Call for Participants:

Syncopation, Synchrony, and the Art of Listening to Others

 

The Existential Psychology Group with the Performance Philosophy International Network seeks participants to create a Key Group for the 5th biennial Performance Philosophy conference, which will be held in Helsinki, Finland, from June 9-12, 2021.


The Performance Philosophy network aims to create a non-hierarchical and inclusive conference. Instead of individual keynote speakers, the conference invites proposals from key groups.


The theme of this year’s conference is “Performance Philosophy Problems 2021- How does Performance Philosophy Collaborate?”. The conference organizers ask, “What kinds of problems does work in the field of performance philosophy lead us to encounter and to articulate, and what tools does it provide to deal with them?” Artists, philosophers, scholars, artist-researchers and performance philosophers, regardless of their particular genre, school or discipline, are invited to articulate kinds of problems that can be addressed by collaboration between philosophy and the performing arts, broadly considered.


The Existential Psychology Group aims to create a Key Group presentation that considers the problematics of “problems” themselves. A problem, just like a patient, is so much more than “something to be solved”. The Existential Psychology Group was created within the Performance Philosophy network to address the entanglements of performance, ethics, hermeneutics, dialogue, drama, poetry, and the practical philosophy that is therapy, focusing on the existential questions of making meaning at the crossroads of existence: what does it mean to be free, to choose, to be responsible, and aware? Looking toward Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons,” we celebrate the event of understanding between participants in any performance, such as the performance on the “stage” of therapy, as the co-creation of new knowledge that looks beyond the individual and has an integrity and life of its own. A “problem”, such as the presenting problem of a mental illness or condition, can only be understood within the conversation and the performance of therapy, and as such, cannot be treated as an object of study, but more like a co-creation that takes on new life. How does the creation of such new understanding impact each participant’s freedom, access to choices, responsibility, and awareness of the horizons and boundaries of their own existence?


One of the major problems that therapists and counselors face is how to listen, and this question is exacerbated today by the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth is not new, but its now-widespread implementation during the pandemic has prompted varying responses, from criticism that it can only ever offer “therapy lite”, to enthusiasm for new forms of communication it might engender. The Existential Psychology Group proposes that we welcome the potential “problem” of listening and understanding during this unprecedented and historical moment as an opportunity for scrutinizing what it means to listen to others at all.

 

Does listening transform as a performance practice when the physical body is mediated through technology? What are we listening to—the person or the technology? Can we truly listen through such mediation, or do we merely hear? Or, how might our listening (interpreting) get in the way of our truly hearing (pre-reflectively, as to sound rather than music)? In Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy holds that “To listen, as well as to look or to contemplate, is to touch the work in each part—or else to be touched by it, which comes to the same thing” (p. 65). How can we listen so as to open and hold open, rather than produce meaning, and how might technology help us to better do that?

 

How does the necessity of communicating through technology exacerbate the boundaries of time, space, and the body that both define our isolation as well as open up our intersubjectivity? How do we and how must we differently listen, attune, and attend to one another during this time?

To this all, we offer the notion and experience of syncopation. Syncopation is rhythm patterned on mis-matching; it displaces accents so that strong beats become weak and vice versa. But as the gaps of syncopated rhythms continue, they synchronize. What at first feels awkward and backward becomes smooth, snappy, intriguing. Considering the art of listening and understanding that forms the basis of the practice of existential psychology and therapy, how is syncopation a kind of synchronization, and how might considering listening and understanding from amidst the demands on technology we are experiencing during the pandemic open our ears in new and different ways?

 

This is an inclusive group. All who desire to participate are welcome. We envision this group as an ensemble or a choir; singing together requires listening intently and intensely to voices of difference. In singing together, let us listen for other forms of expression. We seek key group participants who could bring performances, texts, images, or any other creative, scholarly, or practical offering to the collaborative creation of a group presentation for the conference. Please send a letter of interest of no more than 300 words with your contact information to:


Elisabeth Laasonen  Belgrano, PhD:  elibelgrano@ mac.com

AND

Claire Maria Chambers, PhD at chambersclaire@seattleu.edu


By November 10. Upon receipt of your letter the group organizers will send you details regarding next steps.

The interested participants will meet online to discuss the creation of our abstract around November 25.

At that point, duties will be assigned and the proposal written.

The proposal for the Key Group will be submitted to the conference website no later than Dec. 15.

Please visit the Performance Philosophy conference website for the conference-wide CFP (links below).

Note that bursaries are available for BIPOC folks.

 

Further information:

Existential Psychology group

Performance Philosophy  Network 

 

If you are not already a member, please consider joining the Performance Philosophy Network!


Performance Philosophy 2021 conference CFP

ALEPH 

 

.., is a PERFORMANCE in CONTINUUM. 

Layer on layer.

A tone stretching into infinity

- as life itself. 

Listening and sounding

- as acts of meaning-making -

marries sacredly around and into 

the safe line of extended

breathing/sounding/caring 

for the Other.


Expanding physically, mentally, spiritually, existentially...

 

Words and sound synchronice

through past memories,

overspilling presence,

and future imaginations.

Feelings, dissonances,

syncronisations, 

cold, warmth,

humidity.

Including

ALL and NOTHING.

 

 

 

 

collaborators in ALEPH:

Amori Mori Jorge Alcaide

Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano

Jonas Nilsson

Mark D. Price

Juan Carlos Poblete

Drew Sky




Recorded and edited in continuum in Kulturtemplet/Gothenburg, Manchester/Bolton

2020

A new organisational model: key groups in a key role

The thematic focus the conference is matched by its strategic aim: to develop non-hierarchical interaction and self-organisation between participants and to increase inclusiveness. This is why, in addition to individual and panel presentations, the conference is introducing a new organisational model in which the habitual ‘keynote speakers’ will be replaced by collective agencies, key groups (KGs).

The KGs will be created around a common problem. Each group may consist of artists, scholars, researchers, educators and other experts from within or outside academia. Already existing working groups, including those from other associations, are welcome to apply. The conference will facilitate the functioning of the KGs through a range of practical, financial, direct and in-kind support. In return, the KGs are expected to commit to working before, during and after the conference.

 

INTRA-ACTIVE zoom encounter Sat. 5 December 2020

(a one hour)


A PERFORMANCE through PHILOSOPHY 

departing from:

 

The ART of LISTENING or simply "LISTENING"

 

 

Meeting agenda

performance philosophizing through LISTENING (and hearing)

Looking at the act of listening in the broadest way...

 

the performance will be staged  as follow:

• Welcome!

•  Introduction: max 3  min. individual thinking/sharing per participant (performer) on  the idea of LISTENING 

• Introducing the conf. 

• our proposal

• open dialogue on the structure of KEY GROUP PROPOSAL

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

 

 

 

 

CONFERENCE VISION

 

(information for participants)



https://www.performancephilosophy.org/events/biannual-conference/

 

 

INCLUSIVENESS!!!

 

 

KG proposals (information for participants)

 

A KG consists of a group of people (minimum: 3): artists, scholars, artist-researchers, curators or other experts ready for a collaborative reflective practice around a common topic. The conference welcomes proposals from new groups and existing ones – whether from within the Performance Philosophy network (https://www.performancephilosophy.org/groups/) or other professional associations. Each KG needs to have a named ‘facilitator’ who will submit the conference proposal. The facilitator convenes the group and carries primary responsibility for its functioning and collaboration with the conference organisers before, during and after the conference.


How does a KG work?

KG proposals are formulated around the topic of the conference. Applicants should first read the full Vision Statement. Each KG will be offered a 90-minute slot for the presentation. Instead of ready-made performances or reports of accomplished projects, these sessions should prioritise presentations of works in progress wherein problems are opened, shared and developed together. Presentations should focus on the way the group works, that is, how it deals with its problem/s.

Before the conference, the facilitators of the KGs are invited to a two-day remote tutorial that runs from 1 to 2 February 2021, organised collaboratively by the members of the conference committee and the Performance Philosophy network.

In order to support their work, the conference invites the facilitators of the selected KGs to attend a series of collective teleconferences that run from 1 to 2 February 2021. The aim of the meetings is to plan the forthcoming sessions together and familiarise the KGs with their technical and practical parameters.

Each KG is appointed an individual ‘tutor’ who is ready to help it in its preparations and in the presentation itself.

The conference provides the KGs with a Research Catalogue–based digital platform with sufficient IT support. The platform functions both as a virtual workspace for the group and as a medium of dissemination for its outcomes.

The KGs are welcome to work at the venues of the Theatre Academy during the three days preceding the conference (from 7 to 9 June 2021).

The final KG sessions will take place in spacious venues where all the conference participants are present. The venues are technically well equipped and modifiable, suitable for visual, musical and corporeal performances. KGs are free to choose, or invent, how they organise their session.

A KG presentation may include:

  • performative demonstrations or experiments
  • workshops or participatory actions
  • choreographic and dramaturgical arrangements
  • paper or no-paper presentations
  • lecture demonstrations
  • transdisciplinary dialogues
  • interviews
  • group discussions
  • ‘virtual nodes’ (i.e. interventions by an intermediary of digital media)
  • something totally unexpected and surprising

After the conference, the KGs are asked to finalise their digital expositions. They are offered a chance to publish their outcomes, either in the forthcoming issue of the Performance Philosophy journal, (number 8.2, Dec. 2022), or in Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research, a Research Catalogue-based multi-medial journal.

 

 

 

Preparing KG proposal (deadline 15 Dec.):


 

(information for participants)



notes.... collecting ideas...

 

"

these groups provide an occasion for, and a frame in which, every participant of the conference can observe, and thereby think about, quite practically, how performance philosophy collaborates. Performance Philosophy, as a hybrid from inception, favours alternative and/or collaborative models of working and communication, where people with different kinds of experience, background and expertise meet and unite their efforts on an equal basis to face problems with both philosophical and artistic bearing. Through the PPPKGs, the conference itself wants to provide its participants with an occasion to witness actual research in-the-making in a critical and supportive collective setting. In this regard, the event is strongly inspired by the long-term commitment of art academies in Finland to the development of artistic research.

 

Besides PPPKGs, the conference also welcomes individual proposals for paper-presentations, no-paper presentations, lecture-demonstrations, lecture-performances, workshops, panels and other interventions fitting with the focus of the event and the given circumstances. (For more information, check the forthcoming Call for Participation)

 

A CONFERENCE THAT STRIVES TOWARDS INCLUSION

 

PPP Helsinki 2021 seeks to pay particular attention to access: to meet the needs of diverse participants; to take into account cultural and linguistic differences and to provide an environment that ensures a safe and respectful encounter between all participants. With an aim of widening modes of engagement, the event will draw on the benefits offered by new modes of remote and virtual participation, digital performing and philosophizing.

 

VENUES

 

PPP Parallel panels will take place in the facilities of the Helsinki Theatre Academy. Working group sessions bringing together all conference participants will take place right in the middle of Helsinki city, in the Töölönlahti bay area, either in spacious, well-equipped and easily accessible indoor venues, including Music House and Oodi Public Library, or in the open air in the vicinities of those venues, where there is lots of open public space, including parks, squares, lawns and street-life.

 

In June, the nights in Helsinki are luminous and charming. Every night during the conference there will be social events, Performance Philosophy Parties, involving local artists and activists in informal and inspiring settings, where everyone can come together.

these groups provide an occasion for, and a frame in which, every participant of the conference can observe, and thereby think about, quite practically, how performance philosophy collaborates. Performance Philosophy, as a hybrid from inception, favours alternative and/or collaborative models of working and communication, where people with different kinds of experience, background and expertise meet and unite their efforts on an equal basis to face problems with both philosophical and artistic bearing. Through the PPPKGs, the conference itself wants to provide its participants with an occasion to witness actual research in-the-making in a critical and supportive collective setting. In this regard, the event is strongly inspired by the long-term commitment of art academies in Finland to the development of artistic research.

Besides PPPKGs, the conference also welcomes individual proposals for paper-presentations, no-paper presentations, lecture-demonstrations, lecture-performances, workshops, panels and other interventions fitting with the focus of the event and the given circumstances. (For more information, check the forthcoming Call for Participation)

A CONFERENCE THAT STRIVES TOWARDS INCLUSION

PPP Helsinki 2021 seeks to pay particular attention to access: to meet the needs of diverse participants; to take into account cultural and linguistic differences and to provide an environment that ensures a safe and respectful encounter between all participants. With an aim of widening modes of engagement, the event will draw on the benefits offered by new modes of remote and virtual participation, digital performing and philosophizing.

VENUES

PPP Parallel panels will take place in the facilities of the Helsinki Theatre Academy. Working group sessions bringing together all conference participants will take place right in the middle of Helsinki city, in the Töölönlahti bay area, either in spacious, well-equipped and easily accessible indoor venues, including Music House and Oodi Public Library, or in the open air in the vicinities of those venues, where there is lots of open public space, including parks, squares, lawns and street-life.

In June, the nights in Helsinki are luminous and charming. Every night during the conference there will be social events, Performance Philosophy Parties, involving local artists and activists in informal and inspiring settings, where everyone can come together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOVING FORward into our proposed KEYGROUP:

 

Summarizing before the final creation of proposal:

 

Dear all, 

We had such a lovely, creative, and productive conversation on Saturday. Thank you, everyone, for making the time on a weekend (especially so early in the morning/late in the evening for some!). Speaking personally, it was such a pleasure to meet everyone. 

To move forward, Elisabeth and I would like to request that each of you respond to this e-mail with a few sentences (or video, or sound, or other media if you feel so moved) about the practice, presentation, or idea that you would like to include in our Key Group presentation. Please respond by December 10th. Please also submit any further ideas you have for structuring the presentation. I know this is a short turn-around, so thanks in advance. Then, Elisabeth and I will take your ideas to create the proposal we will submit to the conference on December 15th. This can be a multi-media proposal. 

 

The group created this basic idea for our Key Group proposal: 

Our presentation will take the form of an arena, something like a traditional poster session, but with immersive, performative, perhaps simultaneous interventions, hybridized between online and on location at the Helsinki Theatre Academy. We discussed this like an agora (both virtual and IRL), where we could exchange stories, listen to one another, other conference attendees, and members of the public. Another analogy we discussed was the alchemist’s alembic, with our interventions like alchemical substances we introduce into a space of experimentation.  

Some of the offerings our presentation might include: 

    • A durational performance in an immersive environment, perhaps the day before the conference  
    • Experiments with alternative forms of hearing (how can I listen without my ears?) 
    • Exploring the limits of listening (listening for the barely audible; being overwhelmed by listening; Aryong’s example of her patients with developmental disabilities not wanting to hear “om”—toleration) 
    • Listening and pain and/or trauma 
    • Exploring what listening really is or can be (Mark’s example of the deaf percussionist), exploration of how listening is an embodied art 
    • Finding ways to explore technology as both uniting and isolating 
    • Using theatre techniques to listen, such as Playback Theatre 
    • Sounds of silence—maybe a microphone in an empty room; people can tune into this soundtrack from elsewhere, perhaps online. Or, inviting people to make sounds of silences and share them. 
    • Sharing stories about listening; creating a collection or an archive that will live beyond the conference. When have you known you were heard? What’s it like to really hear someone? 



Again, the conference will take place June 9-12, 2021, at the Helsinki Theatre Academy in Finland. With all the unknowns surrounding the pandemic, we anticipate people participating on location and remotely. 

To access the recording of Saturday’s meeting, got to:  

https://seattleu.zoom.us/rec/share/-VUz8U_4lZbh1e9m-bX_dAGv0mFsS2uGCKkdZpyOot0d1_zU_FBMWCh3kHoyX4U8.hlk6A1llx_t_kz0K 



For an example of an interactive project using the Research Catalog, Elisabeth shares the site for ORNAMENTING (force) an ECOLOGY of TRUST (form): Exploring Force and Form through Performance /Performativity 

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/220252/220253?fbclid=IwAR03u9NWD1nofzH8g8lXK4iY3_6qQlV4pUP0gAD8-6TkfY1PVv_-E-CIO2o 



To access the research catalog page Elisabeth created for our group, go to: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1018320/1018321?fbclid=IwAR0JSJ-TX-wGgGLdg_hpwftG3wgepWkupqs2qYjLybBI_-3gR4uEDq33-K4 

With gratitude, 

Claire and Eli 

 

 

PROPOSAL!!!

 

The Art of Listening

a short video performance-essay-engagement exploring vocality, voicing, listening, and silence. The work will be a performative invitation to listen, to contact, and to respond with silence, stillness, movement, body, breath, and / or voice. The video may be projected in a suitable space as an installation or as an intimate experience on a computer with headphones.

 

Misha

What kind of alternative ways of listening can we find through artistic experiments?

What does listening mean in the time of pandemic, who and what do we listen to? How do we make meaning of what we hear? How can we find ways of empathetic presence without physical presence?

 

Anna

Listeing to the process. Tuning into non/existing acts of and silences... Tuning in to the spirit of our senses.

 

Eli

"how we might  engage with silence/ absence/non-meaning  in ways which do not impose an over-hasty closure of the phenomena by relegating it all to logical negation. Whatever silence ''is'', it is not merely ''the absence of sound'',  It meshes with meaning in all sorts of synchronous ways which seem necessary to any dialogue. 

 

Yesterday I took a tape-loop from a total stranger on FB and listened to it until the ''meaning'' and ''feeling'' evaporated. A little like repeating a word until all there is left is the materiality of the vocalisation. But the conscious mind detests a vaccum, and soon enough the ear and brain and body start to invent meanings in the nuances.  We stare into the fire and make dragons, we join the dots of random stars and make constellations,  After about twenty minutes I began to ''hear words'' in the one-minute tape loop.  In Deleuze's or Jane Benett's terms, or Walt Whitman's, the process is ''allowing matter itself to speak..'.  Within three, maybe four hours I had assembled a poem/song and posted it on Youtube,   I would be interested in repeating the practice under similar conditions for the conference, making pieces from loop-tapes of my fellow contributors. it would be interesting to explore not the ''Logos '' or propositional content of your voices, but your voices themselves... to try to amplify ''what your voice has to say'' regardless of lexical meanings.  

 

Mark

.....

 

 

Claire

I prefer silence but actually it is not complete silence. For me, silence means one from the artificial sound. Through the absence of artificial and mechanical sound, our senses open to natural sound when we step on carpets, to air which touches the skin when we move hands and shoulders or to body sound. For me it is so hard to relax when I get on  the silence car [...] It is fascinating and challenging to talk about "making sound."   
 
Aryong

I physically express my current situation, story, in motion. If you are two, it is done by both bodies without connection to each other, ie two subjective monologues that can grow into a duolog, ie each and doing his thing in turn without response from the other. The next step is that one tries to listen to the other, to tune in physically to the other's movements, both as imitating but also in his own way. Then it is done the other way around. That is, the other listens to the first, and so on. The third step is the dialogue, where based on each person's movement possibilities, an intermediate area is found where the creation takes place and a common story / listening communication in motion.

 

Elisabeth

60 secs of Silence

 

 

Unknown Other

how we can learn to let go of that need to control the listener's experience. When we speak to someone in person, we cannot really grasp how we are being perceived and listened to. But we may be inclined to control the experience as much as we can, to help better relay the meanings that we want to convey and be understood more accurately. We feel we can somewhat control the experience because we hear ourselves as we speak. We generate an idea of how we come across to the other person. As we hear ourselves, we make tweaks to it as we go. We may make use of our tone of voice, a conscious choice of words, gestures, facial expressions. Or, we may rely on a fundamental trust in that person’s relationship to us and their ability to grasp what we say. 

 

There could be two people sitting face to face in a dialogue with each other, but they are both wearing earpieces that emit random disruptive noises. The earpieces do not play the same noises at the same time, so one person who hears a random noise would not be able to assume that the other person hears the same thing they do. However, they will see the person flinch, look lost, confused, uncertain, annoyed etc.... and they will not know if that reaction is because of what they said to them, or because of the noise they hear in their ears that is disruptive to them.... 

Or it might not be disruptive, but it may change the overall emotional experience of how they perceive what the other person say.....So.... maybe in addition to random disruptive noises, we can also play ambient or epic music--- to romanticize or dramatize what they hear from the other person??

 

Sophia