room for people with chronic pain in the lives of other people, our social structure and the political system at all?
Voicelanding - Exploring the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance
(2021)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This practical artistic research project explores how the performance of acoustic sound in dialogue with site can create a sonic scenography, experienced by an audience from within the sonic structures.
Six art projects were carried out in the context of this research. Their form varies due to the site-sensitive approach that is employed: the space and the participating musicians are both the source and the frame for the resulting spatial sound performances.
During workshops the collaborating musicians are introduced to site-sensitive methods. They learn full-body listening, spatial sounding, and space-care. The musicians learn to co-create with the space. In a collaborative process, spatial sound compositions are created using the site-specific sonic material that is elicited from the dialogue between the performers and the space. The relation to the audience plays an important role in the sharing of the performance space and the experience of the sonic scenographies. Therefore, active audience encounter is considered during the creative process towards the performance and it is further explored during each performance.
As sound is invisible and ephemeral it is a vulnerable material to engage with when creating scenographies. In this research its instability has revealed itself as an indispensable quality of a scenography that aims to connect the elements of a shared space and make their relations perceivable.
There is a tendency to make ‘reliable’ material scenographies and to sustain spatial sound through audio systems while attempting to overcome the challenges a site brings to performance. This approach to performance, scenography, and spatial sound composition, however, limits the relation between acoustic sound and site. In my sonic scenographies the performers are dependent on the dialogue with the space in order to create sonic structures that can be experienced by an audience. The attention needed for this collaboration is space-care. It includes care for all entities in the space, and especially the audience. The ephemeral quality of acoustic sound creates an active sonic scenography that performs together with the musicians, and engages multimodal listening.
The resulting spatial sound performance includes the placement and movement of sonic expressions that are specific for each instrument-site relation. In the created performance, as the audience can ‘roam through’ it, they can experience a sonic scenography that unfolds around them. In the interaction of performers and audience in these shared spaces (architectural space and sonic space) a social space can develop that allows for an ephemeral community to emerge.
Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets
(2020)
author(s): Susanna Hast
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything is a documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) in Performative and Mediated Practices, comprising a series of excavations and vivisections of W(w)hiteness through clowning, making and thinging. This work/play traverses the fields of critical whiteness studies, performance and clowning, visual and cultural anthropology and decolonial critique.
This eclectic mash-up of history, memory and trauma unfolds from my original question: as an actor, which bodies is it appropriate for me to inhabit? Via hyper-disciplinary experiments of the impulse and
what it means to be ‘on’ the moment, the research fabricates a series of clowters, performed entanglements of clown and character passing between various continents, temporalities and situated histories.
SQUIRM is the title given to both the final performance essay as well as to the reflective documentation emerging from this research. As experimentations with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort, the performing essays in SQUIRM document, animate and satirise explorations of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. At the intersections of histories, they dig through remnants of collective memory, personal genealogy and shame, in the hope of reassembling new, sharper ways of giving and receiving attention.
From inside the body of this performer SQUIRM is about TONGUE-ING, about licking the future into softness by reinvigorating ancient clown practices to poke at whiteness in the current age. It’s about squirming and laughing through the discomfort of privilege in what feels like a crumbling time.
But mostly it’s about feeling great in a beard.
Percussion Theatre: a body in between
(2019)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
What does the musician become when sound and instrumental thinking are no longer privileged as the foundation of a musician's practice? In what ways does an emphasis on the musician's body cause music to approach art forms such as theatre and performance? After a generation of pioneering work from Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, John Cage and many others, where is the theatrical and the performative in music today? How do its recent developments shape, alter, constitute a musician's artistic practice? Through her research, Jennifer Torrence argues that this type of music demands the musician assume a different understanding and relation to their instrument and therefore a different relation to their body. This relation calls for new ways of making and doing (new artistic practices) that foreground the body as a fundamental performance material. Through an emphasis on the body, the musician emerges as a performer.
This exposition is a reflection on the research project Percussion Theatre: a body in between. This project is comprised of a collection of new evening-length works that approach the theatrical and performative in contemporary music performance. These works are created with and by composers Wojtek Blecharz, Carolyn Chen, Neo Hülcker, Johan Jutterström, Trond Reinholdtsen, François Sarhan, and Peter Swendsen. The exposition contains reflections on recent developments in contemporary music that mark a mutation of the executing musician into a co-creating performer, as well as images, artefacts, videos, and texts that unfold the process of creating and performing the work that constitutes this project. The ambition of this exposition is that through the exposure of a personal artistic practice an image of a larger field may come into focus.
Still Moving
(2017)
author(s): Juriaan Achthoven, Rhian Morris
published in: Research Catalogue
The startingpoint of "Still Moving" has been: to map and perform an artistic process in which the aim is to create a scenographic poem. If poetry is about 'feeling in language' (Eliot), then scenographic poetry is about feeling in the materiality of a spatial-temporal composition. We have started to work with an actor, live video technology and 'Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot. Throughout the process the main ingredients have shifted towards: the breath of the actor, a lot of soil and sensor-technology. The research question has been evolving from an interest in the concept of 'presence', towards an interest in rhythms of the body in relation to rhythms of the earth, towards an interest in the materiality of the ingredients.
This page is meant to give insight into our process of creation.
In and out of memory: exploring the tension when remembering a traumatic event.
(2015)
author(s): Anna Walker
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The modernist approach to trauma points to an occurrence that demands representation and yet refuses to be represented (Roth 2012: 93); the intensity of the experience makes it difficult to remember and impossible to forget, making any form of recollection inadequate. This exposition explores the repetitive and unresolved notion of trauma using 11 September 2001 as the entry point to navigate a pathway backward into the past and all that was remembered, and uncovers what was forgotten in an effort to lay a traumatic memory to rest. The research began with a journal written on the day of and days following the disaster, which up until a couple of years ago remained closed and unread. Personal remembering is layered upon a well-established collective memory of the event and a vast array of literature, art, and theory written in response to 9/11.
Jazz / Pop Singing at the Crossroads of Movement and Musical elements (copy)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Daniela Fanelli
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Research question - How can focusing on the connection between body movements and the key musical elements of rhythm, lyrics/mood, pitch and dynamics positively affect the expressiveness and vocal freedom of jazz / pop vocalists?
When considering the attributes of captivating performances, jazz and pop singers often tend to underutilize their bodies on stage. This observation prompted a deeper examination of the interplay between body awareness, singing, and movements, resulting in the question “How can focusing on the connection between body movements and the key musical elements of rhythm, lyrics/mood, pitch and dynamics positively affect the expressiveness and vocal freedom of jazz / pop vocalists?”
The research aims to address this question through a series of investigative stages. Firstly, the analysis of my 2023 end-of-year performance revealed a clear correlation between gestures, expressiveness and the four musical elements mentioned. Further research supported this finding and led to the development of movement-focused singing exercises, whereby vocalists sing while consciously engaging their bodies in alignment with each key musical element individually. This methodology underwent testing with six vocalists, yielding valuable empirical data.
The data shows that this set of exercises can be a helpful, holistic tool in increasing expressiveness, enhancing awareness and improving embodiment while singing, as I have also experienced for myself. By sharing this research, I hope to encourage all musicians to deepen their connection with themselves, their instrument, and the audience through movement and body awareness.
Espelho meu | Performance/installation for voice, body and image
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Bruno Pereira, Pedro Santos
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition presents and explores all the creative process related to the performance Espelho meu, premiered in March 2017, in Porto, Portugal. From its assumptions and creative contextualization, we deepen our reflection and explore a possible outcome materialized in this work. It's the materialization of a creative thought, a creative process, into the artistic gesture of the performer. We believe that the creation of new performances is the only effective way to develop the contemporary performative scene. New performances that raise questions and multiple layers of understanding promoting new visions of the world and new possibilities. In this paper, we will briefly discuss the role of improvisation in the process of creating a vocal gesture that externalizes an inner thought, the role of the body and the energy of the performance, the non-imposed but important interaction with the audience, the relevance of the text as semantical and sound object, the choice of the concept mirror and its symbolical impact, the cross paths between artistic practice and technology and the artistic exploration of the performance after its physical existence in time, consolidated in the performative resonance as a creative tool to stretch time and to provocate the ephemerality of performance.
Peripheries
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Montserrat Fonseca Llach
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The periphery is present in the distance, somehow the periphery finds its identity from the periphery. When the place of origin is out of reach, between signs of strangeness and marks of a foreign place, in a constant tension between “being and not being there”.
Travel, which makes the origin tangible, in a portable dimension of the landscape and its roots even in the distance. The trip implies a fixed point, from which it emerges and from there the "being in transit" becomes a primordial state of leaving and looking for a home.
The body becomes an intermediary of this space "in transit", the only constant territory, as an object that absorbs, adopting foam in constant transformation and flow. Foam that becomes tidal, goes, collects, returns, and from there as a loop, generating ties with the origin.
Body-Object Intersections: Touch Model
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Barbis Ruder
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The touch model is a first attempt at describing the space between
the body and the object as a new form: their intersection.
The touch is the intersection, and it builds a shape with various
specifications.
Deer, Tigers, Perec and The Everyday - a choreographic approach
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): STELLA MASTOROSTERIOU
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
My research focuses on the interrelations between different types of spaces and the types of movement they encourage or impose. The research is inspired by the writings of writer Georges Perec and informed by concepts and methods from the fields of sociology, anthropology and architecture.
This portfolio supplements the written exegesis of my practice-led research process, which revolves around two interwoven strands / projects, and serves as an analysis of the artistic outcomes and as documentation of the artistic processes. The practice research has been constantly informed by theoretical concepts deriving from an extensive theoretical research, which will be selectively reported. Several smaller projects, experiments and workshop processes that I will briefly delineate in this paper, led into forming two more elaborate projects that I have been developing in the past year and will be more extensively reported in this paper.
The first strand has to do with working in the public space and aims to devise ways of thinking and creating in and for the public space. Under the title I DON’T SEE DEER, I work with observation and writing as a tool for studying everyday life and movement in the public space, in order to highlight existing aspects of the city and propose new site-specific situations. Both the research process and the artistic outcomes were located outside – in the urban space. The process and the outcomes of this part of the research have so far been translated into various forms: a video work, a live performance, a photographic series, a workshop, and most importantly the outline of a flexible way of working that I can bring into different places and groups.
In the second strand, I attempt to incorporate concepts, tools and findings from working in the public space into choreographic research and creation for the stage. While keeping observation of street life as one of my main tools, the practical research here was mainly studio-based. This strand led to the creation of the work WE ARE NOT TIGERS that I presented as my final project for the master.
The two strands did not follow any successive chronologic line. Instead they emerged and were developed concurrently, as autonomous processes that constantly affected and informed one the other, throughout the past year. In this paper though, I will mainly follow the chronological order of how my research path evolved, while linking the practice-led research to the theoretical research.