Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)

X-position

Stockholm University of the Arts publication series: X-Position, ISSN 2002-603X;3

Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice (2021) Marie Fahlin
The purpose of the artistic research, Moving through Choreography – Curating Choreography as an Artistic Practice, has been to consider choreography and curating in their similarities and differences. Thus, at different phases of the working process, choreography and curating were treated as one and the same artistic practice; while, in other moments, as practices that are distinct from each other. Curating has been implemented as a ‘taking care’ principle and a relational activity impacting the production, presentation and documentation of choreography. Choreography has undergone a process of self-reincarnations, or rather, of trans-carnations, whereby the entire body of work has been scrutinized and altered. Key figure/body/agent of these trans-carnations has been the horse, or rather, the assemblage of human and horse, women and horses, here called ‘Centauring.’ Curating and choreography have been integrated to a scrutiny of the art of riding, specifically, the choreography of dressage. In dressage, the research has identified the rigor needed by the research to both steer and unleash the working process. The research has been pursued by purely artistic means, within a circumscribed field. Different perspectives and the making use of ramifications and loose ends, has proliferated into a plethora of intra-related works, objects and choreographies within which research result and artistic result coincide. The research har proceeded in consecutive phases. Each phase has developed its own specific artistic methodologies. The overarching methodology has provided for a clear navigation of undetermined directions and dramaturgies. The concept of ‘One’ has produced and collected both core outcomes and residual manifestations. The exhibitions and the exhibitor have carried, pursued and embodied the works and otherwise choreographies, throughout the research process.
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Beyond Cut and Join - Expanding the creative role of film editing (2023) Kersti Grunditz Brennan
The research project Beyond Cut and Join – Expanding the creative role of film editing comes out of two major observations over decades of professional film editing experience: that a lot of film editing’s potential is untapped in filmmaking, especially in relation to character creation; and that editors’ skills, influence and authorial participation often are misunderstood and undervalued. Through editing practice and writing, this research explores an expanded role of editing by asking: 1. what can editing do to create characters; 2. what is a useful and challenging creative research design for exploring editing; and 3. what expanded description of film editing can be articulated for these explorations. The project aims to share, refine, and add to editing vocabulary by articulating creative strategies for shaping characters. It further aims to challenge notions of authorship in cinema by developing collaborative structures and artistic methods that benefit creative processes in the edit room. By demonstrating how significant the handprint of one individual editor is, the project’s final aim is to highlight the extent to which editors’ personal experiences influence their choices in composition of material. Outcomes of this project are filmmaking methods that place editing and collaboration in the forefront when weaving dramaturgy, aesthetics, and content creation processes that shape film characters and cinematic stories. The output of this research includes films, academic articles, personal essays, a video essay, and pedagogic applications. These outputs cumulatively demonstrate the artistry of the editor and the significance of editing.
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Darkness as material - PhD project - 2023 (2023) Mia Engberg
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.
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voice under (2023) Ester Martin Bergsmark
If voice over is the superior voice that dictates truth, I examine voice under, the other truths that take place simultaneously. In my doctoral thesis voice under, I explore all the parallel voices beyond the dominating all-knowing voice over. The intention of the project and concept voice under is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film. By looking closely at, challenging, and playing with different cinematic conventions, I explore how we can recreate seemingly dominant expressions and find spaces for resistance, although temporary. This document outlines the different modes of publication of the doctoral thesis voice under. voice under consists of two branches: film and text. The Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis) voice under will be made public and archived on September 1, 2023, through the following three materials: 1. Welcome to voice under folder 2. Performative contemplative film screening 3. The book voice under, consisting of a collection of texts
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Släpp sångarna loss! (2023) Tove Dahlberg
My dissertation "Unchain the Singer! Gender, Performance Norms and Artistic Agency in Opera" is taken from an opera singer’s perspective and the aim is three-fold: • to investigate and problematize how gender and performance norms are reproduced on the opera stage • to provide tools and propose approaches to transform gender perspective and norm critique into a creative artistic practice, enabling conscious and active artistic choices in relation to gender and performance norms • to explore ways to expand the singer's artistic agency. The artistic research project draws on knowledge from both my own practice as a professional opera singer and my collaborators’ experiences from the worlds of opera, classical music and theatre. The thesis consists of four artistic investigations: 1. In "Mönster och möjligheter" (Patterns and Possibilities), gender markers were explored and identified, both in vocal and dramatic performance. The five Mozart scenes that were studied revealed a structure suggesting that femininity in the operatic art often can be expressed by taking responsibility for the music, for facial features and bodily behaviour, and for the audience. Correspondingly, masculinity seemed to be expressed by actively taking less responsibility in these areas. 2. The second investigation was connected to Norrbottensmusiken's production of the new opera "Under en kvinnas hjärta" (Beneath the Heart of a Woman). This study exposed how performance norms affect singers' artistic possibilities also in contemporary opera. The investigation found that if the director's reading of an opera is norm-creative, it can facilitate a less traditionally gender-coded performance. However, even in more traditional opera productions, there are still options for the singer to work norm-creatively with their role, for example by mixing feminine and masculine gender markers. 3. The third investigation, the concert production "Sångernas sång" (The Song of Songs), explored an expanded artistic agency for the singer. Actively using my experience from my career as an opera singer, I wrote the libretto for the chamber mini-opera "Stark som döden" (Strong as Death) in collaboration with a composer. The study suggested that singers, in addition to their creative work on the role, could also contribute with other important perspectives. Concert and opera productions, as well as newly written works, can be enriched by a dialogue with the singers early on in the artistic process. In the creation of the two roles in the chamber pieces "Hög visa" (Songs of Solomona) and "Stark som döden", useful methods for creating a subject position for the characters were developed, as well as ways to work in a concert situation with the portrayal of sexual desire. 4. The fourth and final investigation, "Interaktion och intimitet" (Interaction and Intimacy), was an exploration of intimate scenes. The study showed that the method and know-how of an intimacy coordinator can provide a sense of security that can make the singers freer in their portrayals of sexuality. A greater focus on the story can also make the scenes more interesting artistically. In addition, this study revealed the potential of an expanded agency for the singers. Allowing singers to adapt the text and the distribution of lines in repertoire opera, as well as creating a more collective rehearsal process, where the singers take an active part in the stage directing work, could open up for more norm-creative representations of gender on stage.
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Staged Conversations Using dialogue as both method and form when staging documentary material for theater and film (2024) Marcus Lindeen
Between 2017 and 2024, I have conducted an artistic research PhD project at Stockholm University of the Arts resulting in a feature length documentary film (The Raft, 2018), a documentary based theater play (The Invisible Adventure, 2020) and a book with his work diaries documenting the process of creating the two works (Staged conversations, 2024). The research project focuses on using the conversation as both method and form for staging documentary material for theater and film. The Raft reunites seven people who were all part of a social experiment crossing the Atlantic on a raft in 1973. The film mixes archive footage from the original journey with scenes shot in a studio, where participants share memories onboard a scenographic replica of the real raft. In The Invisible Adventure three characters – a scientist, a video artist and a transplantation patient – meet for an intimate conversation on identity and transformation. The performers who interpret the characters through repeating dialogue from a sound script in hidden ear-pieces, sit together with the audience members in a circular scenography, where there is no separation between stage and audience seats. Both the film and the play are using the staged conversation as a shape for the storytelling and share similarities in their visual expression with wooden scenographies set in a black box studio environment. In the film it is the real people from the raft journey who reunite 43 years later in the studio. In the play the script is based on three separate interviews with people who have never met, but who are interpreted by performers. The research project will be finished and presented publicly in January 2024. The film and play will be presented together with the release of the book at Gothenburg International Film Festival in collaboration with Gothenburg City Theater.
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BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD (2023) Kersti Grunditz Brennan, annika boholm
BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD – an exposition of recurring processes, trails and building blocks of the film and research project BLOD through the lens of its methods. The BLOD methods are articulated as a Manifesto, written to accommodate a multitude of contents, forms, and modes of collaboration, while demanding cross-disciplinarity, honesty and risk-taking. The methods are non-linear, looping, and embedded in the manifestations of the research: films, performances, presentations, etc. The BLOD project aims to create multivocal cinematic experiences through embodied practices. The research explores relation-building through a feminist methodology of creating gaps and friction – between audience, story, time, matter, and co-creators. The project asks: how to tell multifaceted, non-exploitive stories of womb-related states of life and death, rarely depicted in cinema? And how to disturb film industry hierarchies through a collaborative practice that maintains individual artistic integrity and promotes collective authorship? The BLOD research shares its outcomes via the mediums of its artistic practice: videos, texts, digital expositions. This exposition is designed to reflect the connections and interactions of the research's building blocks: ideas, places, materials, people, time, experiences, technologies. To enjoy BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD: move around it with your mouse, follow dotted paths out from the center towards texts, images, and videos. Hover over numbers and words in BOLD to reveal expanding texts. Linger on images and videos for captions, translations, and instructions for further interaction. Along the outer rim of the main page are spiral buttons to take you back to the center with a click. Subpages have links on the main page but are also listed in the Content index in the upper left menu. The exposition is mainly in English. Videos in Swedish have English translation.
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Monsters I Love: On Multivocal Arts (2019) Alex Nowitz
Proposing a ‘multivocal practice’ in the vocal arts, this exposition (documented artistic research project) embodies an inclusive approach to four core categories for the contemporary performance voice: the singing, speaking, extended and disembodied voice. The culmination of a four-year PhD project in Artistic Practices (Performative and Mediated Practices, with specialisations in choreography/film and media/opera /performing arts), it documents artistic research sub-projects through the presentation of multimedia material, interweaving performance recordings with reflective and contextualising texts. Multivocality addresses various models of virtuosity, all of which are informed by a multi-faceted artistic knowledge, whether experimental or experiential, technical or technological, improvisational or compositional. Contemporary vocal performance practices are loaded by questions pertaining to detecting and solving technical issues that span the vocal domains. Through a range of artistic practices—vocal, oral, bodily and technology-related—the research project unfolds what is conceived as a bountiful ‘vocal imaginary’. When voice and body meet technology-related practices that aim at the expansion of the vocal realm by using custom and gesture-controlled live electronics, a performance æsthetics of the in-between emerges. This is explored via the ‘strophonion’, formerly built at STEIM in Amsterdam and, during the course of the PhD, further developed by Berlin-based software programmer Sukandar Kartadinata who created an intricate configuration on the basis of the audio processing application Max/MSP. Through the formulation and performance of ‘The Manifesto for the Multivocal Voice’—a ‘discursive solo performance act’ that aims to provide insights into principles and premises, and to develop the discourse on the politics of today’s performance voice—the exposition attempts to establish a potential theoretical and philosophical grounding for multivocality. Its second major concern relates to the poetics of the voice, investigating the thresholds of highly individualised vocal practices by asking: what are the boundaries of the contemporary performance voice? The exposition (on the Research Catalogue) comprises video and audio documentation of public live performances, lectures and artists’ talks as well as studio productions and rehearsals. The user is invited to study scores and various texts, such as poems, extended programme notes, translations, performance instructions, comments and other reflections. The collection of essays and articles that guide the user through the edifice of ideas that the artistic research project has unveiled remains central to the endeavour.
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Lyssna till ASIA/ÄRENDE och UniZona & PolyZona (2022) Vanja Hamidi Isacson
Welcome to the exhibition "Listening to ASIA/ÄRENDE: Kaarle Vihtori Turunen and UniZona & PolyZona". This exposition is linked to the thesis "The potential of multilingualism in dramatic works", which is available both as a printed copy and digitally as a PDF. The thesis consists of eight chapters and a prologue and epilogue. Chapters three to seven contain audio files that are available to listen to in this exposition. The exposition consists of audio files and text excerpts from the two multilingual works ASIA/ÄRENDE and UniZona & PolyZona by Vanja Hamidi Isacson. The audio files and excerpts from the works relate to specific chapters of the thesis, where these examples are discussed and analysed. The thesis in its digital form can be read and downloaded in the exposition "The potential of multilingualism in dramatic works" For those who visit the exposition without reading the thesis, it is recommended to go through the pages via the chronological order of the table of contents.
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The poetics of enlivening. Searching for the music drama "Borderlands" (2020) Kerstin Perski
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.
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The decline of choreography and its movement: a body's (path)way (2019) paz
This doctoral artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) addresses the possibility of a dance withdrawn from that neoliberal scheme according to which self-performance, entrepreneurship and the production of subjectivity rule. Taking as a starting point the dissident corporealities that have emerged in the last fifty years in Western contemporary experimental dance; the project involves aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political perspectives, carried out on choreographic, performative, textual, audiovisual, curatorial and discursive media. This documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) consists of three inter-related parts: first it invites the reader to see the performance's video "ECLIPSE: MUNDO". Afterwards, the reader is invited to read the book "To Dance in the Age of No-Future" and get a context regarding the rest of the audiovisual materials located on the same website. The exposed materials are displayed as an “essay written form” understood in the Spanish or French sense of the Latin word "ensayo / répétition" and its associated meanings such as try-out, rehearsal, practice, study, preparation and experimentation. To this end, the materials show an ongoing migration of concepts, practices and tools, through analogous forms, equivalences and contrasts that invite to see this project's genealogies and continuous iterations in formats such as video, testimonies, audios, scores, tool descriptions and images. Accordingly, it is the reader who –by viewing, listening to and reading these materials– can trace the diverse kinetic, political, aesthetic, discursive and conceptual layers linked to the practices and presentation formats specific to this doctoral research project since its beginning. About this Doctoral Artistic Research Project In late capitalism dance's commitment with the future (or its lack thereof) must find alliances with potentiality and nothingness. This is not a nihilistic affirmation, but an attempt to enable an interval: a dance whose value has to be apprehended there, where it is already happening. Kafka said that "one might have a goal, but not a pathway". The pathway involves a decisive cognition such that cannot be carried out without one becoming the path itself; without defying so to speak, the relationship of the dancer with dance itself. It is not about what the dancer can do, say or communicate in respect to dance, but what dance accounts for in itself. In modern's kinetic exhaustion, the latter is possible approaching dance as a presence-in-crisis. The semantic field of the word "crisis" and its associated words, –critical judgment, decision and separation–, defines the moment when something or someone has somehow one foot outside. The moment when one realizes that it is not the world that ends, but the linguistic constructions and the reality systems that had made sense until then. This proposal tries to embody that gap. It tries to reveal the somatic, kinetic, political and aesthetic implications whereby to dance on a limit that is both inaugural and terminal. Decisive. Although “deciding” will always be not knowing what will happen. It is a dance that, although it does not seem to mean anything, it does something. The moment at which dance let's go of being a product (a goal), to become a deposition. "Deposition" is a word that includes both, an abandonment and a position. At the same time, to take on a position implies a becoming: the (path)way through which the dancer coincides with dance's conditions. The moment at which the dancer abandons any intention to communicate, to propose or to interpret dance, to carry out kinetically and perceptually the non-significant, ephemeral, ineffable and impersonal conditions that dance implies as a presence-in-crisis. In short, the coincidence “dancer : dance” implies taking into account an experience of dance freedom that is fugitive. In the theatre apparatus it involves a dancing which ―by lacking recognizable aims, signs and subjects― gives way to an aesthetic paradigm which is not be construed as a particular kind of thing (a performance, a type of dancer, a subject, or even a social or artistic process), but rather as a gap's embodied experimentation. A threshold, a curve. A parenthesis. An eclipse. A void: the encounter with something which doesn't need to be produced, because it is already happening.
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This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything (2020) Stacey Sacks
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.
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FAUXTHENTICATION – Art, Academia and Authorship (or the site-specifics of the Academic Artist) (2020) Bogdan Szyber
Fauxthentication – Art, Academia & Authorship (or the site-specifics of the academic artist) investigates the means of production of the art that can be created within the boundaries of artistic research. It explores the factors that constitute its value system, who or what can produce these signs of value, and for what reasons. The project examines the conditions that expose the flaws of the increasingly standardised higher education industry, which artistic research today is a part of, through the use of institutional critique, critical interventions and site-specific case studies. In a series of performative stagings, Fauxthentication probes the pressures inherent to academic excellence, leading to the grey economy of the higher education industry, that supports and capitalizes on academic fraud, all performed by a global digital proletariat. 
Artistic research is habitually linked to an academised and thus bureaucratised art practice. This project draws critical attention to the risk of it creating its own branch of artistic research art, or ”edu-art”, as well as its own category of artistic research theory; thus prone to becoming self-referential and codified, coagulating into a new ‘ism’ for the initiated. ‘Edu-art-ism’ grapples with artistic quality assessment, systematically addressing solely the theoretical framing of the work. The Fauxthentication project acknowledges the complexity of the conditions of artistic research by proposing, through its series of explorative stagings, a challenging new way of viewing and hence transforming the very field that it is a part of.
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The potential of multilingualism in dramatic works (2022) Vanja Hamidi Isacson
"The potential of multilingualism in dramatic works" is an artistic research project that aims to investigate, develop and deepen the practice of writing multilingual drama for an imagined audience in Sweden. Through placing significant focus on the playwright's practice, the goal is to contribute to the artistic development of dramatic writing in Sweden and in other Swedish-speaking contexts. By using sociolinguistic theories and terms around multilingualism, both the artistic practice and the discourse surrounding it are developed and challenged. Through the application of an integrated ideology of multilingualism, language ideologies based on a monolingual norm are contradicted. In this way, the project makes room for silenced and marginalized voices and perspectives that rarely take or receive a place in Swedish performing arts contexts. Considering language, and thus multilingualism, as social practice and action is the starting point for the research. This post-structuralist approach is in line with the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and language theorist Michael Bakhtin. In this research drama is considered as both practice and as action. Central concepts are linguistic repertoires, translingualism and speech acts. Within the project, two dramatic works have been created, ASIA/ÄRENDE and UniZona & PolyZona. These constitute the artistic result of the research and can both be described as dialogical polyvocal plays. Common and central to both works is that multilingualism permeates them and constitutes their formal core. The multilingualism has consequences that affect the dramaturgical and musical structures. The creation of the works has taken place in dialogue and collaboration with multilingual actors, directors and translators in Sweden and Finland. The form of the artistic work has been conversations, workshops and periods of writing, translation and design. Through these processes and works, the issues have been successively investigated. As tools for analysis, reflection and discussion, four categories have been created: dramaturgical, political, emotional and communicative potential. With the help of these, the concrete functions of multilingualism in both dramatic works are examined with the aim of making visible the potential of multilingualism in dramatic works. The project demonstrates that multilingual dramatic writing requires different, less traditional approaches and in this way contributes to an expanded practice for the playwright. The methods used in the creation of the works have been collaborative, transcultural and dialogic, shifting between practices and acts of listening and composing. "The potential of multilingualism in dramatic works" aims to show the enormous artistic, creative, political, emotional and communicative potential that multilingualism can bring to the dramatic work and, by extension, the performing arts.
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Trädgårdsmästare och arkitekter: att skriva från början eller skriva från slutet: prospektiva kontra retrospektiva filmmanuspraktiker (2021) Alexander Skantze
There are different ways to create a screenplay – freewriting from a spontaneous idea, or more planned with a determined end. I and three other screenwriters write two short screenplays each. I document the process and compare the screenplays. Based on a critical analysis of some classical dramaturgy handbooks I explore prospective versus retrospective writing practices, focusing on processes as well as results. The results will be of value for both the practice and teching of screenwriting.
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Voicelanding - Exploring the scenographic potential of acoustic sound in site-sensitive performance (2021) Mareike Nele Dobewall
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.
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choreo | graphy: artistic research project documentation (2022) Eleanor Bauer
This page contains a chronological overview of documented artistic research and expositions created within the doctoral research project "choreo | graphy," at Stockholm University of the Arts. This research project generated text publications (documented here in pdfs), live performances (documented here in videos), scores for those performances, interview podcasts, and works for video, all included herein. A summary of the project is located at the top of the page, entitled "choreo | graphy: doctoral project summary." It explains the research questions and methodology, offering context and orientation for the expositions and documents on this page. Reading this document as a guide to the Research Catalogue contents will assist in understanding each item in relation to the overall research. ABSTRACT The research project "choreo | graphy" is an inquiry into the relationship between thinking through dance and thinking through written language, taking the notion of choreography literally as dancing-writing. Respecting that different media afford different thought processes, ideas, and concepts to be reached, this practice-based artistic research project has unfolded within artistic processes and experiments to explore and develop the relationship between dancing-thinking and writing-thinking. Investigating the media-specificity of thought in dancing together (khoreia) as it relates to the media-specificity of thought in language and specifically writing (graphia), the research strives for an adequate relation between the two, one that serves both art forms and respects their differences. The separation of the word choreography into "choreo | graphy" signals the project’s intention to open space for consideration and reinvention of the poetics of choreographic practice and discourse.
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Movement first : Directing for Movement-Based Performative Arts (2021) Lena Stefenson
Making performances that have movement as a base means in many ways to venture out into an unexplored landscape. What is to be played on stage usually has its origin in a movement-based idea and not in an already written text to be analyzed. How can this work go? Where are the challenges and what methods can be used? Lena Stefenson has written this book on the basis of her own experiences as a choreographing director with examples from various works as well as her own and others' teaching. The text is about how to create the elevated movements in a performance. How to work with theme? With story? What is the relation between text and movement? What does it mean to be a choreographer / director for a movement-based work? How are the last rehearsal weeks going? The book is aimed at anyone who is, or wants to become, a choreographing director or actor in the movement-based performing arts with forms such as dance, mime and circus. It is also aimed at those who generally want to make their scenic work more physical.
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Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies (2021) Anne Juren
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.
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ENHEAR (2022) Carolina Jinde
ENHEAR a way of being a state of mind a field of enquiry exploring the creative and collaborative potentials of sound centric strategies in film and media-based contexts The term enhear invites an approach to research, art practice, sound studio and world that is comprehensively aural. It proposes listening as both act and role; listening as a present tense, continual and continuous co-creation of the inter-relational spaces we all share. Drawing on the specific expertise and orientation of the sound engineer in film and media-based production, the research unfolds as a series of interrelated experiments and reflections, exploring enhear via a diverse range of artistic approaches, collaborative methods and pedagogical practices. Each sub-project brings particular attention to the auditory perspective, a radically underutilised element within the visually dominated context of film and media. This project contends that consciously incorporating attentive and inclusive listening practices into the lifecycle of creative processes will make considerable artistic, ethical and practical contributions to film and media-based productions; further utilising the expertise, raising the profile and expanding the practices of the sound engineer.
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