Per Roar

MEMORYWORK
Norway (residence)
research interests: Choreography, Performance studies, Trauma studies, Memory, Autoetnography, Composition, Fieldwork, Politics of representation, Artistic research
affiliation: Oslo National Academy of the Arts
en

Per Roar works as a choreographer, performer, and artist-researcher, and since 2017 also as a professor in choreography at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO). He has an interdisciplinary background and a strong concern for socio-political matters. This makes him combine strategies from social research with somatic approaches to make choreography and public art, as seen in his doctoral project Docudancing Griefscapes (2015) from UniArts Helsinki. In recent years, he has been involved in collective artistic projects, such as SEMINARIUM (2012-2016), BY CARTE BLANCHE (2016), LIVING AND LASTING (2022), and as a co-leader of MEMORYWORK (2021-2024), an interdisciplinary artistic research enquiry into the politics of remembrance and representation, funded by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Member of the interdisciplinary group Practising Memory After Mass Violence at the George and Irina Schaeffer Centre for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention, American University of Paris.

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research

research expositions

  • Tracing Practices – questioning and circulating archives (2023) author(s): Per Roar, Camilla Graff Junior, Luisa Greenfield, Myna Trustram published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
    Our exposition comes out of a conversation and explorative research process about the performative potential of archives, both publicly and personally, shaped by four different artistic mediums and practices in film, performance art, choreography and essay writing. The shared medium has been through the use of text and online communication. The research was developed through ongoing monthly meetings and notes that were taken since April 2019. From those meetings, we laid a structure where we each created our parts of what became the score for "Living and Lasting", which we first performed in Oslo and then in Berlin in 2022*. This score is the pivot point of our exposition. Our working process includes considerable elements of risk and surprise by alternating between collaborative meetings and individual work. The first time we perform a new piece none of us know exactly what or how the others will present. Along with the audience, we experience portions of the text, movements, and media put together for the first time, without knowing whether the whole thing will coalesce, diverge, or fall apart.  (*) In Oslo at the 2022 Nordic Summer University (NSU) and in Berlin at the symposium “Who tells y/our story?” ​​by the artistic research project MEMORYWORK (2021-2024).
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