Research Catalogue

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

'Empowering Collective Performing Arts: A Facilitator’s Collection of Voice and Dance Scores to Overcome Social Barriers' is a practice-led research project that explores the ways to encourage group connection through performing arts activities within diverse communities.

Wang Xiyao (1992) is a leading abstract Chinese painter based in Berlin, whose complex account of intercultural abstraction sees Eastern tradition deep in dialogue with contemporary Western language. It has replaced vivid, multilayered-meanings, deep personal experience, cultural memory, and common history, which have traditionally formalist postulates. Under the mentorship of Werner Büttner and Anselm Reyle and also inspired by Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Julie Mehretu, she began to elaborate a dynamic practice based on rhythmically interplaying color, line, and space. Many works are inspired by poetic and philosophical tradition, employing concepts such as Chinese Liu Bai (留白, intentional blank space) and moving into physical expression through dance and martial arts. In this respect, Wang's working process in creation corresponds to the concept of bodily perception in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and experiential aesthetics in John Dewey, considering immersion in the multisensory approach rather than pure visual contemplation. By an original synthesis in manifold aesthetic and sensory modalities, she thus develops multidirectional experiences, which are fascinatingly active and dialogic in the sense that they stir her viewer into an incessant questioning about form, culture, and consciousness.

In this article, Bob Selderslaghs presents a research project by the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp and Fontys Academy of the Arts Tilburg on how teaching artists can strengthen their practice in an international, hybrid learning community. Through inspiring lectures, practical experiments and in-depth reflection, participants gained recognition for their practice, expanded their artistic-pedagogical repertoire and built valuable contacts. The project emphasises the power of flexible frameworks, embodied learning and sustainable networks for greater visibility and impact in this dynamic field.

This exposition presents a practice-based research project that reimagines electronic music performance through the participatory and ritualistic ethos of Capoeira. Initially motivated by a critique of audience passivity in contemporary electronic performance, the project shifted from “translating” Capoeira into an electronic context toward constructing ritual-based frameworks that foster shared authorship, presence, and collective agency. The research unfolded through iterative processes of design, testing, and reflection. Early on, ritual was established as a conceptual foundation, situating the work within debates on participation, spectacle, and cultural belonging. Subsequent phases explored instrument-making as both technical and symbolic practice, producing DIY electroacoustic objects (Lua and Mar) that embody accessibility, agency, and transparency. Attention then turned to orchestrating the ritual performance itself, experimenting with spatial, temporal, and sensory structures that redistribute power and unsettle the artist–audience divide. The process culminated in a public performance integrating instruments, structure, and reflection, while raising new questions around documentation, belonging, and the fragility of agency. From these iterations emerged the framework of ritual as multi-dimensional architecture: a compositional and perceptual field where time, space, materials, and social dynamics interweave to sustain collective creativity. The exposition combines documentation of instruments and performances with reflective writing, offering both a record of process and a proposition for future development.

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