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
No Show
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition contains six letters about the work No-Show that was performed in Reykjavík in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University. The letters address different aspects of my artistic practice and research such as motivation, method, affect, ethics and the findings.
No Show is a series of five immersive participatory performances, solitary experiences performed in five private homes in different neighbourhoods of Reykjavík in June – August 2020.
Island
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a documentation and dissection of the performance Eyja/Island that was peformed in 2020. The performance is a part of the artistic PhD research "How Little is Enough?" Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters in Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University.
It contains a video essay about the process of creating the work that describes both motivation and methods, a manuscript, photographs of the performance and a video interview with Gréta Kristín Ómarsdóttir a co-creator of the work.
Island
Eyja is a piece about what it means to belong; what ties a person to a community or a place and what kind of commitment it requires to be a part of something.
The challenges of the island reflect the global challenges of current times. In the performance guests are invited to critically investigate their own ideas on what it means to belong.
The guests are invited to mirror themselves in a staged journey through the life and values of the islanders. Through walks, observations, genuine exchange, symbolic gestures and structured dialogue, topics on quality of life on the ´island´ are contemplated.
När vi ses och Hur gör vi med publikinsläppet?
(2023)
author(s): Karin Bergstrand
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exhibition shows my project from the Master in Acting 2021-2023 at SKH in Stockholm.
The essay is called "When we meet" and the performative part "How do we let the audience in?"
As an actor and clown, I have worked in many different rooms and with many different audience agreements. Everything from stage-salon situations where the audience knows exactly how to behave and what their participation looks like, to playing for only one person in a hospital bed or in a small rowing boat, where participation must be clearly negotiated and communicated. I've met adults who are world masters of theater etiquette, but can't answer a question if asked from the stage, and I've met children who are wild first-timers who engage in intense dialogue with us on stage.
I am interested in the dialogue between actors and audience and in audience participation. What standards and agreements are they regulated by? How does the fear of making a mistake, breaking the norm, affect the experience of the performance? Does that fear of shame limit what is possible in the theater?
I have also wondered what roles the audience can have, what in a work communicates this role, and whether the audience can change roles in the same work.
In "How do we let the audience in?" you can read about the work with Eva and Margaretha, two half-masks who are both actors but in whose artistry the audience plays very different roles.
The application of creative practice as a means of disrupting or re-defining the dynamics of power in, with or for different communities.
(2022)
author(s): Sabrin Hasbun, Gareth Osborne, Rachel Carney, Julika Gittner, Catherine Cartwright, agnes villette, Harry Matthews
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.
Throws of Dice
(2019)
author(s): Henna-Riikka Halonen
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
My doctoral research project is a speculative spatial construct, an alternative labyrinthic infrastructure that is flexibly built within and as a response to the artworks it houses.
Existing in tension with the framework affecting it, the artworks and the texts leak out from the structure and are performed in and around the physical floorplan. This format renders the configuration of the research project visible and temporary, with the potential to be reformulated and adapted to future contexts. The labyrinthic structure allows the research to go off in different directions, enabling us to consider the multiple perspectives and modes of writing that constitute its story and the complex infrastructures that might support it.
As a strategy for artistic, social and political engagement and a reaction to a contemporary condition in which our claim to the positions we occupy is increasingly simplified, my research project creates a space of thinking, imagination and resistance. By confusing the functionality of language, it aims to make visible the power dynamics and infrastructures shaping our world. The notion of power is two-fold, the research examines, on the one hand, the complexity of human interactions and positions concerning hegemonic power structures and on the other hand, the relationship between the visual and the verbal and experience and affect.
A number of defining characteristics of our contemporary condition are matters of concern; the speed of the networked globalized economy, the control enacted by states and categorization and exclusion of culture. In artistic research (and the networked world as a whole) there is often a tendency to adopt an overarching view which seeks to unify under a single concept a multiplicity of events. However, here the strategy is to do away with the reductive way of doing theory and instead, to dismantle hierarchical relationships between categories. My research project also contributes to the genealogies of participatory practices and to bridge the gap between language and visual art, I am tapping into similarities and differences of a kind of a virtual staging offered by literature, visual art and digital technologies. I draw from literary strategies of speculative fiction, in particular, those of the French Nouveau Roman.
By using chance, paradox (aporia) and uncertainty as guiding principles and as revelatory tools this research endeavours to deconstruct and divert perception and language, emphasizing absurdity and creating sense rather than meaning. More particularly, the research constantly explores its own limits and reflects its involvement with the social and political structures it is addressing to create or anticipate new modes of existence.
This project requires the reader/viewer's active participation, leaving holes or unknowns in the narrative structure that moves through entangled nodes of connections and different temporalities to suggest alternative and expansive forms of viewing and making art and research.
The research uses my installation/performance Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear (2014) as a frame structure, both as a physical blueprint of a labyrinth and as a story. This approach is not intended as a retrospective view towards the work but proposes instead a speculative re-writing and re-scripting of a work that offers new 'portals' to other works and worlds, through other narrative and theoretical threads opening up new perspectives, concerns, times and spaces. The other works embedded in the structure are the moving image works Moderate Manipulations (2012) and Placeholder (2017).
Dear _____, Please Imagine my Birthday
(2019)
author(s): Harold Hejazi
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
How much of our sense of identity is filtered through social memory—the memory of others and our own? This is a reflection on a performative birthday which attempted to transplant the artist’s community from Victoria, Canada to Helsinki, Finland. Through the medium of larp, the performance explored the ways in which the self is socially produced and sustained through interaction, memory and community. In so doing, the larp offered a self-portrait in which the story of a self was produced collectively.
Information for foreigners: chronicles from Kashmir
(2016)
author(s): Nandita Dinesh
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
'Information for Foreigners: Chronicles from Kashmir (IFF Kashmir)' is an adaptation of Griselda Gambaro's 1992 play of the same time. Directed and written by this researcher in July 2015 in close collaboration with a theatre company in Srinagar, 'IFF Kashmir' uses techniques from site-sensitive, promenade, and immersive theatre to perform narratives surrounding the conflicts in the region. Beginning with a description of the foundations and development of 'IFF Kashmir', this exposition puts forward insights that have emerged around the notion of 'balance': from an evolution of balance vis-à-vis narratives of victimhood and perpetration to considerations of balance regarding representations of time (the past, the present, and the future).
How much of our sense of identity is filtered through social memory—the memory of others and our own? This is a reflection on a performative birthday which attempted to transplant the artist’s community from Victoria, Canada to Helsinki, Finland. Through the medium of larp, the performance explored the ways in which the self is socially produced and sustained through interaction, memory and community. In so doing, the larp offered a self-portrait in which the story of a self was produced collectively.open exposition comments (0)
'Information for Foreigners: Chronicles from Kashmir (IFF Kashmir)' is an adaptation of Griselda Gambaro's 1992 play of the same time. Directed and written by this researcher in July 2015 in close collaboration with a theatre company in Srinagar, 'IFF Kashmir' uses techniques from site-sensitive, promenade, and immersive theatre to perform narratives surrounding the conflicts in the region. Beginning with a description of the foundations and development of 'IFF Kashmir', this exposition puts forward insights that have emerged around the notion of 'balance': from an evolution of balance vis-à-vis narratives of victimhood and perpetration to considerations of balance regarding representations of time (the past, the present, and the future).open exposition comments (0)