IMPRINT
(2025)
author(s): PP, TC, CAW, BC
published in: Research Catalogue
In once-uniform, traces of life emerge
a neighbourhood, built for order
now breathes individuality
over time, structure makes expression
a slow transformation shaped
not by plans, but by presence
tiles, shadows, colors
quiet gestures speak of daily routines
people who made this place their own
imprints, not imposed but lived
together, form the memory of space
a home grown into differencs
ÖR - AS ongoing loop
(2025)
author(s): Aðalheiður Sigursveinsdóttir
published in: Research Catalogue
AS this is my final project about my final project at the University of the Arts in Iceland, it serves as a reflection on my own artistic process. AS I am completing my MA in Performing Arts, this moment signifies an ending, yet I feel I am still in the midst of processing it.
AS I set out to create a documentary play rooted in personal experience, aiming to bring realism to the stage. AS I allowed myself throughout the process to repeatedly ask: what am I truly confronting? AS I came to realize that, in the beginning, I was not being honest with myself. AS I tended to lean toward abstraction, to fix things, to escape into dreams rather than meet myself with clarity. AS I was not truthful to my own state of being.
AS a way to hold myself accountable, ÖR ultimately became a kind of encounter, with a meeting within a Program of Honesty. AS if ÖR blends inner and outer realities, flowing in a hybrid form of lived and performed experience.
AS are my initials, it echos in my writings. AS an ongoing loop.
Swinging On The Shoulders Of Giants
(2025)
author(s): Jacob J Johnson
published in: Research Catalogue
This work is intended for those who want to learn more about the methods and arranging techniques that can be used to play the same composition in different ways and how to arrange one's drumming within jazz music. This work is not only aimed at drummers. All the concepts, methods, and analyses I present in this work are also applicable to other instruments.
The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between transcription and creative improvisation in jazz drumming. In order to fulfill this aim the following research questions where formulated:
In what ways does transcribing and analyzing my favorite drummers' playing enhance my musicality and personal musical voice?
What characterizes the idiolect of these four drummers?
How does an established jazz drummer accompany a soloist, and is it possible to hear a clear interaction in their playing with each other?
How does my comping and solo playing develop through the process of transcribing and emulating the performance of these iconic drummers?
In this master's thesis, I have chosen to analyze how four different jazz drummers play the same composition. The song I have selected is one of my favorite jazz standards, titled You & The Night & The Music. This is a fairly well-played jazz standard with several different versions and arrangements.
The drummers I have chosen for this thesis are Gary Novak, Niclas Campagnol, Philly Joe Jones, and Jukkis Uotila, who, in my opinion, are some of the best drummers in the world. I have transcribed these drummers’ comping and solo playing, and I have also learned to play the transcriptions myself.
I have done this to analyze what I can learn from it and to absorb the knowledge and skills of these drummers so that I can apply them to my own playing. I have also recorded myself imitating and replicating my transcriptions. This was done to observe what I can come up with spontaneously when improvising and how I interpret and perform the same composition and arrangement as they do.
In this work, I have also analyzed the equipment that drummers use. I have done this to understand what equipment I need to achieve a certain sound or feel in a song. As a final step, I have recorded my own version of this song together with a jazzband to demonstrate my hopefully newly acquired knowledge and interpretation.
This work has developed my musicianship and has also expanded my personal musical toolbox, enhancing and improving my bag of licks. I have also gained a deeper understanding of how interaction works between different instruments in a jazz band, as well as how improvisation and interplay function between a soloist and accompaniment.
The transcriptions have also improved my technical ability in both my hands and feet, and I have had to practice intensely to be able to play some of the drum grooves and solo phrases that they are playing. My sight-reading ability has also improved, and I have become much faster at reading advanced drum notation. The work has also given me an expanded knowledge of the equipment drummers use and why they choose their drums, cymbals, drumheads, and drumsticks.
Revisiting Ballet through Groove
(2025)
author(s): Julie Pecard
published in: Research Catalogue
How can groove influence ballet language to bring forth movement signature and support new meaning? I aim to uncover how groove can bridge classical form and movement signature by developing a method based on groove, revisiting ballet terminology, and allowing the performers to find their movement signature. Resilience has emerged as an accompanying concept that provides a base when generating movement.
I research, create, and perform work that is anchored in Western Contemporary Dance. In my practice, I search for connections between the dancers, the concept, the music, the rehearsal process, and the performance. Questions I ask myself are: What are threads that help all involved connect to the work meaningfully? And how do we all come out of the creation with a sense of authorship? I often invite personal memories of the dancers into the work to make it more relatable, finding that commonalities emerge to connect us. The themes I base my concepts around are identity, finding a place of belonging, home, and womanhood.
I have chosen to approach this research with varying lenses: my personal experience both in life and in the studio, through poetic writing, relating to thinkers and choreographers, and through the creation of Lost Threads. There is an analytical approach through depicting what in groove can serve ballet. I have based my research on music theory and transferred knowledge to an embodied practice around groove. I have analyzed the biomechanics of ballet movements, precisely 8, adding how language can contribute to another level of experiencing movement. I define resilience as the process of finding one's centre, and how the process toward equilibrium can be used to generate drive and inspiration, relating this process to choreographic scores and improvisation. The counter side of this research is the poetic approach I have taken through writing and sketching. This world offers further possibilities to uncover more knowledge on the connection of ballet and groove, performers and movement signature, resilience and improvisation. I’ve come back to my roots of ballet and gone deeper into the ground, emerging with an innovative practice through groove. Daring to search for innovative ways of bending classical form.
Fontys Academy of the Arts, Codarts, Master Choreography COMMA, Master Arts, Cohort 4: 2023-2025
Second Semester
(2025)
author(s): Leà Deppner
published in: Research Catalogue
Second Semester Fashion Design KABK 2025
Holding Open Space
(2025)
author(s): Nicola Visser
published in: Research Catalogue
This practice-as-research (PaR) project explores how we use our eyes in seeing and being seen within the context of the mover and witness roles, as practiced in the ‘open space’ segment of Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP). As a dance artist-researcher, I am interested in how a witness holds space for another in ways that go beyond the concept of ‘non-judgement’. My PaR was animated by the question: How do we hold ‘open space’ across distance? Framed in the context of Covid-19 social distancing, it opened up a research inquiry into practices of looking for the witness and leads me to propose that witnessing is not only an embodied technique but an improvisational skill.
Witnessing is a co-creative act, how we look changes what we see. My study was invigorated by the theoretical frameworks and writings of key thinkers—including Erin Manning on the Minor Gesture (2016, 2022, 2023), Eugene Gendlin’s practice steps of a Process Model (2017), and Lauren Berlant on transformational infrastructure (2017)—and finds re-orientation with/in the project of decoloniality. My methodology includes studio practice of MoverWitness relation in the open space segment of CDP, parallel methods of close reading, close talking (Schoeller 2022), ‘close drawing’ and ‘close dancing’, and interviews with artists about how they use their eyes in their practices. Ultimately, my PaR project formulates a principle and practice that I term Slow Seeing. The study of looking, attention and perception lead me to detail findings that contribute to ways of seeing as an epistemological concern. The insights are arranged into three broad fields. These include, first the practice as it pertains to contemplative dance training, where I propose a unit of embodied technique called ‘easy eyes’ and an improvisation score for the witness in a MoverWitness relation. Second, a reframing of CDP as a transformational infrastructure and a place of radical hospitality for fugitive gestures. And third, reflections on the socio-political implications of this eye practice and its potential to delink dance praxis as part of the project of decoloniality. A key insight is the notion that the eye technique and practice levers a shift in the sediment of our habitual unquestioned ordering of the world and cultivates courage in doing and knowing other-wise. It is strikingly significant because it wedges up a fulcrum and shifts the way we perceive small and big things —where we sit, how we stand, which tea we buy, movement, relation, migration, borders, identity, capitalism, power paradigms, ideology, the far away-nearby, love, everything-everything. So small. It makes a rupture, a crack, a glitch, and a fertile place for lively possibility