Navigating in Overlaps: Redefining Performance Space as Multi-Space
(2024)
author(s): Stijn Brinkman
published in: KC Research Portal
In this study it is advocated to perceive performance space as overlapping multiple spatial layers, all existing in the same moment, but all with different boundaries. A triangle of performer, audience and surroundings creates performance space together as co-players by activating spatial layers and redrawing spatial boundaries. A new term is coined to better understand the unstable, moving nature of performance space: multi-space. To deal with the concept of multi-space in actual performances, the use of the verbs ‘navigate’ and ‘zoom in/out’ are advocated.
Embedded in this study is an exposition of the artistic projects of Stijn Brinkman, in which the concept of multi-space is tested as new tool to create performances with more exploration, agency, imagination, and movement. By finding a way for performers to disappear and to be present at the same time, the domination of walls and the domination of a performer's body (both apparent in many traditional performances) are challenged. The concepts of multi-space, navigate and zoom in/out stimulate audiences to engage more with their surroundings, while helping performers to shape their ideas always through site-specific processes.
"An Actor Prepares": A musician's approach to a selection of techniques by Konstantin Stanislavski
(2022)
author(s): André Teixeira
published in: KC Research Portal
The belief that imagination’s engagement and emotional connection with what I play enhance my performance propelled me to do this research. However, these are not systematically integrated in instrumental practice. Thus, it seemed to me that the twentieth century theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski’s ‘system’ would be the perfect basis for such a quest.
The starting point were acting techniques from his first book "An Actor Prepares": the "given circumstances", imagination-related ("supposed circumstances", “inner visions”, "magic if”) – and emotion-related ("emotion memory", "sensation memory", "surroundings"). Partly supported by existing literature, these techniques were linked with the instrumentalists' work and tested out in a self-case study through three interventions.
The process consisted of making video recordings of the 'before' and the actual interventions, which were guided by the filling out of intervention forms designed by me. The techniques were applied on three distinct piano passages of Richard Strauss’ melodrama for narrator and piano "Enoch Arden". Furthermore, I did interventions’ reports to provide more palpable insights about the experience, namely the effects of each technique on the performer.
The outcome was evaluated through a questionnaire filled in by a group of listeners, comprising musicians and non-musicians, and by me.
The responses generally show that the techniques were effective. However, the recordings were perceived as very similar. Also, the listeners’ perception sometimes differed from mine.
Nevertheless, the reports allow us to conclude that these techniques might affect the performer’s focus, creativity, self-confidence, knowledge about the works and also self-knowledge.
Multilayeredness in Solo Performance
(2021)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory Copenhagen
This project investigates the multilayered potentials of solo performance with the intention of opening up the single player limitations often experienced during the creative process of play and practice.
In performance contexts ranging from acoustic solo piano to a digital code-based video keyboard, concepts of multilayeredness are explored through compositional and improvisational strategies, that include instrument topography, extended piano techniques, audio-visual sampling and digital keyboard mapping.
The purpose is also to create results that will contribute to how solo artists across formats can express themselves more dynamically and with greater flexibility in the interaction between their various materials and artistic ideas. A contribution also in terms of expanding methodological approaches to how solo performers and research practitioners can work iteratively and interactively in their reflective processes, inviting both a more verbalised and dialogic form, and to explore ways of documenting and communicating these processes in hybrids between text, sound and image.
negotiating the space in between
(2021)
author(s): Jonas Frey
published in: Research Catalogue
This research was conducted to reveal a deeper understanding of my artistic practice that moves in between redefining my urban dance practice and an opening to ideas of contemporary choreography.
Based on studio sessions, interviews and reflections and using a variety of modalities for documentation, this practice-led research expands my artistic practice, bringing in sources of inspiration from dance, pedagogy, sociology and philosophy.
The main outcomes channeled into an emerging methodology that provides strategies to develop co-creative contemporary choreography.
This methodology can serve diverse creative contexts that foster the wish to collaborate and be imaginative.
Embedded in an upcoming artistic community of urban dance based choreographers this research seeks to define my space within the landscape of contemporary choreography.
Demmin – letting a city sound
(2020)
author(s): Mareike Nele Dobewall
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The project ’Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen’ (’Demmin – letting a city sound’) explores the history and stories of the German city of Demmin in a dialogue between the local choir, Peenechor, and the site of Haus Demmin. During a two-week workshop the choir and Mareike Dobewall explored how to vocalise other stories, of the inhabitants of Demmin and the two decaying buildings known collectively as Haus Demmin (the ruins of an 11th century fortress and a former mansion). In a sonic dialogue between ageing voices and decaying architecture a vocal performance in the open air was created. Stories, history and fairy tales took new shape through vocal music, and un-listened sound was given presence. The site-determined performance allowed for the memory and the imagination of the visitors and the participants to rise up and become a part of a holistic experience.
The Lost and Found project: Imagineering Fragmedialities
(2019)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture.
I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do.
To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method.
By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites.
I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).
Future Guides for Cities: From Information to Home
(2018)
author(s): Michelle Teran
published in: Norwegian Artistic Research Programme
“Future Guides: From Information to Home” is an artistic research project on following: how to practice and theorize following. It was carried out between 2010-2014 within the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme and around the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. A final exhibition of my artistic research, “Your Revolution Begins at Home“, took place at the USF Gallery and Cinemateket in Bergen, September 4-14, 2014. “Confessions of an Online Stalker“, a critical reflection text on artistic results of the research, was submitted in 2015.
Artificial Center of the Imagination
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): The Artistic Director of the ACI
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Artificial Center of the Imagination is a loosely existing consortium of thinkers, artists, caretakers, makers, technologists, therapists, and educators, all sharing an affinity with the imaginary and the artificial. This exposition is a gathering of thoughts, a sharing of ideas, and a calendar of activities.
Imagining the world through the lens of loser and hoping for a better future
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Anna Pierga
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
My thesis is an attempt to create a bridge between my artistic practice and theoretical research behind its themes and topics. I highlight imagination as a tool to recreate one’s world in order to survive a hostile, success-oriented and normative daily reality. The text is divided into three main sections. Each focusing consecutively on childhood,
queerness and examples of imagination in fairy tales and artistic practices; all understood through the lens of failure. I look at childhood as a queer and highly creative universal experience of living on the edge of established social norms.
I draw on queer writtings such as Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstram and Cruising Utopia: Then and There of Queer Futirity by José Esteban Muñoz in search of utopia and longing for a better future.
In the final part of my thesis I refer to Ursula Le Guin’s essays on fantasy and science fiction, fairy tales and artistic practices. I explore various examples of failed heroes and the role of imagination in order to rewrite the present for a queerer future of more possibilities.
Imagined Voices : a poetics of Music-Text-Film
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Yannis Kyriakides
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Imagined Voices', a research by Yannis Kyriakides, deals with a form of composition, music with on-screen text, in which the dynamic between sound, words and visuals is explored. The research explores the ideas around these 'music-text-films', and attempts to explain how meaning is constructed in the interplay between the different layers of media.
Issues that initially arose out of the research, were directly related to the question of 'voice': Who is narrating? And where is the voice located? These questions became more pertinent after noticing a phenomenon occurring during performances of these works: that when we read text synchronised to music, we become very aware of an inner voice silently reading along. This effect of hearing one's own voice in the music, was a discovery that had many consequences for the ways in which the ideas about listening and the role of multimedia could function within music.
In the creative work of the research, that has resulted in over thirty works of 'music-text-film' the media are set up to highlight ways of listening that puts emphasis on the role of the listener/spectator. A state of limbo is created between the narrative voice of the text and the implied voice of the music, due to the absence of a conventional focal point to pin it on - an actor or a singer. The thesis suggests that because of this vacancy and the way the projected word takes the place of the sung or spoken voice, the inner voice of the audience becomes activated. This then becomes a vital immersive dimension in the performance, as the inner voices of the audience find their place within the fabric of the music.
The Informed Performer
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joost Vanmaele
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Playing a musical instrument is generally considered to be a complex human behaviour involving the integration and coordination of a broad range of human functions such as perception, imagination, memory, information processing, emotion, communication, and dexterity. From this perspective, it seems only reasonable to assume that, in an age of informational and communicational abundance, this intrinsic multifacetedness manifests itself in numerous informational contact-points between musical practice and a variety of academic and para-academic fields which zoom in on these specific elements of musical activity. Joost Vanmaele’s dissertation is directed at carefully and systematically evaluating the position of musicianship in an age of informative abundance and connectedness, to consider ways of re-balancing and broadening its epistemic grounds and attuning its information systems, with a view to artistic development, enrichment and/or liberation. By proposing a Bio-Culturally informed Performers’ Practice of Western Art Music [BCiPP], an information- and dialogue-friendly, transdisciplinary space is created where musical activities are not considered as phenomena sui generis but rather as informable cultural instances or personal particularisations of the human capacity to meaningfully generate and react to temporally patterned sounds. The potential impact of BCiPP is put to the test in two case-studies.