Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Clew: A Rich and Rewarding DIsorientation
(2024)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition examines the curatorial project "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation," held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017. The project is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” “Clew” proposes a framework for curatorial dramaturgy and asks: What is the potential of a dramaturgical approach within an open-ended exhibition structure? Who, or what, is the curatorial dramaturg? How do materials and time contribute to unfolding exhibition narratives?
[This exposition corresponds to Section Six: Extending Lines in All Directions: Curatorial Dramaturgy in the printed dissertation.]
Collaborative Dramaturgies in Filmmaking
(2023)
author(s): Hannaleena Hauru
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, I make a personal reflection on how the dramaturgical concept of the feature film “Parvet” was created. The aim of the project is to build dramaturgical tools that would benefit voices that are currently marginalized in Finnish film and television. The “Parvet” film focuses on experiences as a racialized or indigenous person, and as a non-binary trans person in Finland in 2023 and deals also with the representation of people with learning disabilities, while most crew members in the production, including me, are white, non-disabled and cis-gendered. The central questions in the thesis are:
• How did using feminist decolonial theories and my previous experiences in collaborative filmmaking inspire the methodological framework for the concept of "Parvet"?
• How can autobiographical minority experiences be adapted to fiction film by providing agency to the performers by rearranging artistic decision-making power between the auteur-director, the performers, and the designers in the crew?
• How does "Parvet" navigate the complex interplay of collaborative filmmaking within a project centered on minority topics while operating in an environment and industry dominated by structural whiteness?
Creating “Parvet” took place in 2022–2023. The film is directed by Hannaleena Hauru and Katja Gauriloff and produced by Emilia Haukka. The production is a collaboration between Aamu Film Company and Uniarts Helsinki's Theatre Academy. “Parvet” will premiere in 2024. The thesis was written in the Summer–Autumn of 2023, while “Parvet” has still been in post-production.
Building upon Ruins – Interweaving Metaphors
(2023)
author(s): Joanna Magierecka
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Does the complexity of a work of art, composed of diverging narratives, present a possibility to connect to what we do not grasp? In this exposition I present interweaving as a compositional technique and dramaturgical strategy, through aspects of the creative process connected to and elements of three installations – part of a series called Ruins. The installations combine different aspects of storytelling, participatory strategies, media, and forms of expression. I believe that interweaving different and diverging fragments, allowing audience members to create their own performance dramaturgy and experience, can create an understanding of others and their experience. In that lies the possibility for a shared story – a collective story. Interweaving as a method is also present in the dramaturgy of the text itself – building up to an audio-visual representation of those elements and the written text. In this way, I hope the exposition lets the reader and me both investigate interweaving as a technique and experience it.
Transient sound
(2023)
author(s): Alicia Lazaro Arteaga
published in: Research Catalogue
Art, and music, have the capacity of placing us in front of the symbolic. They bring us closer to everything we cannot understand in a rational manner, allowing us to see ourselves from the inside. Going back to the notion of music as a transformative ritual, a role that has had along centuries in most societies. Music as a sacred space.
This exposition explores the relationship between music and text. Placing the idea of narrative as part of the music, connecting storytelling with sound. By using folklore stories as a structural element in the composition process, I have attempted to grasp the emotional landscapes inside of the tales and translate them into music. This process has been crystallized into several pieces that show the path between the starting point, which was using a text to create music, and the broader conception of music as an experience that involves not only sound but images, space, and movement.
The poetics of enlivening. Searching for the music drama "Borderlands"
(2020)
author(s): Kerstin Perski
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
From the librettist’s perspective, the traditional working methods which tend to dominate in the creation of new music drama, often result in a situation where the initial intentions are lost along the way. How can we get away from a rigid methodology, where the different professionals involved in the creation of new music drama have to succumb to a procedure which can be likened to a whispering game? A procedure, where the dramatic content, rather than undergoing an emotional enrichment in its transformation into music, often loses the crucial connections to the initial intentions.
This doctoral project aims to reach beyond the whispering game by seeking alternative working methods in the creation of a new music drama with the working title "Borderlands", circling around the subject matter of flight and borders - inner as well as outer. The research identified cross–border methods which, borrowing from the terminology of Martin Buber, can be seen as an attempt to counteract the “I–It” relationship that often results from the genre’s focus on virtuosity. The results might inspire further attempts to find alternative working methods which could ultimately create a stronger “I–Thou” relationship between the performance and the audience.
Shuttling
(2015)
author(s): Mick Douglas, Beth Weinstein, James Oliver
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition investigates practice-as-research dynamics through a project titled ‘Shuttle’, from which emerged a practice of ‘shuttling’ as a layered modality for processing methodological artistic research. An international crew of artists, designers, and performance makers enquire into peer-to-peer creative practice development: practices unfolding through the dramaturgy of a twenty-day, four-thousand-mile mobile performance-research journey in the deserts of the North American south-west. We trace the dynamics of a practice-as-research milieu through a suite of artistic operations, performatively elaborated through this rich-media exposition. Through ‘shuttling’, we generate parafunctional performative spaces and temporalities. Our spatio-temporal and sensory mode of research – conditioned, co-created, and situated as a mobile laboratory – posits reflexivity as an embodied practice, as a medium of ‘shuttling’ with the dynamic emergence of creative research practices.
A practice based research: On Aesthetic and Political Scenography
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Scenic Voice
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Dear Reader,
This is a research about aesthetic and political scenography.
This is an attempt to create awareness.
This is a composition of images, sounds, and melodies
through an imaginary and personal lens.
This is a formulation of my artistic system.
This is a mixture of concerns, questions and beliefs.
This is my voice.
This voice could be yours.