recent activities
Performative paradigm for businesses
(2025)
Lorena Croceri
Performative Paradigm for Businesses
Reconfiguring Strategy, Presence and Creative Leadership
This article introduces the Performative Paradigm as an innovative framework for business development, leadership and strategic positioning. Moving beyond traditional rational models, the performative approach integrates embodiment, narrative, and emotional architecture into the very core of professional structures.
Rather than separating personal presence from strategic decision-making, this paradigm understands the body, desire, and symbolic expression as essential tools for navigating uncertainty and generating sustainable innovation. Drawing from performance studies, psychoanalytic thinking, and affect theory, the article explores how performative logic can be applied to projects, teams, and leadership styles—especially within multidisciplinary or creative industries.
Far from being abstract, the paradigm proposes concrete methodologies and real cases where performative alignment has shifted business dynamics: from burnout to embodied clarity, from fragmentation to integrated vision. Aimed at entrepreneurs, consultants, and visionary leaders, this article opens a liminal path where doing and being converge.
Playing in Tongues - Possible dialogues between Odissi dance and experimental electronic music
(2025)
Francesco Gulic
How can dance and music, an art rich of history and a recent practice, the living body and digital immateriality communicate with each other? This project explores these questions through a live electronics performance in interaction with Odissi dance, one of the eight classical Indian dance forms. The performance combines fixed and improvised elements, fostering a dynamic interplay where music sometimes leads the dance and at other times responds to it. The work mirrors the traditional Odissi performance arc while reinterpreting it through a contemporary Western compositional lens.
The sound material is created using SuperCollider, a code-based music synthesis platform. Algorithmic processes govern parameters such as duration, pitch, and amplitude, while real-time interventions are performed via a MIDI controller, enabling a fluid and reactive sonic environment.
Several collaborative experiments inform the project’s development. Conducted both remotely and in-person, they involved exchanging musical sketches and choreographic responses, fostering a conceptual understanding of each other's creative processes, and enabled immediate feedback and improvisatory interaction, revealing how abstract sound gestures are interpreted by the dancer as vivid metaphors of natural phenomena through the expressive language of mudra.
This project embraces the idea that meaning in performance does not pre-exist but rather emerges through the interweaving of gesture, sound, attention, and relational space. Rather than seeking fixed correspondences between music and dance, the collaboration foregrounds the instability and fluidity of sense-making as a shared experiential process. Movement and sound co-construct each other in the moment, guided by intuition, somatic listening, and a continuous negotiation of presence. In this light, the work becomes less about illustrating pre-defined narratives and more about cultivating a living texture of interaction—an evolving field where different temporalities, traditions, and sensitivities resonate and transform one another.
Informed by Andrée Grau’s insights in Intercultural Research in the Performing Arts (1992), this project also approaches collaboration not as a neutral meeting ground but as a space charged with cultural histories and asymmetries of knowledge. Grau urges us to move beyond celebratory notions of “fusion” and to critically examine how traditions are represented, adapted, and negotiated in performance. In this light, the work does not seek to erase difference but to hold it in tension, encouraging a space where both artists remain grounded in their respective practices while allowing mutual transformation to occur. Rather than simplifying or assimilating Odissi into a Western framework, the collaboration is framed as an encounter—sometimes smooth, sometimes resistant—that reflects the complex, evolving nature of intercultural exchange. Here, meaning is not given but co-constructed through attention, respect, and a willingness to remain in the discomfort of not fully understanding.
Bibliography
Grau, A. (1992). Intercultural research in the performing arts: A critical review. Edinburgh University Press.
Jayadeva. Gītagovinda. Tr. Giuliano Boccali (1982). Adelphi.
Cassio, F. (2000). Percorsi della voce. Storia e tecniche esecutive del canto dhrupad nella musica classica dell'India del nord. Ut Orpheus Edizioni.
Frödin, K. Unander-Scharin, Å. (2024). FRAGMENTE2. Research Catalogue. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=2045845
Frisk, H. (2025). Sound intuition. Research Catalogue. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=3025541
Giordano, S. The emerging sense. Research Catalogue. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=1220694
Delphi and Delos, a Journey
(2025)
Olivia Penrose Punnett
This video essay explores the sacred landscapes of Delphi and Delos, studying their historical significance as a centres of female knowledge, through embodied, intuitive, and affective engagement. Thinking about Ada Lovelace’s notion of poetical science, the site visits seek to trace the contextual and geographical roots of this concept. The film approaches knowledge as a sensuous, relational and embodied process, one that resists dominant rationalist and technocentric paradigms.
The voiceover, recorded in Greece, threads reflections from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Karen Barad’s Diffracting Diffraction (2014), and Sasha Biro’s The Oracle as Intermediary (2022) from Otherwise Than Binary, New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture Decker, J.E., Layne, D.A. and Vilhauer, M. (2022). Through these situated readings, the film proposes curating research and thinking through place as not merely interpretive but performative: an intra-active practice between self, site, and matter.
The work explores myth and reverie, positioning the body in context as instrument. It proposes an expanded curatorial methodology rooted in presence, sensual attention, and poetic science - where intuition is included, and the landscape is approached as co-creator.
recent publications
Trumpeting at the Court of Christian IV
(2025)
Ólafur Elliði Halldórsson
Two of the oldest manuscripts containing trumpet music lie in the Royal Danish Library and were both written in Denmark around the year 1600. They contain hundreds of fanfare-like melodies with little explanation as to how, why, or where they should be played. Written by trumpeters with limited musical education, the manuscripts present a unique challenge in deciphering distinct and personal notation styles. The aim of this research is to shed a new light on the so-called Thomsen and Lübeck manuscripts by stepping into the shoes of the trumpeters of the late renaissance and early baroque. The court of Christian IV (1577-1648), King of Denmark and Norway, was one of the most influential courts of early 17th century Europe and employed a respectable number of at least 123 trumpeters throughout Christian’s 60 year reign. By examining the role and duty of those trumpeters, as well as the culture around trumpet playing in the 16th and 17th centuries we gain a new insight into the festive, vigorous, and loud music of the royal courts. Improvisation plays a big part in interpreting the Danish manuscripts. By applying improvisation techniques described by Italian and German trumpeters in the 17th century, as well as considering the capabilities and limitations of historical instruments, new life is brought to fanfares which might appear monotonous and repetitive at first glance.
We Are You - An Investigation into intersections between Western Contemporary Opera and Online Fan Culture
(2025)
Robin Fiedler
Finding an audience we can relate to, or bringing our social circle into our audience is still a struggle for most younger composers. With the Western classical opera audiences ageing and the attempts to bring younger audiences into opera houses and concert halls, we need to ask ourselves as composers who we write for, and how we reach these people. My opera Serenoid which had its premiere in September 2024 at Tête-à-Tête Festival in London came out of a niche space of queer and disabled geek culture in creative online fandom communities that I have been part of since I was a teenager. These groups are hardly engaged with classical music as a genre, their creative focus is on visual art and writing, mostly around an established pop-culture franchise, in this case Star Trek. Often decried as cringy, the spaces in which they move have been melting pots for many people outside of the narrow representation of mainstream media in search for community and belonging since the arrival of the internet. The decision to take Serenoid as a story from an obscure niche space on the internet to the opera stage attempts to speak to its members and therefore open the doors my own community to become part of the “opera audience”. My research describes the process and outcomes of this experiment and hopes to prove that as classical composers we can speak to younger and diverse audiences by openly and authentically being part of the group we write for.
L'Art de doubler
(2025)
Anežka Drozdová
Just as variety and change are the core principles of nature itself, they seem to be essential for music, too. This research examines doubles in the repertoire for flute between 1700–1750 as a specific type of variation. Originating as a vocal tradition of embellishing the second verses of airs de cour, the tradition continued in instrumental music by creating doubles mostly for songs and dance forms, such as Menuet, Gavotte or Sarabande and remained popular until it gradually evolved into the variation form in the second half of the 18th century. The role of the flute in this repertoire is unique thanks to the vogue of the airs the cour among flautists and composers for flute.
The presented exposition traces the development of doubles in the flute repertoire of the first half of the 18th century. Highlighting the variety of unique compositional styles, the research distinguishes between three typological categories of doubles: diminutive, ornamental, and those presented in sets of variations, typical of a Galant sonata. The examination and analysis of a representative number of doubles led me to extract elements and patterns, typical for each category, and, in turn, this thorough study of the doubles allowed me to play them with a better understanding. Finally, the synthesis of both the theoretical and empirical approaches provided enough information and inspiration to compose doubles for other musical pieces from the same period. These newly composed doubles are included in the collection titled L’Art de doubler, attached to the exposition.