Linking Papers
"The doctoral student informs the supervisors, the Responsible Professor and the Research Coordinator about the performance dates and location for the artistic part to be examined at least two months before the planned pre-examination date. The doctoral student sends a “linking paper” and the updated research plan to the Responsible Professor and the Research Coordinator at least two weeks before the artistic part is realized. Tutke (Performing Arts Research Centre) will forward the information and the documents to the pre-examiners. The doctoral student does not contact the pre-examiners, as the communication is the responsibility of the Responsible Professor or the Research Coordinator. The “linking paper” motivates how the particular artistic part is related to the doctoral research and the research questions, and discusses the role of the artistic part in the context of the doctoral research."
Tutke/Performing Arts Research Centre Doctoral Studies Guide.
ARTISTIC PART #1
Linking Paper
Heterochrony, Multitemporality, Idiorrythmie At Play
Artistic Research Through The Expansion Of The Theatrical Co-Presence In Time(S) Of The Acknowledgement Of The Anthropo(S)Cenic Turn
(Or How To Mut(at)e Into An Anthropo(S)Cenic Theatre Director/Spectator?) - Working title(s)
Vincent Roumagnac (France)
Theatre Director and Doctoral fellow at The Performing Arts Research Centre (TUTKE)
Theatre Academy - University of the Arts Helsinki.
INTRODUCTION
The working title of my research which is based on the scrutiny of the relationships between Theatre and Time is Heterochrony, Multitemporality, and Idiorrythmie at Play: Artistic Research Through the Expansion of the Theatrical Co-presence in Time(s) of the Acknowledgement of the Anthropo(s)cenic Turn.
The aim of this artistic research process, which started in the Performing Arts Research Centre of Helsinki one year ago, is to queer and expand the temporal dimensions of theatrical conventions and staged displays. It speculates and operates from the disruption of the in-between-human-only theatrical co-presence and its augmentation vis-à-vis nonhuman materialities and temporalities. This entails an experiential deconstruction of the historically temporal constructed frameworks of theatrical production, its associated institutional values and its aesthetical parameters, which I propose to extend beyond traditional human history and timescale. In that direction, I propose to challenge my practice of directing (mise-en-scène) by the idea of re-directing (re-mettre-en-scène) – or being redirected (être re-mis-en-scène) by and through – the concept of 'the Anthropocene'.
The research thus concerns performative arrangements and displays which avoid the characteristics and conventions of the theatrical 'here and now' and the temporal linear logic of production and organisation of what “we” (western European theatre oriented artists and spectators) call a 'stage'. In the research, the terms heterochrony, multitemporality, and idiorrythmie assemble all these aims together while methodologically diffracting the experimental process through three complementary temporal approaches.
– The first approach – through the notion of heterochrony – relates to the destabilization of the chrono/logic of the production and the organization of theatre works.
– The second approach - through the notion of multitemporality – aims to experiment with new theatrical arrangements in order to develop a spectatorial sensitivity to the simultaneity of manifold temporalities on and around a chosen 'stage' or 'event'.
– The third angle – through the notion of idiorrythmie1 – points towards testing the potentialities of a relational reorganisation in between the stage and the spectators out of the conventional framed time of the theatrical representation. It is based on a long-term iterative process of encounter/non-encounter through fractal and protean narratives (or what I coin as narriteratives, for iterative narratives).
So far I have reflected on this experimental theatrical process from a posthumanist reformulation of the notion of ‘temporal turn(s)’ based on a theoretical, possibly paradoxical, confluence, between deconstructive undecidability (Derrida), diplomatic relationism (Latour) and new ecosophical and new materialist trends (Barad, Morton). Through this practice-based research, I propose to bring a contribution to the aesthetic and political question of the rerouting of theatre practice in time and of the speculation of a paradigm shift produced by the ongoing anthropocenic acknowledgment (considered as a productive, unstable and disputable assemblage of signs and definitions in the making). Elaborating from a time-specific perspective, considering that time is central to the ongoing conceptualization of the Anthropocene and its aesthetical supplement through the notion of anthropoScene (Chaudhuri), I propose to engage with the following questions:
. What kind of aesthetic mutation of the theatrical co-presence might be generated by the agential permutation between the nonhuman skene (backstage/background) and the human proscenium (stage/frontstage) which entails complex temporal diffraction in the display and the experience of the multiple agents?
. What kind of theatrical experience, from directing to spectating, might emerge from this strategy of diffraction?
Supervision of the Research: Prof. Esa Kirkkopelto
The first year of the research has been supported by CIMO Fellowships programme (Europe) and KONE Foundation (Finland).
RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
A. WHAT HAS HAPPENED DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF THE DOCTORAL RESEARCH PROJECT
During the first year, I have implemented five artistic projects in order to examine, clarify and select through the practice the orientations of my research on alter-temporality of theatrical events/works. These projects are The Theatre Season, The Cancellation (Kesäteatteri (The Tempest)), We split! We split! We split! Reading, performing and rehearsing the scene one of the act one of Shakespeare´s The Tempest within three Baltic winter storms, The Skene Expedition (I & II), B.O.O (Backstage Oriented Ontology).
> Among these five affordances, I have chosen to present the project The Theatre Season as the first artistic part to be examined. A description of the project can be found below.
> A short description of the other projects is also attached as an appendix to this paper in order to give my external examiners a comprehensive panorama of the way I have been carrying out experiments within the first year of the doctoral process.
During this first year of my doctoral research, and through these artistic implementations, I have been continuing to work on the hypothesis of the disruption of the theatrical co-presence and the destabilization of western theatre temporal conventions. I have been delineating how I might re-route my theatrical practice through the hypothetical notions of heterochrony, multitemporality, and idiorrythmie and, within the latter, a double process of temporal disruption and destabilization. I have been thus exploring, from and through the making, what can be the aesthetic bearings of such a strategy of mise-en-scène that is based on this double undermining i.e. 1. on the deconstruction of the dominant conception of theatrical time originating in the western logic of ‘organization and production of time’ and 2. on the disturbance of the inner temporal logic of the production of stage/staged works. The different projects that I have generated in the frame of the research would, therefore, examine the questions: what happens to my theatrical practice of mise-en-scène (and subsequently to its spectating/witnessing) when the logic of organization and production of time is dislocated? How might directing, acting and spectating be des-organized/re-organized within this process of dislocation and what kind of shift of the mimetic experience does this resetting generate? What kind of theatrical remnants are retained and what kind of emerging forms/relations emerge when perturbing theatrical temporal 'homochronic' conventions? What kind of ‘director’ will I become when it is no longer about directing i.e. pouring authoritatively definitive theatrical objects onto temporally framed centripetal stages but instead setting conditions, from a hypo-intentional, yet agential, marginal presence, in order to trigger centrifugal, complex, durational, contingent, loose, floating in between happenings, deferrals, and iterations, scenic events? And consequently who (where and when) is the spectator I address this theatre experiences to?
During the last six months, I have been also embedding into the research, as a main line of flight, a clarified chrono-political/ethical and ecological agenda by establishing the link between this rerouted practice and the concept of the Anthropocene, or better said I have been discerning how the actual collective acknowledgment of the Anthropocene might frame this 'alter-theatre' ethos, regime, practice, and contemporary legitimacy. By pointing the dominant homochrony of Western theatre founded on Western conceptual and lived production of unitary linear, monotheist and profitable time and by speculating on the undermining of its correlating ideology of theatrical co-presence based on the in-between-human-only ‘nowness’ and epiphanic expectations of the ‘theatrical representation’, I have started to posit my practice as a stage of the ecological dismantling of this conventional co-presence(s) and its expansion vis-à-vis background nonhuman materialities and temporalities. As I mentioned above, my strategy is not based on the elimination of the theatrical human agency but on its displacement from the center of the stage towards its ‘modest’ ('vulnerable'?) periphery by proposing the inversion of the traditional (from Greek ancient theatre) polarities of the proscenium (front-stage) and the skene (background/backstage).
Hence from the first-year’s implementations, a series of research questions have emerged and solidified.
These following questions are the starting point of the second year of my doctoral project. As such, in this transitional movement, they are embedded in the presentation of my first “artistic part”.
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Can there be such a thing as a contemporary (scenic) ‘temporal turn’? How to frame and articulate it within the notion of the Anthropocene? How might this speculative turn affect the practice of mise-en-scène (and consequently of the 'spectating') and reset the latter according to a response to the current ecological demand?
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What happens to this practice when its motivation is to stage diffraction of the conventional ‘now’ of the ‘theatrical representation’ through the speculation and experimentation of heterochronic, multitemporal and idiorrythmic regimes and experiences that would exceed the socially constructed time of theatre and its subsequent production and organization of co-presences?
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What kind of paradigmatic shift might generate from the permutation of the temporality-ies (and values) between the proscenium (the ‘prime’ stage) and the skene (the 'secondary' back-stage’')? What kind of mutation of the idea and practice of stage (and therefore staging/spectating) might be generated through this permutation?
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What happens to (my) theatre (-making practice) when directing is turned into a practice of inviting a contingent spectator to attend this per/mutation of scenic agencies which might generate an ‘out-of-focus-ness’ or a confusing time depth of the « when does it really happen? »
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What kind of ‘new’ stage(s), actor(s), director(s) and spectator(s) – and therefore what kind of new mimetic bearings – might emerge from this invitation to backstage-conditioned, open and durational works/processes/experiences?
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What is/could be a/the anthropo(s)cenic director? And therefore a/the anthropo(s)cenic spectator?
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Can the art of theatre sustain itself – or collapse – within this double-bind of maintaining its human specificity and disjuncting itself from anthrocentrism and the subsequent anthropogenic aesthetic control? What splits? What is redistributed and how? What expands? What emerges?
B. METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Practice as Research
The encounter during the first year of my doctoral studies with the research centre community and the consistent and vivid dialogue with professors and colleagues on methodological issues have strengthened my first intuition to develop my research according to the paradigm of Practice as Research (as opposed to Practice Led or Based Research). Hence the epistemic articulation of my research art projects is carried out through simultaneous artistic translation/writing based on the exploration and development of methods, tools, interfaces, staging for artistic research exposition (Schwab). Such a development is based on the attempt to display the exhibitions of high-quality artworks simultaneously with their creative epistemic documentation redistribution, coined as exposition. The relevance and validity of the epistemic claim will, therefore, continue to be challenged through the practice by testing experimental situations and displays with the possibility to get lost, taking care of giving space and time for fallowness, for the dynamics of the unknown in order to challenge and counter-balance the demand for construction of the written articulation. In relation to this articulation I will also consider the following questions:
. What happens to the freedom to interpret art in the shift from artistic exhibition to research exposition?
. What are the aesthetical, ethical and epistemological implications?
. How to maintain ‘free’ artistry i.e. a non-mastering of the interpretative output of the art practice while articulating the latter for dissemination within the field of artistic research?
. How can exposition operate as a disclosing deconstructive methodology rather than a closing self-exegetical mode of control?
. Shortly put: how to maintain position as an artist-researcher without becoming a theatre/performance studies scholar?
Heterochronic, multitemporal, idiorrythmic Academia?
The latter perspective entails a parsing and implementing of different modes of translating, disseminating and presenting the research on the border between (on the edge of?) academia and the art scene. This border can be also thought as a third space and the current research intends to contribute to the definition and expansion of such a third space for a sensitive production of knowledge (or a production of sensed experience). Alongside the research on the topic itself, research within the research will be maintained and developed further in order to answer the questions:
. How to embed and activate this question of alter-temporality within the modes of presentation of the research within the academic field of artistic research?
. How to use these alternative modes of presentation as a strategy within the attempt to question/produce epistemic legitimacy through ‘inventive/expanded/queered writing’ within the paradigm of Practice as Research.
First Artistic Part
This October, I will present my first artistic part to be examined. The preparation, happening and outcome of this event within the evolution of my doctorate will affect, in a convergent way, the dynamics of the research during the next year. It should be a very stimulating situation in which art and research will be at work and play, displaying, finding and challenging their borders, entanglements, and autonomy. From these synergetic frictions, merging and crisscrossing I hope to draw my personal inscription and contribution to the field and community of artistic research.
Perspective of development during the second year of the research
On the one hand, I will dedicate the second year of my research to examining and articulating the outcomes of the presentation and evaluation of my first artistic part, parsing supervision and external examination feedback, personal experience, documentation and spectatorial inquiry. I will combine this articulation by reflecting on the four other artistic experiments that took place during the first year. I thus intend to strengthen the process from an inward reflective incubation of the practice, leading to a first occurrence of “(re)writing”, which will be outted and tested through exposition(s) on the occasion of several gatherings on artistic research, such as Växjö Conference and Senselab’s symposium “The Distribution of the Insensible” in Montreal, Society of Artistic Research’s (SAR) conference “Please Specify” in Helsinki, PSi #23 “Overflow” in Hamburg and eventually Carpa in Helsinki. My participation (if my proposals are accepted) in those artistic research platforms and events will be motivated by my interest in sharing the research process, with a view to developing a personal type of writing/communicating that would embed the topicality of my research on time within the paradigm of practice as research.
On the other hand, I would like to start in the second year to ponder the potential of entangling/challenging the research from the perspective of media archeology (new stages of co-presence linked to the developments and practices of new technologies) and speculative architecture (what would be the architecture of this theatre practice be based on? On the one-hand queer temporalities such as heterochrony, multitemporality, and idiorrythmie, and on the other hand, and correlatively, on nonhuman environment agency?). Lastly, I will continue to develop the artistic project Backdrop that was initiated during a recent research residency in Portugal. This project was selected to be part of the Second Research Pavilion exhibition on “The Utopia of Access” in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale.
FIRST EXAMINED ARTISTIC PART
11. - 19.10.
Working title (s): The Theatre Season REDUX / The Theatre Season LECTURE
The first artistic part will consist of the exhibition (The Theatre Season REDUX) and the lecture (The Theatre Season LECTURE) of the project The Theatre Season.
The double-proposal will be displayed simultaneously in the Theatre Academy and in the Performing Arts Lab (ETLAB).
The Theatre Season REDUX
The Theatre Season REDUX will restage, revisit, reconstruct and diffract the one-year project The Theatre Season that took place in the vicinity of an abandoned outdoor stage located in a public park in Helsinki from May to April, last year.
The Theatre Season REDUX will consist of an installation in the main Theatre of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. A 66' video will be displayed as a part of the installation. The Theatre Season REDUX will be implemented at the same time as a performative report of the initial project The Theatre Season and as autonomous staging/re-mise en scène i.e. it will welcome spectators who have followed the initial project as well as those new to it.
Installation with screening.
Opening hours: 8 am to 7 pm / Looping video (66’)
The Theatre Season LECTURE
The Theatre Season LECTURE will consist of the presentation of the project The Theatre Season in the form of a staged/screened/weathered lecture.
Duration: 45´
Every day at 6 pm.
ARTISTIC PART #2
Linking Paper
Dear External Examiners,
(Dear Ellen, Dear Carl,)
I am very pleased to welcome you to weSANK Deep Stage As..., the final staged outcome of the two-year research project weSANK.
I have been pondering what could be the appropriate linking paper to send to you before you come to Helsinki this November to examine this second and final artistic part of my doctorate.
Let us start with a few words about what has happened since last we met, and how the weSANK project has emerged.
The research, whose working title has evolved since the last examination and is stabilized (for now) as Deepening the Stage, still looks into the relationship between scenic thinking and time ecology. It still aims to, in and through the art, revise and reconfigure the scenic regimes of co-presences, the social function of theatre and, de facto, the agency of the director, through considering the "stage" no longer as a centre but as a middle (milieu), a porous and contingent (g)hosting milieu in and through which more-than-human agency and temporality come into play.
The first part of my doctorate was focused on in the ecodramaturgical and scenic potential of non-human entities such as plants or minerals, and more significantly of biospheric phenomena such as the weather, the development of the research pushed me, I would say inevitably, to take into consideration other "non-human" agents, the so-called "artificial" ones, such as big data, algorithms, and the associated computational modes of representation ... in order to widen the critical scope of my research questions on the non-human co-actance, the correlating potential of mutation in the organization and the production of a stage and the redirection of spectatorial attention.
As announced in the linking paper of the first examined artistic part I have made a critical move forward, from what I would call a deconstructive strategy to a more generative regime of research. This move still embeds a specific focus on (queer-ed) temporality, coupled with a meta-perspective on artistic research and the epistemic becoming of experimental aesthetic thinking in the expanding field.
One and half years ago, as a first step of this second research movement, I invited French architect and researcher Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou to join me. Emmanuelle's work focuses on architecture in its experimental dimension, and her research and projects are situated at the intersection of architecture with other disciplinary fields, including contemporary art and computation. She is currently conducting a PhD at ATTP Technische Universität in Vienna, looking into, as she writes in her research abstract, "the implications for architecture of the phenomenon of re-localization of the global, in today’s digital age".
The weSANK research project has therefore surfaced from the confluence of our two parallel research streams.
At our first meeting the question was: How would my research’s speculative notion of deep stage dialogue with Emmanuelle’s perspectives on a proto-architecture, that is developing systems and models to organize and distribute the individual and the collective, in our computationally driven world?
During this first meeting, we shared the wish to look into trends of post-digital culture and current development of artificial capacities, in relation to architectonic, representational and/or performative issues.
Then after sharing the critical premises of our respective researches, we finalized the collaborative project question:
How to prototype the stage of the future?*
*Question that immediately and, needless to say, embed the necessary revision of the very terms of prototype, stage, and future.
Our main goal was to orientate the research project into an emergence of alternative common imaginaries. Making alliances and exchanging with other artists and architects in different European and Asian cities, we set up an ephemeral, fragile and joyous factory for assembling prototypes in an attempt to (re)compose the bio- and techno- invisible ecologies “we” are already part of.
Then we invited the spectators to enter a quantity of scenic/scenographic "potentials", proposing to poetically and ethically sense diverse ways of inhabiting the world through a reset notion and, therefore, experience of stage.
I will let you discover more details about the intentions and the methodology of the project further on.
Now, and considering the obvious contradiction of the introduction of this paper in relation to what follows, I would like to open a discussion with you about the examination itself, its preparation and its criteria.
At this time in the development of our artistic research when we, a cluster of artists-(becoming)-researchers, are wondering continuously about how to find a way out of the obsolete – according to us - dialectic that dissociates practice and writing about the practice, I find this exercise of the “linking paper” interesting and significant.
Indeed, at the very moment when we are exploring “other” forms, formats and modes of disseminating our artistic research processes, when we are claiming the epistemological agency of the art itself within the context of artistic research, the writing of such a “linking paper” is yet being filtered by this same critical logic towards the research “articulation/contextualization”.
Actually, I would have a question for you. May I? What do you examiners come to examine? Will you expose yourself to the art per se, as the other spectators in the bunker? Or will you have a peculiar, let's say functional, gaze on the proposal, a special mission to decode the research through the art, in the context of the doctoral studies? I know that there are guidelines for examination published by the institution, but I would be interested to discuss with you if there is any difference for you. Is the quality of the examination changing if you posit yourself as an art-goer or as a doctorate-examiner? If yes, I would be happy to hear from you what is the difference, and the change in the qualitative criteria of the examination of the art.
As you know – as you both have been contributing in the movement - artistic research seems to vigorously and audaciously draw new epistemological paths, in constructive reaction to pre-established academic hierarchies and conventions of “knowledge production”. From the perspective of opening up new forms, times and spaces for the sharing of its object - a research through the art that would maintain itself as art – what is exactly the object and the aim of the examination? And correlatively, to what shall (or shall not) the “linking paper” link in relation to those qualities?
So here comes what I propose to you, in order to “contextualize” this examined work (taking into account that you both know already the research settings from the first artistic part), but without exhausting it rhetorically, inviting you to a more direct experience of the artistic affordances.
Basically, you will simply find below a link (isn't it a linking paper at the end of the day?) that is already available online. Any spectator/visitor of weSANK Deep Stage As... can easily find this piece of communication on the web (for example on the Baltic Circle Festival web page on which the project is recommended), and read it, before coming, if they wish to set for themselves a backdrop for the showing, or after visiting, if they wish to dialogue their own experience with the project’s framework.
Here is the LINK:
(the link was disabled after the examination)
Now,
Welcome to weSANK project! Welcome back to Helsinki!
Looking forward to sharing the project with you both,
Vincent
