Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
About this portal
The portal is used for the presentation of dissertations, papers, essays, artistic work, and work-in-progress of the ACPA PhD candidates. Furthermore, it is used by supervisors and other coaches to insert comments on the work of these candidates.
contact person(s):
Marcel Cobussen ,
Gabriel Paiuk url:
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/creative-performing-arts/
Recent Activities
-
The Palestinian music-making experience in the West Bank, 1920s to 1959: Nationalism, colonialism, and identity
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Issa Boulos
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Research by Issa Boulos.
Before 1936, musical practices in Palestine relied heavily on colloquial poetry, especially in rural communities, which constituted most of the population. During the first half of the twentieth century, Palestinian music evolved as a reflection of the social, cultural, and political evolution of Palestinians. Palestinian music-making evolved exponentially resulting in the expansion of various folk tunes into shaʿbī songs, the creation of the Palestinian qaṣīda song genre, new compositions of instrumental music for traditional and Western music formations, the establishment of choirs and children music programing, and active engagement in composing in the styles of the dominant Egyptian genres of the time as well as muwashshaḥāt.
In 1948, the vast majority of Palestinians were displaced, and musicians found themselves at the frontier of implementing new political and cultural visions in the countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Therefore, the continuation of the musical narrative in the West Bank did not seem attainable. By the early 1950s, Palestinian musicians and intellectuals developed a vocabulary that reflected the topography, scenery, culture, dialects, and history of al-Mashriq, one that is independent of Egypt’s. Their input, intuition, experience, and convictions of various Palestinian musicians helped to make the music scene in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan what they are today.
-
Musika: The becoming of an artistic musical metaphysics
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Stanimira Withers
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Musicians spend a significant amount of time practicing. Over the years, intuitions and understandings accumulate that may be difficult not only to share, but also to make sense of.
'Musika', a research by Stanimira Withers, is an exercise in musical metaphysics, which attempts to articulate and contextualize some of these intuitions and understandings, expanding the territory on which thinking about music is familiarly performed. With the presumption that consciousness is fundamental, this dissertation proposes that music is a form of consciousness, which enters in a mutualistic relationship with sentients to acquire experience and to propagate its evolution. ‘Musika’ is defined as a consciousness organization cultivating sound-based forms and intelligences.
Incorporating and integrating insights from physics, philosophy and psychology with a cultural-musicological attitude, 'Musika' is concerned with contextualizing and validating the artistic experience and its practice-derived tacit knowledge. A contribution to the fields of philosophy of music and music ontology, and specifically, to the musicological discourse of musical meaning, the study explores how music and consciousness trace the same fundamental process of evolution, constructing different information-based realities.
-
Blind maps and blue dots: the blurring of the producer–user divide in the production of visual information
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joost Grootens
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation of Joost Grootens explores the question of what contemporary mapmaking practices can reveal about the ever-evolving field of graphic design.
The shift towards digital modes of production has fundamentally changed the field of graphic design, to the extent that a clear distinction between the producers and users of visual information no longer exists. The evaluation of graphic design’s recent developments is too strongly focused on what happened to the persona of the graphic designer. In this research an alternative model is introduced that focuses on the technologies that have shaped the field.
Graphic design and cartography have different origins and concerns, but their contemporary practices have much in common. In this research, cartography is considered a testing ground to understand the transformations of graphic design. Adopting notions from post-representational cartography, three mapmaking practices of amateurs and technology companies were selected to survey, analyse and test that transformation.
The dissertation contains of a series of visualizations that embody an alternative documentation of the research. The development of alternative and complementary languages is considered to be an essential aspect of artistic research. This parallel visual documentation of the research questions the discursive text, and all the prejudices and histories contained within it.
-
The variational mode: three cases about documents, artworks and animation
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Riccardo Giacconi
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The artistic practice of Riccardo Giacconi deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential. This dissertation is about three different cycles of artworks Giacconi produced as part of the research project. The notion of animation inheres in each of the three case studies: – Case 1 focuses on my artworks about Simone Pianetti (1858-?), an Italian mass murderer who escaped and disappeared, and who then became a puppet character, animated as a stock character.– Case 2 focuses on Augusto Masetti (1888-1966), an Italian soldier who shot at his superior officer and declared not to remember having done it, as if in a state of ecstatic possession, as if animated by an external entity. Mainly using publications and workshops, Giacconi produced a series of artworks related to legal, medical and anarchist records on his case.– Case 3 follows the appearance of a puppet character in Colombia, el espiritado, and its supposed connections to the Masetti case. Giacconi describes a series of artistic works the author produced, starting from a puppet script about the self-destruction of a village, which can be read as a commentary on puppetry, anarchism and animation.
-
Cantos da Floresta (Forest Songs) : exchanging and sharing indigenous music in Brazil
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Magda Pucci
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This thesis of Magda Pucci presents the research process behind the project Rupestres Sonoros, by the São Paulo-based musical group Mawaca, that recreated indigenous Brazilian songs, and the Cantos da Floresta tour of the Amazon, involving an intercultural exchange with six different indigenous groups. The thesis also addresses the projects’ outcomes, such as the publication of didactic books, creation of websites, workshops and new projects that seek to shed light on indigenous musical expressions. The thesis is about the journey of going up on stage, organizing intercultural activities, producing books, records and videos that transformed Pucci
and Mawaca, in a postmodern context, into artists that create in order to help raise awareness on the current political issues concerning the indigenous communities in Brazil. The purpose of this thesis is to reveal how music performance and research can be conducted by “anthropophagizing” knowledge, that is, consuming from a broad range of cultural sources, regurgitating and reinventing multicultural musicalities.
-
The reflections of memory : an account of a cognitive approach to historically informed staging
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Gilbert Blin
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The research is dedicated to Gilbert Blin’s work in staging operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Nourished by a decade of productions for the Boston Early Music Festival, the first objective of his dissertation is to enable a better understanding of both his creative and interpretive processes in the operatic field. The main research question he attempts to answer in his dissertation can be phrased as follows: how can a post-modern stage director use historical research for creative purposes?
The title of this dissertation, The Reflections of Memory, is the appellation Gilbert Blin has been giving to his current approach as an artist and constitutes a conceptual answer to this question.