Research Catalogue

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on crevasses and mistakes, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to slip into another form of existence, say, a chair? Contextual note: These essays were first published as part of the book Choreographic Poetry (2019), a collection of literary scores for dance. They were written in the framework of my PhD in artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Choreographic Poetry: Creating literary scores for dance. Thanks to the dancers and musicians who contributed to the process of developing the PhD project. To Chrysa Parkinson, Anne Gry Haugland and Bojana Cvejić for their valuable contributions during the process of writing these essays. And to Jeroen Peeters and Mette Edvardsen for further editorial dialogue. Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays. www.jannecamillalyster.no Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere. Gestures is a series of essays. www.varamopress.org

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.

This is the shape that my temporary virtual studio had during NPP –New Performative Practice MA SKH Uniarts, Stockholm–.

The perception of the canon of post-war Western art music today is still strongly determined by a constructed dichotomy which keeps Western art music separate from evolutions and radical experiments in jazz and African-American music. The very extensive oeuvre and philosophical body of thought of the American composer Anthony Braxton, what he calls his Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct (TCTUC), can be seen as the metaphorical elephant in the room. This unique oeuvre has been largely ignored to this day within the repertoire, discourse and performance practice associated with the canon of post-war Western art music. This research project takes Anthony Braxton's TCTUC as a starting point to see how I, as an interpreter of Braxton’s music, can contribute to a broadening of this canon. My intention with this research is to provide artistic responses to the gaps within the existing discourse on post-war Western art music (see Braxton, Lewis, Piekut, Born, a.o.) by approaching a wide selection of Braxton’s compositions on his own terms. By putting these works as specific case studies on the agenda of relevant actors such as the conservatory, contemporary music festivals and concert series and through recordings and other media, I aimed to make a canon broadening possible through my practice as an interpreter. The results of this research, presented in the form of concerts, lectures, articles, workshops and recordings, are collected in this Research Catalogue website.

The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music. The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead, it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work? As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.

If there is one thing that complexity theory has taught us, it is to consider phenomena not as isolated events with properties of their own, but to observe them from a different perspective: as relations in a vast network of interdependent systems. In this light, the role of contemporary music performance has changed, and will continue to change, precisely because the context in which it is created and takes place is constantly evolving. Artistic research can provide the tools to be aware of these changes and to actively re-act in this changing context, not by simply transposing the context or its elements into a representational or aesthetic framework, as happened with the avant-gardes of the 20th century, but by breaking cultural boundaries through transpositions into distant fields with isomorphic functional principles. It is precisely because of this characteristic, which reveals the intrinsic interdisciplinarity in artistic research, that it is possible to revolutionize the traditional conception of music performance and not confine it to an aesthetic regime, but rather expand it to include the context. However, since relationships are not unambiguous, it is not just a matter of revising the concept of performance, but also of reviewing the way we experience and live in the context, as artists, as human beings, and as elements of a circuit of which we are only a small part. In this paper, I will first examine how environmental and social changes have been reflected in performative changes and the ways in which the context of the ecological crisis and contemporary performance are interrelated. Then, I will focus on my research project, “[in situ]”, highlighting its site/situation-specificity, flexibility, immersivity, and interactivity, and explaining how it aligns with and differs from other contemporary music performance practices.