Research Catalogue

What is OASIS? Does it have a spiritual dimension,or is it something temporal that is shaped by social relationships and achieved collectively? It is about the collective, inclusion, a place of relaxation? Does it have to be about proximity between people or a total isolation in a safe domestic environment and introspection? What happens if, within our social fragility, we leave our personal oasis and enter the public realm, where we are exposed under the gaze of others? If we decide to carry with us , even if it means symbolically , our personal domestic objects that make us feel secure and present , as a shield against the uncertainty of the outside world? Is this the answer?

This performance seeks to form visually narratives about gender fluidity, identity, vulnerability, and the sense of the fragmented self in this fast changing world monitored by cameras, frames and the feeling that we are constantly observed . Body is the main research tool, a moving diary. On its surface are imprinted all the stories, desires and fears experienced during the years. They are collected, and then, interpreted kinetically, blurring the boundaries between the material reality, and the reality of the unspoken. A keeper of all the intimate and domestic moments, trying to protect them from the external world. In this journey, Camera obscura is a companion and an opponent.

This research endeavours to reveal the transformative potential of artistic creativity by combining musical improvisation and yoga-based embodied listening practices. The study incorporates three listening practices: humming and self-observation, listening only with the right ear, and listening to the space within the heart. The effects of these experiments are documented in a journal and recorded as audio files. In addition to improvisation as a musical practice and embodied listening, this research also considers how yoga, - which has become an important part of Indian culture over the centuries with its roots in Vedic culture - can shape artistic identity through its philosophical understanding of sound, and its perspectives on the human body as a cosmos. The research emphasizes subjects such as the healing power of humming, chakra energy, collective consciousness, energetic centers of consciousness in the human body and their potential role in transforming the artist's identity. The thoughts and experiences in this research are personal, but the content of this article has been written based on these experiences as an attempt to present visions for global musicians to transition their musicianship into a more universal form, and to pose multifaceted questions to the reader. This paper draws attention to different improvisation techniques makam terminology and explores existing literature to open innovative doors based on holistic experience. The findings reveal the vibrant and energetic connections between the effects of music and vibrations on human life and the body, and the various philosophies that nourish the artist's identity and expression. This thesis encourages improvisation as a form of existence to establish deep spiritual connections with experiences from the past and present. Highlighting dimensions of music that are unnoticeable due to existing industrial structures and education models, the most importantly, esoteric knowledge of the body, inviting the reader to be open-minded for all sonic possibilities.

In recent years, it has become a real possibility for artists to engage with spatial sound technologies that allow for movement beyond the stereocentric paradigm. Thus, spatialization has mostly lent itself to avant-garde traditions, electronic music, and sound art. However, the rapid advancements of technologies have called for artists, songwriters, and musicians of all genres to contribute to this development not only by following and fitting into these new formats but also by shaping them through artistic engagements with them. When considering sound in space as a new component in the music creation toolbox, a new dimension is added that provides creative and performative potentials of situating songwriting and music creation within a spatial sound practice. Beyond the literal, what kinds of metaphorical or emotional resonance can emerge from the vibration between various bodies, such as composers, performers, and audiences, as well as bodies of sound, technologies, interfaces, instruments, scene, setting, speakers, aesthetics, and orientations? Voicing Spatial Songs was conducted by avant-pop duo SØSTR, which consists of sisters Louise Lind Foo and Sharin Foo.

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.

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