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
Swan Screed egg God
(2024)
author(s): Nicole Ross
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten
Thesis / Research document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2024
MA Artistic Research
A search for the special through oil electric and sentimental.
Transformative Encounters Podcast
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
"Transformative Encounters" is a podcast series dedicated to the exploration and unpacking of the concept "performative encounters" within the realm of contemporary performance and how it can be understood. This series forms an integral part of the knowledge dissemination deriving from the artistic research project How Little is Enough? that is centered on sustainability and social change, conducted at the Malmö Theatre Academy by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir under the umbrella of Agenda 2030 a transdisciplinary Graduate School within Lund University. In the podcast, Steinunn extends invitations to european artists and theorists, fostering performative encounters where they engage in in-depth discussions and multifaceted explorations of this concept from diverse perspectives.
The podcast series is edited and produced by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir with the support of Inter Arts Centre at Lund University and Malmö Theatre Academy.
Music: Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir
STRINGS
(2024)
author(s): Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition is a documentation and dissection of the process of creating "Strings", a series of performative encounters with members of Agenda 2030 Graduate School. 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 exposition is a logbook of the process from the moment of conception to the aftermath and follows two dramaturgical tracks, an inner journey and an outer chain of events. The exposition holds a personal diary, correspondence, manuscripts, qoutes from participants, pictures and a video interview with the artistic researcher.
The Anonymous – A Documentary Memory and Transformation Project
(2023)
author(s): Bengt Bok
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
De anonyma (The Anonymous) is a research project on memory and transformation that is divided into three parts: a book, a audio work, and a film. Over the past twenty years, Bengt Bok has returned several times to a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin. The first time he visited the site, he was shocked by the former death camp’s immediate proximity to a surrounding village. A community. Not only today but when the camp was still in use by the Nazis. How could people carry on living so nearby? He subsequently transformed the memories of his personal encounters, experiences and observations both in the camp and in the village into a book, which he, in turn, transformed into a sound work and, finally, into a film. In this exposition, Bok explores what became specific to, and distinctive about, each of the three different expressions or works — in other words, which narrative components remained, which disappeared, and which were added.
Covered Mouths Still Have Voices
(2023)
author(s): Tom Western
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
overed Mouths Still Have Voices
Tom Western
UCL Geography – t.western@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
The title of this essay is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Και τα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts. My focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The essay listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to friends in Athens. To Kareem al Kabbani and Urok Shirhan, whose soundworks resound into these pages. To Fani Kostourou, Pasqua Vorgia, and John Bingham-Hall for organising and running ‘The City Talks Back’. To Fadia Dakka for her kindness and patience in waiting for this essay to be done.
Talking Transformations: Home on the Move
(2022)
author(s): Ricarda Vidal, Manuela Perteghella
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition comprises an online version of a travelling exhibition which was curated by Manuela Perteghella and Ricarda Vidal in 2018/19 as a direct outcome of our collaborative Arts-Council-funded project "Talking Transformations: Home on the Move".
The online exhibition charts the journeys of two poems about "home" around Europe and the transformations they underwent as they were translated through different languages and into film.
Initiated as a response to Brexit, the poetic journeys focused on the EU countries most important to migration into and out of the UK—for migration to the UK, Romania and Poland; for migration from the UK, France and Spain.
The online exhibition invites viewers to listen to the poets and translators recite their literary versions and to watch the artists' filmic interpretations. It also includes recordings of translations made by Ricarda and Manuela in response to the the multiple versions of the initial source poems. The exposition concludes with a section dedicated to reflections about the project by some of the people who took part in it.
Fragments in Time
(2022)
author(s): Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, almut schilling, Till Bovermann
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The processual sculpture "Fragments" is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the "Rottings Sounds" project of artistic research*. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. It is located at the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. For this exposition, media representations of physical fragments have been arranged, then subjected to multiple stages of erosion processes specific to digital data. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
*"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" is a cooperation of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as project AR445-G24.
HONEYMOON IN POMPEII - work in progress
(2021)
author(s): Sven Vinge
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad.
I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of:
1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries.
2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking.
3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame.
4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa.
We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?
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.
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.
Johannes Kretz and Wei-Ya Lin: con | versation – de | fragmentation
(2019)
author(s): Johannes Kretz
published in: Research Catalogue
This is the exposition for the application of Johannes Kretz and Wei-Ya Lin for the SAR conference in Bergen 2020.
Animalium
(2019)
author(s): Lise Hovik
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Animalium is a continuation of the artistic research project Neither Fish nor Fowl which investigates the significance of affect in performing arts for kindergarten kids and consists of theatre-making, film making and writing. Affect has been philosophical, emotional, and material inspiration in the creative process, and in relation to the young children audience. The theatre project developed by Teater Fot is Inspired by posthumanist philosophies, and the project investigates human as animal in musical and sympoietic interplay with young children. We investigate the strange and weird in-between, in transition, in the undefinable; neither fish nor fowl, but perhaps chickenlion, orangerobot, dragonurchin or birdfish? The exposition is a translation from theatre to text, pictures, sound and video, and explores how the translation twists, twirks and turns the theatre into virtuality. By this translation details come close-up and new shapes and colours emerge – the body and space of theatre are transformed and translated into the strange materiality of the screen, and the work will expand in time.
Re-enaction of animal becoming
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this artistic project I explore the concept of transformation - specifically the transformations that take place between the human and the animal. It is assumed that both play and dance improvisation trigger novel sense-making capabilities by a deep engagement with the environment (Paolo, 2007). Both activities give rise to transformative forces, ways of becoming that create openings and passages through which one re-engages and re-connects with the environment.
In the first phase of this artistic project I recorded a spontaneous play event of my 12th year old daughter . Her play serves as an entrance point to examine animal becomings as transformative forces. In the second phase I re-enact the animal becomings of my daughter through an improvised dance solo. The aim is to grasp, in a corporeal sense, the transformative forces that are at work here.
“Lasciatemi morire” o farò “La Finta Pazza”: Embodying Vocal Nothingness on Stage in Italian and French 17th century Operatic Laments and Mad Scenes.
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This music research drama thesis explores and presents a singer’s artistic research process from the first meeting with a musical score until the first steps of the performance on stage. The aim has been to define and formulate an understanding in sound as well as in words around the concept of pure voice in relation to the performance of 17th century vocal music from a 21st century singer’s practice-based perspective with reference to theories on nothingness, the role of the 17th century female singer, ornamentation (over-vocalization) and the singing of the nightingale. The music selected for this project is a series of lamentations and mad scenes from Italian and French 17th century music dramas and operas allowing for deeper investigation of differences and similarities in vocal expression between these two cultural styles.
The thesis is presented in three parts: a Libretto, a performance of the libretto (DVD) and a Cannocchiale (that is, a text following the contents of the Libretto). In the libretto the Singer’s immediate inner images, based on close reading of the musical score have been formulated and performed in words, but also recorded and documented in sound and visual format, as presented in the performance on the DVD. In the Cannocchiale, the inner images of the Singer’s encounter with the score have been observed, explored, questioned, highlighted and viewed in and from different perspectives.
The process of the Singer is embodied throughout the thesis by Mind, Voice and Body, merged in a dialogue with the Chorus of Other, a vast catalogue of practical and theoretical references including an imagined dialogue with two 17th century singers.
As a result of this study, textual reflections parallel to vocal experimentation have led to a deeper understanding of the importance of considering the concept of nothingness in relation to Italian 17th century vocal music practice, as suggested in musicology. The concept of je-ne-sais-quoi in relation to the interpretation of French 17th century vocal music, approached from the same performance methodology and perspective as has been done with the Italian vocal music, may provide a novel approach for exploring the complexity involved in the creative process of a performing artist.
Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance in Theatre and Music Drama
at the Academy of Music and Drama,
Faculty of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts,
University of Gothenburg
ArtMonitor dissertation No 25
ArtMonitor is a publication series from
the Board for Artistic Research (NKU),
Faculty of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts,
University of Gothenburg
A list of publications is added at the end of the book.
ArtMonitor
University of Gothenburg
Faculty Office of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts
Storgatan 43
PO Box 141
SE 405 30 Gothenburg
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ISBN: 978-91-978477-4-2
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten Thesis / Research document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2024 MA Artistic Research A search for the special through oil electric and sentimental.open exposition comments (0)
This is the exposition for the application of Johannes Kretz and Wei-Ya Lin for the SAR conference in Bergen 2020.open exposition comments (0)