Research Grant Reports

The following reports sent to the funding institution answer the following questions online:

Provide a summary of the project’s progress to date. What has been particularly successful? What challenges have arisen in the project**?

How have you used the granted funding for other expenses so far?
Has the project seen significant changes from the plan presented in the application? If so, please specify.

** An edited version of the summary may be published on the foundation’s website and used in communications. Write the summary so that its content can be understood without prior knowledge of the project.

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One-year Grant REPORT (maximum 5000 signs)

My art-based research project addresses the implementation of a specific method for the repositioning of my practice as a theatre director that I call – or speculate as - redirecting. The way this movement of repositioning materializes and temporizes in and through the practice is my polymorphic response to what I call an urgently needed transformation of scenic thinking in the face of the planetary, techno-conditioned, climatic challenges. During this second year, the first artistic part was examined and accepted. The successful examination confirmed both the relevance of the chosen methodological path and its accuracy when it comes to its artistic materialization through and within the research. Via feedback looping with the methodology that was being formed, new art tests were carried out. Speculative reformulations of the research questions have bloomed and been evaluated. From artistic testing and through consistent correlative close-readings, both of which were discussed with the research’s sphere of examiners, supervisors, peers and audience members, new terms have emerged such as neganthroposcenic chronotopias, deep stage, and hyperdramatic theatre; these notions will be pondered over and tested through the art practice further on. According to my plan to entangle the research with architecture, I have set up a new research group based on the encounter of my concerns on theatre time ecology and contemporary architectural thinking. I have documented the process thoroughly from the perspective of the specificity of the exposition in and of artistic research within academia and artistic research milieu. I have also pursued building contacts and collaborations on the Finnish and international artistic research scene by presenting the ongoing research at several events. The success of the examined artistic part has redoubled my conviction to thicken the research through the implementation of new artistic experiments, to deepen its conceptual background through a consistent participation in the seven weekly seminars and in constant critical dialogue with my supervisors, and to continue to disseminate the research via domestic and international platforms by participating in artistic research events. So far, I do not see any problems, just yet unsolved and challenging research questions. The grant has covered mainly the monthly living costs in Helsinki, enabling me to stay in Finland for the duration of my studies. I could thus attend and contribute to the seven weekly seminars and anchor the research within the artistic research community in a contributive, robust and reciprocal way. Additionally, I used the grant to partially cover the travel and living-costs when I went to Montreal to partake in the Senselab event, and to Paris to organize the new research group with architect-curator-researcher Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou. Framing, detailing and pondering the modes and methods of collaboration, and how they are manifesting within the individual institutional logic of the doctoral project are to be pondered over and implemented in the coming year. Already inter-research collaborations were initiated or continued within the community of researchers of the Performing Arts Research Centre (TUTKE). Those intermedial and inter-methodological encounters/processes are amplifying the research in a significant way not only by fertilizing it from a conceptual and practical alteration, but also by rubbing and sharing diverse views on artistic research, on the basis (and the building) of a plural and united research community. The question of how to cherish and develop an ethos and ethics of the plurality and multivocality within singular personal research is part of the work on diffraction, polyphony and multitemporality of the stage (to come). For example, with Jari Kauppinen - sound artist doctoral candidate in Tutke and Professor in TeaK/Degree Programme in Sound - we continued our experimentations on translations and transductions. We co-convened a session of the seminar on Aesthetic Thinking where we co-performed a staged approach of Bernard Stiegler’s techno-organological theory. With Outi Condit - actor and doctoral candidate in Tutke - we collaborated on a performance titled The Actress, on the intersection of Condit’s concerns with “embodied politics of the stage and future cybersomatic acting” and my research on scenic temporal turns. The Actress will be shown this October in TeaK as the first examined artistic part of Condit’s doctoral research. With Simo Kellokumpu - choreographer and doctoral candidate in Tutke - we continued the collaborative path we started together as a duo seven years ago. More specifically, this year I participated in Kellokumpu’s performance #CHARP as a working group member. The performance was presented in the Research Pavilion of Venice last June. It was also examined as Kellokumpu’s second doctoral artistic part. In April, I was invited to organize and curate the Tutke Spring Days. I designed a program of exhibition and performance in addition to research presentations under the title Enter the Art, Exit the Art, Re-enter the Art. Thanks to the grant, I could attend two full terms and follow a great number of courses and seminars. At the end of this second year, I have completed 58 out of the 60 credits required as ‘Studies’ part of the doctorate. I was invited to present the research, and interact with the students of the Masters in Directing in December, and with the students of the Masters in Ecology and Contemporary Performance in March. Those two opportunities to work with the Masters' students of the Theatre Academy generated a shared interest in continuing this kind of pedagogic interaction within the institution in the coming years.

(4869 signs)

Three-year grant PROGRESS REPORT #1 (maximum 3000 signs)

My doctoral artistic research project proposes a methodology of inquiry and experimentality into the question of how to, in the face of planetary climatic challenges, re-route my practice of directing into a practice of redirecting, using a revised temporal ecology of the stage. During the third year of the research, I have been looking more closely into this relationship between scenic thinking and time ecology by focusing on, as planned at the end of the previous year, the three speculative notions of deep stage, neganthroposcenic chronotopias, and hyperdramatic theatre. These new notions have proven, through their artistic and theoretical testing to be effective tools for the research process. The substantial and consistent aggregation of new artistic experiments and their academy-responsive expositional supplements within the vividly critical artistic research milieu and community has confirmed both the relevance of the chosen methodological path and its accuracy when it comes to its artistic materialization through and within the research. Concretely, this process went, this year, through three main moments of affirmation: a research residency in Japan during which the process got poetically amplified and its visibility extended internationally through conducting fieldwork on Japanese Noh theatre, / a second research residency abroad, at the Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, which highly enriched the research / and finally, as planned at the end of the second year, the project weSANK, on the encounter of the research with proto-architecture, was launched and carried out via five collaborative sessions in Tokyo, Paris, Helsinki, Barcelona, and Daegu. Hence, through new residencies, artworks, workshops and conference presentations, and through consistent discussions with supervisors, peers and audience members on those research manifestations, the project has been growing, strengthening and reaching out, in Finland and abroad, in a very gratifying way. The grant covered mainly the monthly living costs in Helsinki enabling me to stay in Finland for the duration of the studies. I could thus attend, and contribute to, the weekly seminars of the doctoral program from November to April. I could thus anchor the research within the artistic research community in a contributive and robust way. Additionally, the grant was used to partially cover the travel and living-costs when I went to Tokyo and to Barcelona for the research residencies. The grant was also used to support the ongoing research project weSANK, mainly to purchase equipment and materials for the realization of prototypes during the collaborative sessions in Tokyo, Paris, Helsinki, Barcelona, and Daegu. The project has not seen any significant changes to the plan presented in the application. The project has a new working title: Deepening the Stage; Neganthroposcenic Chronotopias and Hyperdramatic Theatre.

(2540 signs)

Three-year grant PROGRESS REPORT #2 (maximum 4000 signs)

My doctoral artistic research project proposes a methodology of inquiry and experimentality into the question of how to, in the face of planetary climatic techno-eco-mutations, re-route my theatre practice of directing into a practice of redirecting using a revised temporal ecology of the stage. During the fourth year, a second and final artistic part was put together, publicly presented, examined and accepted by my external examiners. The examination reports confirmed the relevance of the methodological path, its accuracy when it comes to its artistic materialization through and within the research, and described the work as “rich, precise and of high artistic quality, also when considered from an international perspective”. After that, I have started to compose the final part of the research, putting together the four-year artistic experiments and methodologies that emerged in the transdisciplinary and collaborative context in which my research project has been situated; the main purpose of this final doctoral commentary is to resituate its specific contribution on scenic practice and thinking, by replaying its different “stages” in order to share its multitemporal and multilayered dynamic in a way that further discusses, contextualizes and disseminates its perspective on revised theatre ecologies, and artistic research dramaturgies, in Finland and abroad. I have continued to carefully and extensively document the process from the perspective of the specificity of this final exposition designed as a performative redistribution of those traces on the Research Catalogue. I have also pursued building contacts and collaborations on the Finnish and international artistic research scene by presenting ongoing research at several events. New artworks shared publicly, workshops with students and conference presentations among peers have been stages that functioned as dams in the overflow current of the research data mass. This has allowed me to stopover for a while and collect discussions with supervisors, peers and audience members on those research affordances, to help give the project coherence and legibility and to ensure it grows, strengthens and reaches out, in Finland and abroad, in a gratifying way. The grant has covered mainly the monthly travel and living costs in Helsinki during the duration of the year’s studies. I could thus attend, and contribute to, the weekly seminar of the doctoral program from November to April, and anchor the research within the artistic research community’s collegiate, robust and interactive dynamics. Additionally, the grant was used to partially cover the travel and living-costs for my research residency in Paris, at Cité des Arts in the Spring. The grant was also used to support the ongoing research art experiments, mainly to purchase equipment and material for the realization of these works, and also to complement the travel grant awarded by Tutke, which when combined enabled me to participate in a conference in Calgary in July. The project has not seen any significant changes to the plan presented in the application. The project has a new working title: Reacclimating the Stage. As discussed with Kalle Korhonen, I have postponed the last year of my Kone research grant, since I was offered by Tutke an 11-month contract as a "Doctoral candidate" from 1.9 to 31.7. After the term of this contract, I will finish my doctoral process with a public defense and then, I will begin post-doctoral research with the last year of my awarded grant. I would be interested to extend my current research on nonhuman scenic agency further, amplifying its techno-dimension, by implementing the following question: What can an artificial stage be?

(3824 signs)