Crafting Context: An Inquiry into the Art of Curating Music Performance
(2018)
author(s): Imogen Cooney
published in: Research Catalogue
Crafting Context: An Inquiry into the Art of Curating Music Performance
Thesis written by Imogen Eve (3134989)
Master of Music:
New Audiences and Innovative Practices (Specialization)
Royal Conservatory of the Hague
Published on June 21, 2018
Supervisors: Falk Hübner and Renee Jonker
Subject Teacher: Renee Jonker
Research Question
“How can present-day classical performance experiences be curated to fuse attentive listening with active audience engagement in non-traditional performance settings?”
Research Summary
This study explores how curatorial practices can be utilized to create new performance contexts that aim to fuse classical aesthetics with 21st century cultural values. Through research analysis, a Curatorial Methodology is formulated specifically for music events and then applied to case study projects.
The outcome of this research has found that the tools within the curatorial method do aide in transforming these non-traditional performances into more engaging and artistically rewarding experiences. Even within the limitations of this study, this method of approach has the potential to craft new performance contexts that positively impact both classical and non classical musicians as well as generate engaging music experiences for 21st century audiences.
Biography
Imogen Eve is an independent performance arts curator and designer, specializing in creating immersive and interactive concert experiences. Utilizing her training as a musician and within theatre, she crafts the emotive elements inherent in live music with the environmental and atmospheric elements of spatial design to construct narratives - storytelling experiences communicated through sound and space.
Imogen trained as a classical violinist and went on to study at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music (2009-2013) and at the Australian National Academy of Music (2014) whilst simultaneously working within theatre as both an actor and an artistic director. In 2012 she founded and directed The Painted Feet Orchestra, an interdisciplinary performance collective, and directed their productions in the 2012 Anywhere Theatre Festival (AUS) and the 2013 Music by the Sea Festival (AUS). From 2013 - 2015, Imogen was co-artistic director of the Deep Blue Orchestra (AUS) for their production of India Stories in the Woodford Folk Festival and at the Brisbane Powerhouse. As a freelance music director, Imogen worked with Fractal Theatre Company (AUS) on Secret Love Life of Ophelia in 2012 and The Shakespeare Theatre Company (AUS) on Mary Stuart in 2013.
In 2016 she began her master research at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague specializing in curatorial practices for music performance. Imogen currently lives in The Hague and engages in freelance curatorial projects and performs as a violinist with the Pynarello Ensemble Collective.
Capturing Intimacy: Translating Intimate Moments in Film
(2018)
author(s): Kerstin Parth
published in: Research Catalogue
The aim of this arts-based research project was to examine the translation of intimacy in film and to create a transparency for the accompanying artistic decision-making processes. The research focus was to explore the processes involved in the production of moments of intimacy from an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective, and to study the contexts in which intimate moments are "translated" into moving images. Within this context, this project was particularly concerned with filmmakers' experiential knowledge about creating intimate moments within an artistic framework by employing different technologies and staging them in different ways, as well as with asking how this attributes meaning to these intimate moments.
The framework of this research project includes an inter- and transdisciplinary workshop aimed at initiating a dialogue and exchange of knowledge between theory and practice. This workshop aimed to reflect together on the artistic (subjective creative) decision-making processes, to hone the research questions and lay the foundation for the artistic research that took place in the FILM LAB (film research laboratory).
The establishment of a FILM LAB served as an innovative and open research space in which filmic translation and decision-making processes could be observed and rendered comprehensible by employing a "slow-motion procedure". In particular, the FILM LAB aimed to highlight the complexity of intimacy and sound out specific processes of translation by employing and reflecting various artistic and technical means and methods.
Gatherings
(2018)
author(s): Annelies, Alice De Smet
published in: Research Catalogue
‘Gatherings’ are the second level of operation of the doctoral study ‘Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures’. The first level of operation is called ‘responsive walking’ and is of direct embodied immersion of the author/learner’s bodymind while looking for the mess in urban environments and adopting a micro-perspective by means of walking and embodied creation. The second level departs from the assumption that embodied immersions in mess by responsive walking are desettling and urge sense-making. By creating video-assemblages, performance-lectures and conversation pieces processes of embodied sense-making are explored. Thereby, the challenge is to avoid the pitfalls of quick dichotomic, hierarchic and disembodied understandings of bodymindly engaging with the environment. To resist slipping into these categories – that are so readily present when sense-making is discursively elaborated – the notion of ‘pregnantness’ and the notion of a ‘propelling hypothesis’ are proposed. The former is a bodymind state that allows to imaginatively presence not-yet and becoming significances of embodied engagements with environments. The latter is an operative design instrument that allows the responsive shifts in hypothesis to become the very mechanism of a form-giving practice that reflects whimsicalities and contingencies. In order to work towards ‘pregnantness’ and follow the ‘propelling hypothesis’, gatherings interweave autobiographical, fictional and referential voices (i.e. the work of others) through one another. Also different media (i.e. body, drawing, writing, photo, video, sound, animation, modelling), low-tech assembling and analogue-poetic thinking are put into action to bring more sensory, ephemeral, affective and imaginative aspects of bodymindly relating to the environment into account.
Voyager's Record
(2018)
author(s): Paulina Brelińska
published in: Research Catalogue
Point of departure.
The exhibition "The Voyager's Record" refers to traveling as such a form of mobility, which results from the
internal need to see inaccessible, undiscovered, lost and mysterious places. Its title refers to the name of two
gold-plated disks - The Voyager Golden Record - which was placed in the 1970s on board of spacecraft
launched as part of the Voyager program. There were some specific recordings and photographs on these disks
that were supposed to show the life cycle of the human species on Earth to the extraterrestrial viewers. The
exhibition showing the latest works created by young artists figuratively refers to the untamed dreams of seeing
unknown lands and what is more the cosmos. Artists’ projects pay attention to the images and elements of
nature that interest them during their “expeditions” (expedition is translated as “mobility organized for a specific
purpose”). Such concept situates the artist in the position of a researcher/explorer who archives/documents
reality and nature for a specific purpose. These objects are deprived of the features of the “artifact” (translated as
“incorrect element of the scientific research result”). On the contrary, they become a specific scientific record
depicting life on Earth.
During the nineteenth century, when the ideological trend called romanticism was developing, the author of the
book “COSMOS. Alexander Humboldt's physical description of the world” noticed that nature is a constant
object of the discoverer's fascination. When observing the works of contemporary artists, the aforementioned
glorification of nature seems to be still super important. Humboldt wrote: "Children's joy at the sight of the
particular figures of the countries and the closed seas, as geographical cards show us; the desire to see the
constellations of the southern sky that are not on our firmament; images of palm and Lebanon cedars in the holy
scriptures; they are all things as an example cited, and which are capable of awakening in the young soul
unreasonable desire to see distant lands.”
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The exhibition is a story about spiritual travels, as well as about feelings that accompany the search for one's
own nature. Staying in a state of suspension, properly distant from reality, very credible memorabilia arise -
telling a lot about the Earth itself. However, it is not so much its scientific portrait that is important but the
presentation of our planet from the perspective of the internal experiences of its inhabitants.
Paulina Brelińska
ANYWHERE ELSE BUT ME, art and introspection
(2018)
author(s): Antonio Olaio
published in: Research Catalogue
Having Duchamp's epitaph as a starting point, the exposition “Nowhere else but me (art and introspection)” deals with some of the most constant aspects of my research as an artist, through series of paintings, videos, songs, where the relationship between art and self-awareness is more evident and plays a central role in their the conceptual process and in their conceptual scope. But here, instead of emphasizing a unique subjectivity, we realise that an artist’s subjectivity might be a place, a place anywhere. A public space, potencially ubiquitous, as both mind and images might be.
