Position

Motivation letter (draft) for a (never-sent) application

To:

Stockholm Uniarts

Professor of Directing/Position Recruitment

Motivation letter

Dear Selection Committee members,

I write to apply to the Professor of Directing position at Stockholm Uniarts.

After living and working in Lyon (France), as a straight theatre director and as a leader of my own theatre company for six years, I deterritorialized myself and my practice to Berlin, where I spent the next seven years as a freelance artist, queering my theatre practice through new encounters and collaborations, from and within installation, visual and choreographic arts. Three years ago, I decided to move to Helsinki in order to start a new cycle and focus on an artistic research doctorate in the Performing Arts Research Center at the Uniarts Helsinki; Doctorate on Neganthroposcenic Chronotopias, Deep Stage and Hyperdramatic theatre (working title). I am currently carrying this out (3rd year), with the plan to defend within two years. Since my obligatory research-studies are completed, I am currently proceeding with my research (written part and second and last examined artistic part) more outside of the academic curriculum of the doctorate program, while following the research community events on a regular contributive mode. I am thus in the phase of my process when it makes total sense, from a professional perspective, to get engaged and committed with a contemporary directing program/professorship, within a university of the arts where artistic research has been gaining amplitude and credibility, and within an exciting ecosystemic renewal of teams and dramaturgies in order to look deeply at shifting paradigms of art training and production. It would indeed be an ideal place for me to commit and disseminate, develop and share the professional artistic and research-oriented process with students and colleagues; this artistic-research-process combines both the questioning of the necessary transformation of my practice as a theatre director, from an anthropo(s)cenic perspective, and the opening to alternative expositions of the practice through artistic research aesthetic, epistemic and ecological challenges and innovations. This twofold endeavor would be the basis from which I can start a new movement in the continuity of the research with the students and the diverse artistic and pedagogic team of the University of the Arts of Stockholm.

What I can contribute to Uniarts Stockholm is an encouraging approach to a radical and experimental directing/scenic thinking and practice, or what I also call a practice of re-directing. This critically and generatively expands the historical western understandings of directing, considered and transmitted, so far, and still as the dominant trend, through the full potency of the aesthetic control of what we call a stage; an understanding furthermore founded on a humanist conviction, whether theological or teleological, that still claims that theatre is for makers, audiences and critics alike the human reflective art form par excellence. I propose to revise the nature and goal of the practice of directing, in my own practice, and in my pedagogical proposal that I will outline here.

This pedagogical proposal takes root in my own artistic research project of revising my practice as a director from the anthropo(s)cenic perspective of a reinitialized time ecology of the (notion of) stage (see attached description of the specific research and the additional glossary). In that direction the project would propose to institute a paradigm shift in the training of directing based on the move from the experience of the stage as center to the experience of the stage as middle. This process implies an attempt to deepen the stage by redirecting attentions towards more than human materialities and temporalities, and by projecting theatre beyond human history and scale, from the deep time of geological strata to the light-speed of big data. In this perspective training directing would, therefore, turn into training redirecting, which would imply experimentality in the learning process of minimizing, almost-suspending, but also, paradoxically, expanding (within inter-planetary, inter-species and inter-data scope) the anthropogenic production and organization of the stage, therefore suggesting the notion of stage that is re-founded/re-founding itself.  

This pedagogical project, which would stem from my practice as an artist and from my simultaneous speculations and experimentations as a researcher, would indeed propose a shift from traditional humanist views to post-humanist contemporaneity (this concept of contemporaneity will be revised on the basis of its actual redefinition, e.g. in dialogue with the research line of the “contemporary condition” researchers in Aarhus University, Denmark). The project would develop on a broad spectrum of opportunities, sensitive knowledge and theoretical matters sourcing from various disciplines. It would aim to encourage students-(re)directors to enter into a process of critical hybridization of practices and agencies, by crisscrossing contemporary force fields from the performing and visual arts, philosophy, science, engineering, architecture, and new media among others. I would develop, in common with my colleagues, a curriculum with a specific emphasis on exploring from and towards a revised thinking of the stage based on scenic agencies’ questioning and reshuffling. This curriculum would be generated by a focus on the foundations and the becoming of contemporary planetary climatic and techno-conditioned challenges. Together with the students, we would look at the biospheric climate mutations, at the massive displacements of populations, at the increasing entanglement of humans and algorithms, at the growing presence of artificial intelligence (and imagination?) in our daily lives, at the transformative powers of bio-engineering, among other environmental conditions, and we would search and find renewed aesthetic regimes of directing that are able to address these issues. By being informed by these flows, objects, and scales, new stages would emerge that challenge the inherited logic of representation by developing dispositifs of experience, perception-shift, and performativity. Hence in that (re)direction I would suggest amplifying the current process of re-establishing the position of the theatre director within the contemporary post-humanist and climatic demand of redistribution of the organization and production of stages. Stages that poetically engage with and respond to environments, sites and landscapes transformations on Earth and beyond, changing weathers, eco-systemic sustainability, social justice, anti-racism and decolonization of practices, radical-otherness encounters and alien (anti-)matters, utopian leftovers and uchronic charms, post/non/beyond-human, but also vegetal and animal, scenic -turns, multiverses and interplanetary cultures, digital culture and algorithmic biopolitics, speculative architecture thinking, extinctions/finitudes and mourning, eco-anxiety, and hope.

In that (re)direction I would commit to developing, testing and providing new strategies and develop future-oriented working and learning – collaborative and transdisciplinary - methods around the following questions: How to (re)direct, perform and prototype the stage of the future in the face of the environmental threats and lives-technoconditioning of the 21st century? How to re-establish the practice of directing from a revised temporal ecology of the stage, exceeding the modernist linear, progressive and human-centered western conceptualization of time, operating within a crisis of time, looking at and being moved by queer temporalities indexed to operative notions such as heterochrony, anachrony, pluritemporality and idiorrythmie? Within this regime of diffraction of the conventional nowness of the theatrical representation, how to (re-)consider more-than-human, embodied and disembodied, agents (vegetal, animal, mineral, meteorological but also machines, bots, algorithms, holograms, VR creatures, spirits and specters, extraterrestrials...) as contemporary and future scenic co-agents? In other words, how to ecologically revise and renegotiate the (exclusive) human aesthetic control of the stage, a reset that might imply a disjunction from homochronic and anthropocentric representation to what can be coined as altertemporal xenoperfomativity?

 
I would take care to introduce and implement this phase of mutation not as a disruptive process, undermining history, practices, and rituals of conventional western theatre, but rather as an imaginative, generative and critical deconstruction, which would imply a creative meta-perspective on the possibility to transmit tradition and engage with established theatre habits, conventions, and matters. To question what can scenic practice transitioning be at work and at play.

My pedagogical offer as professor of (re)directing would dialogue here with the transformations of other disciplines and practices in the performing arts by looking at and discussing with the advances in expanded choreography and cyber-somatics, actors’ and spectators’ networks, performative scenography and proto-architecture, techno-eco-dramaturgy, critical light design and sound re-imagination, among other disciplinary mutating processes. The students in (re)directing would together go through a trans/inter-medial practical experience in workshops and labs shared in common, which would offer them hands-on experience of engaging with a wide spectrum of transformative, speculative and queer concepts, media, strategies, and materials, and consequently of redefining the power structures at stake in the emergence of redirected stages.

I would be committed to bringing the question of the political in, opening a plateau for pondering and experimenting on different registers and levels of the political dimensions of the stage, in resonance with contemporary geopolitics, distributions of power and labor, new economies and invisible finance systems. This platform would be the testing zone for debating options for the students' design of artistic political discourses, putting at work and play generative contradictions between the adornian legacy on intransitive politics of the artwork and contemporary regain of activisms. These diverse positions could rub against each other and generate original constructions that would contribute to shaping an alternative production of imaginaries for the future of our “commons” in a rapidly techno-eco-changing world, where the notion of “we” has shifted from Hegelian human-oriented teleology to Harawayan radically democratic common that includes all earthly living entities (plus more or less living cyber ones). In this aesthetic and political perspective, that I suggest to name neganthropo-scenic after free-fusioning Stiegler and Chaudhuri, and resetting theatre’s social function within actors, but also spectators, network concerns in the time of the Anthropocene, I would suggest that theatre, as artist Irena Haiduk put it talking about art, on the occasion of the last Documenta 14, is " not here to provide a social service, an infrastructure, or a good feeling". Instead, theatre should produce wild, queer, unexpected and not immediately appropriable imaginary, and expose untamed matters that might at some point resonate with the ethical dimensions of the broader cultural and political context.

One focus of my ongoing research is to think about the skills, sensitivities, and abilities that should be strengthened in an educational curriculum of students-artists dealing with (re)directing. Scenic thinking here is an entanglement of agency and suspension, based on sensitivity, skill, and ability to recognize and parse various simultaneous multi-directional scenic agents. Through this logic I would take students into the process of recognizing and naming a context/situation/stage/force field in order to build awareness on how directing can shift and multiply perceptions through redirection within a chosen dispositif. I am very interested in being part of developing a (re)directing curriculum, which would emphasize and support radical, critical, ecologically and eco-dramaturgically sustainable practices and processes from a pedagogical, artistic and epistemological perspective. This means, for example, a critical reflection toward the tendency that art is realized through productions or that the stage is thought of as a mono-focal, mono-temporal and mono-spatial container for objects of reparative representations (mimesis/catharsis). I would encourage students to gain a broad awareness of the historical development of performance and visual arts from a revised scenic thinking, engaging critically with mainstream history of western theatre, and instituting theatre by claiming counter histories, like negative, queer, landscapist and ecocritical traditions. This project is aware that steps have already be taken by scholars toward the construction of a post-anthropocentric stage. Elinor Fuchs, for example, in a crucial book, The Death of the Character: Perspective of Theatre after Modernism (1996) identified certain general lines for drawing a counter-history of the centripetal stage, drawing on Stein and Beckett, among others. Una Chaudhuri, who collaborated with Fuchs on several projects, coined in 2014 the term Anthroposcene with an ‘s’, opening an aesthetic perspective in the collision between the post-anthropocentric stage and the Anthropocene. I could add here Kershaw, Orozco, May, and Lavery as ecocritical theatre and performance studies researchers that have explored theatricality as a mean to trouble human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism and anthropic (Stiegler) production of imagination based on infinite exploitation of earth resources and prevalence of human species over others. My project follows those steps, beyond the already modernity-deconstructive postdramatic theatre momentum that has determined the last almost two-decades practices of directing, away from metaphysics of presence and anthropogenic scenic control.

I would hence support students’ curiosity towards social and human sciences, contemporary theoretical trends, and encourage them to focus on ecosophy, new materialisms, new feminisms, queer theories, postcolonialisms and speculative discourses in science-fiction and future studies (Jacques Derrida meets Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, deconstruction and vitalism, following Karen Barad's synchretic path), in order to envisage our contemporary world give the students confidence in directing (and in acting, dramaturgy, scenography, etc...) and to enable them to become the critical builders of the non-anthropocentric, centrifugal, virtual, deferred and diffracted stages of the future. In practice this approach would take place as an experimental and research-orientated approach to the relations between the stage, and what I call, after the postdramatic phase, hyperdrama (in relation to Timothy Morton's hyperobjects), which implies a human re-trained and re-positioned agency and perception. In that direction, I would like to propose a special focus on contemporaneity and predicted climate issues and global policies, in order to develop critical renewed takes on representation and perception, pondering with the students: how can we address these urgent matters ecologically, with awareness of the risks of greenwashing opportunism, catastrophe aestheticizing, exploiting/marketing hot topics and art wasting/overproducing. How can (re)directors propose to the spectators dispositifs to situate themselves imaginatively, emotionally and cognitively within the fast and worrying metamorphosis of the planet? How can these dispositifs reflect, on a meta-level, (on) their own ecology and relationship with the archeology of the stage as media?

Finally, and in resonance with my commitment to partaking in the development of an artistic research milieu, I would align my pedagogical project with the epistemological, aesthetic, economical and structural dimensions of this commitment. Epistemologically, I would sustain the idea of artistic practice as an emergence of sensitized knowledge, and define a zone of experimentation for the exposition of these emerging senses-openings. Aesthetically I would suggest that the answer to the previous epistemological concern is to be found in the practices themselves, in the matter of the art and its contextualization; hence, I would suggest installing a loop in-between materiality and articulation, on the assumption that this loop is a novel processual multimedia mode of writing/exposing/disseminating art practices, based on a training in how to document artworks, and replay documentation as writing. Which leads to the next dimension, the economical one, which is about engaging with the experimentation of new forms of artistic research affordances that exceed the disciplinary distribution and the logic of production indexed on market-oriented or scholar-oriented rules. Altogether, these dimensions address a structural concern through the umbrella question: how to ecosystemically establish new platforms for training, making and sharing art, here theatre/performing arts/scenic practices that are sustainable on the brink of ecological-societal collapse. In that direction I would facilitate the linking of the programme of directing with the doctoral platform of artistic research of Uniarts. From a pedagogical and research perspective, and in the very framework of the professorship in directing, I would be interested in proposing a long-term reflection on the situated dimension of experimentality that offers an artistic research paradigm that is in critical resonance with the history of the "theatre laboratories" of the 20st century (Stanislavsky, Appia, Craig, Meyerhold, Brecht, Grotowski, Barba, 9 evenings etc...), and finds the continuity/iteration/collapsing of these historical momentums of experimentation with trans/medial-disciplinary, collaborative, techno-imaginative and climate-responsive processes of reestablishing the idea of stage, the notions of directing, acting and spectating in the beginning, already well underway, 21^st century.

In the last years I have had the chance to get to know and familiarize myself with Nordic/Scandinavian art scenes and artistic research platforms, by participating as an artist in different events and as an artist-researcher in many gatherings (including the Swedish Research Council symposium of Artistic Research, the Summer Academy of Artistic Research in Tromso-Norway, The Contemporary Contemporary Conference organized by Aarhus University in Aaros Museum-Denmark, the Research Pavilion 1 & 2 in Venice, Society of Artistic Research Conference in Helsinki). On the occasion of these diverse events I had the chance to encounter artists, researchers, and alumni linked to the University of the Arts of Stockholm activities and I could perceive its vitality as both an art and research platform. Based on these encounters with the pedagogical team, students and researchers working on the Stockholm platform, I think of from the academic programs and teams in Europe Uniarts Stockholm would be the most ideal place for me and my broad scenic interests and willingness to work in a dialogical manner as part of the pedagogic/artistic/research team. I would be highly motivated to collectively think and manufacture how to prototype the stage of the future and what renewed theatre ecologies might be and do in the face of past, current and upcoming planetary challenges.

I very much hope that this presentation may satisfy your expectations regarding the application to the extent of considering it further. I would be very glad to answer further question you might like to ask.

Sincerely,

Vincent Roumagnac