Research Catalogue

Professional Doctorate in Arts + Creative is an educational pilot program in The Netherlands for an advanced degree in universities of applied sciences. The PD program at an university of applied sciences is developed to train an investigative professional. This portal is a platform for publishing artistic research generated by the PD candidates. Within the Professional Doctorate program, this portal will also be used as an internal tool for documentation.

The EcoSomatics Conversations Series invites sharing of engagement, practices and thinking around environmental awareness through embodiment activities, dance and art. It posits a definition of EcoSomatics as of the body-mind-ecology and takes the form of open public dialogues between two (or more) people: independent artists, practitioners, and academics. The project was conceived by Dr Polly Hudson, (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University), and the conversations are co-convened with Dr Karen Wood, (Birmingham Dance Network and C-DaRE). The conversations took place virtually with a large international audience, and the podcasts are audio recordings of the live events. It is supported by funding from ADM Faculty Research Investment Scheme, Birmingham City University. Image by Ming de Nasty.

The first edition of the Professional Doctorate (PD) Day took place on Tuesday 18 November at the Social Impact Factory in Utrecht. This event brought together PD candidates and their networks from all seven domains of the Professional Doctorate pilot to exchange ideas, explore crossovers, and strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration. The theme of this first PD Day, '𝘙𝘦𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘜𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 - 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘗𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦-𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴,' focused on the future of urban life. This theme is grounded in the United Nations 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘢𝘭 11: 𝘚𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 and during the PD day, the theme is structured around five subthemes. Within these subthemes, we reflected on how we can shape cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient, and ecologically sustainable.

Wearing a garment can serve as a metaphor for inhabiting the city. In both cases, a space built on a human scale is occupied, excluding everything else. Spontaneous vegetation moves slowly, so as not to be noticed. Meanwhile, the city grows and alters it, leaving an indelible mark on its form. The silhouettes of pruned plants, twisted and unnatural, resemble anthropomorphic figures, and the scene becomes suspicious. The “Costumes” series consists of disguises created from models of plants spotted in urban environments. Their shape prevents other life forms from wearing them.

This text is a sustained philosophical exploration of silence as an aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic medium. It examines silence not as the absence of sound, but as a generative presence that structures perception, meaning, and artistic encounter. Within the framework of Post-Interpretive Criticism, silence is positioned as the original ground from which expression emerges and the final condition to which all expression returns. The treatise analyzes distinctions between silence as containment and silence as erasure, arguing that the ethical force of silence lies in its use: it can dignify the unsayable or be weaponized to suppress and marginalize. The work draws on cross-disciplinary examples from sculpture, poetry, music, film, and museology, illustrating how restraint shapes the architecture of experience. It argues that silence is foundational to perception, authorship, and criticism, and that the erosion of silence in digital culture has produced a contemporary “poverty of depth” characterized by immediacy without intimacy. Within the museum context, the text advocates for silence as a curatorial principle—an element of spatial ethics that allows artworks to be encountered with attention rather than overwhelmed by spectacle or interpretive noise. It further articulates the responsibilities of the artist and the critic: the artist must discern which silence they invoke; the critic must understand which silence they break. This essay contributes to ongoing discussions in contemporary aesthetics, museum studies, and critical theory by reframing silence as an essential but endangered cultural resource. It presents silence as an uncommodifiable medium that resists institutional, linguistic, and commercial capture. The work aligns with and expands the theoretical commitments of the Post-Interpretive Movement, emphasizing moral proximity, restraint, and the ethics of presence. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and _Art as Truth: A Treatise_ (Q136329071), _Aesthetic Recursion Theory_ (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881)

This thesis investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression. Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.