HOW LITTLE IS ENOUGH? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters.
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is an artistic PhD thesis and contains research outputs in three categories, Performance Archive, Research Publications and Method Development tied together by an essay.
I.Essay:
Testimony of a Pilgrim.
II.Performance Archive:
No Show - exposition.
Island - exposition.
Strings - exposition.
Pleased to Meet You - exposition.
III.Research Publications:
Porous and Embracing Dramaturgy for Transformative Encounters - video article.
A Quest for Existential Sustainability - video article.
Transformative Encounters - podcast series.
IV.Method Development:
ME-THOD.
How-little-is-enough-approach.
Abstract
At the core of this artistic doctoral thesis are four performance projects designed to counter the consumer-driven nature of contemporary performance-making while also addressing the need to develop sustainable methods of performance. Guided by the question: how to construct sustainable methods of performance for transformative encounters? the inquiry transcends the different layers of performance-making to explore the potential of performance as a catalyst for societal change.
As a part of the Agenda 2030 Graduate School, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Lund University, the project focuses on existential sustainability and investigates how performance can enhance participants' sense of meaning and motivation for adopting sustainable lifestyles and increasing sustainable awareness.
The thesis output is presented in three categories; a performance archive documenting, detailing and analysing the performances and their impact; research publications, disseminating findings and key concepts through different public formats; and method development accounting for the methodological approaches that have emerged through the process.
The four performance works of this artistic research are: No Show (2020), Island (2020), Strings (2022), and Pleased to Meet You (2022/2023).
The three publications of the project are: How Little is Enough? Embracing and Porous Dramaturgies for Transformative Encounters, a video article; How Little is Enough? A Quest for Existential Sustainability, a video article; and the podcast series Transformative Encounters.
Utilizing Me-thod, a pluralistic situated methodology grounded in the artist´s personal background and skillset, together with the how-little-is-enough approach, which minimizes production and focuses on essential needs, the project has collected insights into how performative encounters can initiate transformation in participants and foster connections to the world around them, thereby enhancing existential sustainability and nurturing care for the environment. Through repeated cycles of action-based artistic research, employing qualitative materials and autoethnographical approaches, rich data was generated. The findings emphasize the importance of personal engagement, embodiment, and authentic exchange as catalysts for transformation within performative encounters.
Through this investigation, the thesis aims to contribute to the development of sustainable approaches to performance-making that facilitate profound and meaningful human experiences in an era marked by unprecedented societal and environmental challenges.
ISBN:978-91-8104-107-1
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.]
Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies
(2021)
author(s): Anne Juren
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that I have developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. By drawing on various fields of knowledge – anatomy, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theories, poetry and somatic practices – the research expands choreography towards disparate discourses, practices and treatments of the body. Based on Feldenkrais’ speculative use of language, imagination and touch, I have developed several body-orientated practices situated at the intersection of the therapeutic and the choreographic, the somatic and the poetic.
The research is articulated through three transversal movements. The first movement is the expansion and distortion of the Feldenkrais Method® from its initial somato-therapeutic goals into a poetic and speculative way of addressing the body. Secondly, I propose experiences of diffraction, "blind gaze" and dissociation as a strategy for troubling the dominant regime of vision. The third movement consists of the co-regulation of bodies and dynamic relationships between the individual and the collective.
Combining fantasy, the fantasme and phantasmagoria, I invented the word “fantasmical” to emphasize how the ability to imagine may create phantom limbs that are as concrete as pieces of bone. Studies of Fantasmical Anatomies are simultaneously a set of practices, methods and places where the corps fantasmé is tangible.
Connective Conversations
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Falk Hubner
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is an exposition in progress.
Starting in the 2021/22 season, the professorship Artistic Connective Practices organises and curates a series of encounters with practitioners, the research team of the professorship and audience, in order to explore the notion of Artistic Connective Practices.
Where Can I Wish You Happy? [submitted to Royal Academy of Art, The Hague - 2023-06-29 22:16]
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): He Bo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
Master of Photography and Society
On 12 May 2008, at 14:28 Beijing time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale struck my home province of Sichuan, China, killing 69,227 people, leaving 17,923 missing and injuring 374,643 in various degrees across China. At the time, I was at university in another city far from home.
In this thesis, My beginning question is how to fit myself who is absent from this earthquake into its history and the memories shaped by it. As a practitioner and researcher of photographic images, I want to reach out beyond the physical and psychological distance to the real memories of the earthquake understand its impact by describing, speculating and analyzing ready-made images about it and by explaining my own visual strategies, such as making and reworking photographs on this topic. These images contain 1) group photos of local people before the earthquake who were separated from each other in life and death by the it, 2) video clips taken by television camera reporters and other anonymous people on the day of the earthquake, and 3) the visual outcomes produced by people who look at or photograph the earthquake ruins which turned into tourist attractions now. In these ways, I highlight that we can encounter actively that earthquake through dealing with photographs about it and new photographic actions since then, in order to find possibilities to shape the postmemories for those Chinese who, like me, were absent or irrelevant at the time of the earthquake.
In September 2022, a new strong earthquake occurred in Sichuan. I regard it as a bridge to relate the 2008 earthquake to present-day China. At that time, China was still in the midst of an extremely rigorous Covid-19 prevention and control phase, with various restrictions trying to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 cascading from the top down. By putting the two earthquakes together to discuss, I argue that Chinese people should remember the disasters of the past so that we can find our place in new dilemmas to deal with them. We should face up to the pain others have experienced and are experiencing and reach out to help, instead of ignoring or avoiding our responsibility. As a Chinese studying an English-taught MA program in the Netherlands, the differences between the Chinese and English contexts, the temporal distance between the current Chinese context and the European historical context were gaps that I could not avoid in this thesis writing. These gaps are reflected by describing and reflecting on my act of going to the former site of the Auschwitz Concentration camp. Acting as a spokesperson, I brought the inappropriate reactions of some Chinese people in the present to the plight of their compatriots to that field of traumatic memories, emphasising the importance of confronting one’s own absence and distance from the disaster from the other’s side.
HALL09 - Vilnius
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Breg Horemans, Siebren Nachtergaele, Gert-Jan Stam
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This page is part of TAAT's Live Archive. It's an attempt to structure the archival material of the project HALL33. We focus on scripting a specific workshop-performance that took place Match 10-11th in Vilnius, Lithuania. For this workshop-performance embedded researcher Siebren Nachtergaele (UGent/HOGent) was part of the team as an inside/outside eye in co-assembling of this script/archive page. This page functions as a residu of an embodied and reflective proces, visually meandering between action and extraction. TAAT is founded in 2012 by Gert-Jan Stam and Breg Horemans.
The City of Fire and the Assembly of Death: Two Encounters
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.
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.]open exposition comments (0)
This is an exposition in progress. Starting in the 2021/22 season, the professorship Artistic Connective Practices organises and curates a series of encounters with practitioners, the research team of the professorship and audience, in order to explore the notion of Artistic Connective Practices.open exposition comments (0)
This page is part of TAAT's Live Archive. It's an attempt to structure the archival material of the project HALL33. We focus on scripting a specific workshop-performance that took place Match 10-11th in Vilnius, Lithuania. For this workshop-performance embedded researcher Siebren Nachtergaele (UGent/HOGent) was part of the team as an inside/outside eye in co-assembling of this script/archive page. This page functions as a residu of an embodied and reflective proces, visually meandering between action and extraction. TAAT is founded in 2012 by Gert-Jan Stam and Breg Horemans.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.open exposition comments (0)