Hedvig Jalhed

Sweden °1982
research interests: opera, music drama, dramaturgy, interaction, immersion, voice, vocality, singing
affiliation: Malardalen University
en

Hedvig Jalhed is senior lecturer in Chamber Music and Chamber Opera at Mälardalen University and senior lecturer in Artistic Research in Music with specialization in Music Drama. She holds a position as director for Inter Arts Center, the center for cross-disciplinary research and practice within the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts at Lund University. She is a professionally trained opera singer with a Master’s degree in Musical Performance and Doctoral degree in Performance in Theatre and Music Drama. Her artistic research concerns the development of operatic practice in new works with a special focus on operatic game-design and issues regarding immersion and interaction. Besides her academic career, she has founded the independent chamber opera company Operation Opera and is appointed artistic director for Halland Opera & Vocal Festival on behalf of Region Halland.

research

research expositions

  • Arcade: A Guide to the Operas in the Doctoral Project "An Operatic Game Changer" (2022) author(s): Hedvig Jalhed published in: Research Catalogue
    This exposition is a guide to the four ludo-immersive chamber operas in the doctoral project An Operatic Game-Changer. The operas were created during the period 2016–2020 and are contextualized and discussed in the dissertation with the same title, in which the practice of facilitating operas as adventures rather than spectacles is fleshed out. Through these participatory and multi-disciplinary concepts, conceived with the purpose of generating and analyzing live encounters between professional opera artists and co-playing visitors, immersive features are realized and explored. Arcade is also a kaleidoscopic performance and an exhibition, designed as an operatic amusement park in miniature, with artefacts and excerpts from the operas, and presented live in connection with the public defense of the thesis in 2022 at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg. This online resource functions as an archive of information about the operatic works and their performances, both for those attending the performance/exhibition in Gothenburg, and for those wanting to learn about the project without experiencing this event.
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  • Unfinished Business (2023) author(s): Hedvig Jalhed, Mattias Rylander published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
    How can microsocial rituals connected to a specific site be used as interaction templates for artistic purposes? And how can we distort such rituals artistically in order to make them memorable events? As artists, we regard distortion as the process that gives character and distinction to things and situations, as well as something that confuses and enriches information and interpretation. Through examples emerging from the operatic production Chronos’ Bank of Memories (2019–2022), set in empty shop stores with interacting visitors, we have recalled and fleshed out issues of rituality with distorted proportions. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, its production was interrupted and later on revived, which affected the work. This exposition covers aspects of both our artistic practice in general and this particular opera’s tendency to encompass distorted rituals. Commentary texts, images, and audio/video clips are arranged into an introduction and then three thematic strands in order to offer a reasoned overview of our work process.
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