14 Dec 2017

Performance and Response - Networking Artistic Research, Psi #24, Daegu 3-6 July 2018

Call for Proposals

Performance Studies international #24 / Daegu, Korea / 3 – 6 July 2018
Performance and Response - Networking Artistic Research
A project of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi

Inspired by the announced theme for PSi #24--“Performance as Network: Arts, City, Culture”-- the Artistic Research Working Group proposes to extend the experiences from last year’s “Excess and Abundance” gathering in Hamburg through a ‘performance-and-response’ adaptation of our established “Porous Studio” model of interaction. Developed several years ago, the Porous Studio is an ambitious but contained invitation to PSi member artists and local practitioners from the constantly changing conference locations to join the Artistic Research Working Group in a space of intermixing, contamination, and multiplicity, producing a shifting network of artists sharing their practices and ideas over time. While this gathering has traditionally been restricted to the annual conference event, for 2018 we are experimenting with a new mode of working based on ‘performance and response,’ including structured exchange prior to our gathering in Daegu, in order to emphasize the networking potential of our work together.

Artistic Research is meant as an umbrella concept that includes a range of approaches that use art, creative practice or performance as a primary means and method of inquiry. These include the distinct approaches 'performance as research' (PAR), ‘practice as research’ (PaR), 'practice-based research' (PBR), ‘practice-led research, ‘creative arts research’, 'research-creation', 'arts-based research', and numerous other associated practices. In many cases, the subject of study is artistic practice itself, as in 'artistic inquiry.’ In others, creative practice is used as a way of investigating non-artistic (or not exclusively artistic) subjects. Our aim is to invite a broad spectrum of these approaches, drawn from within and beyond academic and institutional contexts, to reflect the diverse and vital abundance of interrelated orientations, perspectives, and approaches to research in contemporary art. Through the ‘performance and response’ model of exchange, participants will have the opportunity to respond to presentations, performances and articulations through presentations, performances and articulations. In this way we aim to establish a dynamic network of this activity, and to expand our collective horizons through the sharing of knowledge(s) and experience(s).

Model of Engagement for PSi#24

In Brief:
  1. All participants make a submission prior to the conference gathering. The submissions can take a wide variety of forms, including text, video, audio, images, etc.
  2. All participants prepare a response to another participant’s initial submission for presentation at the conference event in Daegu.

The Details:
Stage One: Each participant submits an artistic research project (at any stage of development) or performance documented in some manner, supported by images, audio, video, text, etc., together with a written description or abstract of 100-300 words. It should be possible to experience (read, view, or listen to) the submitted materials within a period of 60 minutes. All proposals must be received no later than 15 March 2018. Please send the abstracts (with links to the artistic research materials) in an email with the subject title “ARWG 2018” to the three Working Group conveners (emails below).

All accepted abstracts will be posted to a dedicated online folder. Participants will then be able to submit additional materials to individual sub-folders, either directly or via links to existing online platforms (such as Vimeo, Youtube, etc.).

Stage Two: Each participant is assigned another participant’s submission by 31 March 2018, and is invited to prepare a presentational response to that submission, using their own preferred mode of practice to critically engage with the submission. The response can take the form of a performance, a participatory research exercise, a written document to be read aloud, etc. The respondents will submit the title and duration of their response (from 5 min to 20 min.) to the group no later than 31 May 2018.

Stage Three: Participants present their responses at the working group sessions during the conference in Daegu. The 100-300 word abstracts are made available onsite for the other participants and for other attendees at the open session who have not had access to online materials.

Depending upon interest, a possible fourth stage will include the creation of a publication on the Research Catalogue (https://www.researchcatalogue.net) consisting of materials and documentation from both the original submissions and performed responses.

On behalf of the working group convenors:

Annette Arlander: annette.arlander@uniarts.fi
Bruce Barton: bruce.barton@ucalgary.ca
Johanna Householder: jhouseholder@ocadu.ca



2 Jun 2017

Excess and Abundance of Artistic Research - Preliminary Program



Performance Studies international #23 / Hamburg, Germany / 8 – 11 June 2017

Excess and Abundance of Artistic Research
A project of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi

Contributions consist of 1) ten-minute reports of on-going artistic investigations or artistic research projects, presented onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online on the Research Catalogue in advance of the presentation; and 2) thirty-minute project presentations or participatory workshops, performances or events, conducted onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online on the Research Catalogue in advance of the event.

Preliminary Program


Thursday June 8 at 10-11.30

10-10.20 introduction and presentation
10.20-10-30 Bruce Barton 10 min.
10.30-10.45 Matteo Bonfitto 15 min
10.45-11.15 Birgitte Bauer Nilsen 30 min
11.15-11.25 Beau Coleman 10 min
11.25-11.30 

Friday June 9 at 9-10.30

9-9.10 introduction and presentation
9.10-9.20 Johanna Householder 10 min
9.20-9.30  Sarah Blissett 10 min.
9.30-9.40 Natalie Garrett Brown 10 min.
9.40-9.50 Katherine Mezur 10 min.
9.50-10.00 Gry Worre Hallberg 10 min. (via Skype)
10-10.30 Anne Robinson 30 min. (walk)

Saturday 10 at 9-10.30

9-9.10 introduction and welcome
9.10-9.20 Annette Arlander 10 min.
9.20-9.30 Hanna Järvinen 10 min.
9.30-9.40 Pilvi Porkola 10 min.
9.40-9.50 Tero Nauha 10.min
9.50-10.00 Mark Harvey 10 min. (via Skype)
10-10.30 final discussion, future plans

New members, visitors and all interested are warmly welcome!

The proposal in full is included here below. Please note that changes are possible and probable:


Performance Studies international #23 / Hamburg, Germany / 8 – 11 June 2017

Excess and Abundance of Artistic Research
A project of the Artistic Research Working Group of PSi

Inspired by the announced theme for PSi #23 – “OverFlow” – the Artistic Research Working Group proposes to build upon but also exceed the ambitious but contained model of the “Porous Studio,” its established practice over the past several conferences. An open invitation to PSi member artists and local practitioners from the shifting conference locations, the Porous Studio has always been seen as a space of intermixing, contamination, and multiplicity. For 2017 we are overflowing the fixed spatial and temporal zones of PSi #23 through extended sessions in Hamburg and pre- and post-conference online (and, potentially, actual) exchange and collaboration via the international Research Catalogue database (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal).

Artistic Research is meant as an umbrella concept that includes a range of approaches that use art, creative practice or performance as a primary means and method of inquiry. These include the distinct approaches 'performance as research' (PaR), 'practice-based research' (PBR), ‘practice-led research, ‘creative arts research’, 'research-creation', 'arts-based research', and numerous other associated practices. In many cases, the subject of study is artistic practice itself, as in 'artistic inquiry’. In others, creative practice is used as a way of investigating non-artistic (or not exclusively artistic) subjects. Our aim is to invite a broad spectrum of these approaches, drawn from within and beyond academic and institutional contexts, to reflect the diverse and vital overflow of orientations, perspectives, and approaches to research in contemporary art. Through presentations, performances, articulations and conversation, we aim to showcase vital examples of this activity internationally, and to expand our collective horizons through the sharing of knowledge(s) and experience(s).

Contributions consist of 1) ten-minute reports of on-going artistic investigations or artistic research projects, presented onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online in advance of the presentation; and 2) thirty-minute project presentations or participatory workshops, performances or events, conducted onsite in Hamburg and augmented by material shared online in advance of the event.

All contributors will be invited to register on the Research Catalogue and establish an individual page on the Artistic Research Working Group site within the database. This will be a closed forum for exchange prior to and following the conference, and we can explore the option of publishing some materials after the gathering as a form of public conference proceedings. Members who will not be able to attend in Hamburg can also submit online presentations or contributions that will be uploaded on the Research Catalogue and shared with the other WG members on an on-going basis.
The theme of “OverFlow” will be served by the very diversity of our collected approaches, but members may also choose to address it directly through some aspect of their conference participation.

Mark Harvey, University of Auckland.
In the way (30 min)
‘In the Way’ will be a participatory performance where participants will explore what it means to continuously 'be in the way' of other people in the site of the conference context. The notion of over-flow is interpreted here in terms of spatial stresses on population and urban contexts. The project aims to ask what can be the thresholds of interruption by being in the way, either physically or symbolically. It will use G. Deleuze and F Guattari’s notion of the swarm as an institutional excuse for its behaviors. This project is also intended to ask in what ways can being in the way generate conversations about how we see over-flowing? 
Bio
Mark Harvey is a New Zealand-based artist mostly working in performance and video drawing on political, psychological and social approaches and physical endurance. Some of the galleries related events he has presented in, include: The 55th Venice Biennale for Visual Arts (2013), the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (2012), UmeÃ¥ Art Museum, (Sweden, 2016), the Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2012), the New Performance Turku Festival (Finland, 2014 and 2016), Te Uru gallery (Auckland, 2016), Laznia Contemporary Art Centre (Gdansk, Poland, 2015), Prague Quadrennial (2015), Hitparaden (Copenhagen, 2014), Te Tuhi Gallery (Auckland, 2012, 2014 and 2016), Window (Auckland, 2008), the Govett Brewster Art Gallery (Taranaki, NZ, 2006), Gallery ZET (Amsterdam, 2011), Blue Oyster (Dunedin, 2009), Auckland Festival of the Arts (2005 and 2015), Physicsroom Contemporary Artspace (Christchurch, 2002 and 2006), City Gallery  (Wellington, 2005),  Canary (Auckland, 2005) and Enjoy Gallery (Wellington, 2003). His writing has also been published in a range of publications such as the UK Performance Research Journal (2006 and 2013) and the South Project (2013). Harvey is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries at The University of Auckland and has a PhD from AUT University related practice. He has recently published a book on a sample of 14 years of his practice titled Play Book (Index Design and Publishing). Some links:

Natalie Garrett Brown, Coventry University, UK.
Moving & Mapping; knowing communities through dance practice – reflections on a interdisciplinary UK funded research project. (10 min.)
Reflecting on the first phase of a 3 year UK funded research project I will explore how the sensate performance body can be a conceived as a knowledge generator within the frame of Practice as Research. Specifically the discussion will focus on the project’s aim to create, a ‘Manifesto for Change’ co-created with inhabitants of City, town planers and artists proposing that a corporeal engagement with place and space can inform and lead city creation for the 21st Century.
Bio
Dr Natalie Garrett Brown, BA, MA, PhD is Head of School for Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. She is associate editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits on the editorial board for, Research in Dance Education and is vice chair for Dance HE (Standing Conference of Dance in Higher Education). Natalie undertook her Somatic Movement Educators Training in Body-Mind Centering with Embody Move Association, UK and is co-convener of the International Conference for Dance and Somatic Practices, held biannually at Coventry University. She is also a founding member of enter and inhabit, a collaborative site responsive project and the Corporeal Knowing Network; an exchange between theatre and dance artists and scholars interested in embodied writing practices and processes. Her current research and artistic project flockOmania, explores collaborative practice across dance, sound, film and the visual arts.

Matteo Bonfitto, State University of Campinas, Brazil.
PERFORMING NICHOMACHEAN ETHICS
(Ten-minute report of on-going artistic investigation)
In this artistic project, called “Performing Nichomachean Ethics” I try to turn the considerations produced in Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, into actions. In this respect, the question raised by the Greek Philosopher - How should human beings best live? - functions in this case as a sort of performative trigger that can generate different kinds of material and narrative layers: actions performed in real time in different contexts; these actions, once recorded, produce audio-visual material; and the account of such actions produce, in turn, written material. Besides the question referred to above, other aspects which appear in the original text by Aristotle are explored in this project in order to create a variety of relational dynamics, in which it is possible not just “to talk about ethics” but also “to talk through ethics”, that is, “to experience and embody ethics” on different levels.
This proposal is part of a bigger project called “The Philosopher as a Practical Philosopher” which is partially sponsored by the Brazilian Government.

Technical Requirements: a Datashow Projector. 
Bio
Matteo Bonfitto is an Italian-Brazilian performer, theatre director and an interdisciplinary researcher. PhD: Royal Holloway University of London, England. Master: State University of São Paulo, Brazil. Undergraduate: Università Degli Study di Bologna, Italy. He is one of the founders of the Artistic Collective PERFORMA TEATRO (www.performateatro.org) and he is currently teaching at State University of Campinas – Drama Department, in Brazil. Besides the performances presented in Brazil, Chile, France, England and Italy, he is the author of various articles and books: The Actor as a Composer; Between the Actor and the Performer and The Kinetics of the Invisible. Acting Processes in Peter Brook’s Theatre, the latter recently published in English by Peter Lang.

Katherine Mezur, University of California Berkeley, CA.
J-POP Kawaii (Cute): Attraction, Estrangement, and Addiction in the Super-Saturated Performances of Live and Virtual Girls
In contemporary Japanese popular culture, girl bands and 3D girl idols dominate the live and virtual stages of urban Japan, global J-POP festivals, and online performance cultures. They play on the super-cute girl, kawaii shôjo, aesthetics of visual and kinaesthetic super-saturated sweetness, soft-porn attraction, and untouchable adorability. Their performances of deafening sound and blinding projections, matched with driving repetitive gestural choreography, expose how their gush and glut of sensuous overload, casts their audiences into trance-like patterns of calls, waves, and sighs. On the most extreme ends of girl performance, the 3D virtual girl vocaloids draw deep devotion from their fans. These kawaii shôjo acts raise questions concerning overload in the current social and political vacuum. Drawing on Donna Haraway's cyborgs, Thomas Lamarre's anime machines, and new media dramaturgy, how do these vocaloid and J-Pop kawaii shôjo expose a disturbing vacuum and fragility in society? Is this addiction to overloaded sweetness liberating or suffocating? Is this another failed future?
Bio
Mezur, Katherine. Lecturer, Departments of English, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley; Assoc. Researcher, SF Museum of Performance and Design. Critical Choreographies and Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, with Emily Wilcox, (2018), "Stranger Communities: Art Labour and Berliner Butoh." "dumbtype's Wonder Women: Corporeal Affect and Medial Precarity," (Eckersall and Fujii, ed.), Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-likeness.
kmezur@sbcglobal.net

Beau Coleman, University of Alberta.
High Tide (performance)
For the Artist Research Working Group, I propose to do a thirty minute presentation (w/discussion) of my performance High Tide, in which I will use the Hamburg harbor, site of Festival Theater der Welt as the source for stimuli; each day absorbing the sites, sounds and vocal fragments located at the festival. I will then bring these memories back to PSi #23: Overflow and use the mediums of words, movement, drawing and tracing to create the performance.  What sifts through and is left in the space? What is forgotten?
High Tide can be performed either as a one-time event or as part of a daily practice, i.e. returning to the studio each day to create anew and build upon the memories of the last performance.  Ideally for PSi #23: Overflow I would like to present High Tide as a daily performance practice.  If that is not possible, a one-time presentation will also be effective. 
Bio
Beau Coleman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been performed and/or exhibited across North America, Europe and in parts of Africa, Australia and Asia. She has made works for a diverse range of locations and contexts, whether they were situated in galleries, theatres, suspended over rivers or projected onto buildings. Previous creations include theatre, live art, digital media, site-specific performance, dance, video and new media installation. Themes of isolation, suspension, intimacy and loss are interrogated in her work. Recent performances and exhibitions include High Tide Canada, Let Me Tell You That I Love You (Distant Islands) (Copenhagen, Denmark, Torshaven, Faroe Islands & Nuuk, Greenland 2015), Let Me Tell You That I Love You (Nuit Rose, Toronto, 2014), These Are Not My Mother’s Hands (Trinity Square Video, Toronto 2013) and Clock Piece (GlougAIR, Month of Performance Art Festival, Berlin, 2012), The Gertrude Stein Project (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada). She is currently working on a series of performances focusing on the ‘act of forgetting’.  Beau received her training at the National Theatre School of Canada and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. She is on faculty at the University of Alberta where she is the Coordinator of the MFA Directing Program and specializes in theatre, interdisciplinary performance and live art.

Birgitte Bauer-Nilsen, University of Stavanger, Norway.
Siku Aappoq/Melting Ice – a performative intercultural installation in the meeting between Scandinavian and Greenlandic artists.  (30 min)
The focal point is the Greenlandic and Scandinavian perspectives of the consequences of the melting ice in relation to global climate change. Bodily experience and knowledge about the climate change have been leading elements in the process and the investigation to make the installation.
In the creative process, a cross-artistic dialogue has taken place. In dance, music and installation and through the physical presence, we have created a trans-local dialogue. We have worked with shaman's songs from Greenland, the iceberg related to the Inuit culture and the human imbalance with the nature and the response from the nature to this imbalance. The development of the intercultural space – a performance – contributes to create a frame and articulate a dialogue for a community, a trans-local temporal space. This means that frames are created during the course of the process. In other words, the frame changes with the temporary community it defines and creates new global dialogue. I will address this intercultural artistic dialogue. Its content is a complex cultural meeting within the concept, the experience in the dynamic, as well as time and space for the artist and the audience.
I have collaboration with professor Pam Burnard and her team from University of Cambridge about performative questions to climate change and the research in Melting Ice.
Melting Ice; Concept and choreographer: Birgitte Bauer-Nilsen, Composer and musician: Casten Dahl, Vocal: Aviaja Lumholdt, Dancers: Thomas Johansen and Alexander Montgomy-Andersen, Installations artist: Marianne Grønnow, Light design: Jesper Kongshaug.
Bio
Ph.D., associate professor, choreographer Birgitte Bauer-Nilsen has made intercultural performances in India, Vietnam, China, Tanzania, Greenland and Europe with her dance ensemble, Yggdrasil Dance. Furthermore Birgitte has given workshop/lectures at universities in Europe and Asia. Birgitte is an associate professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. For more information Yggdrasildance.dk

Anne Robinson, Middlesex University.
If I Sleep, I May Be Caught
If I sleep, I may yet dream. If we sing, we may be heard. The sea, always in motion: and voices fluid. Borders in the sea are an impossibility and we may overflow them.
Wakeful is a new, experimental work in progress, which aims to commemorate peace 100 years on and facilitate participation in discussions about loss, trauma, war, songs, inter-generational memory and pacifism. In the international space of PSi at the sea port of Hamburg, I wish to discuss and get feedback for this work in progress and also engage in a song ritual at the port.
'If I Sleep, I May be Caught’ was the motto of a ship named Wakeful on which my father was ship’s cook, built on ‘Red Clydeside’ in 1917 and sent off immediately following the WW1Armistice, to engage the 'Red Navy' in the Gulf of Finland. My father was traumatized but largely silent about his war experience, apart from one single, stark memory of Russian sailors in the ice… his revulsion at the destruction of others resonates now with Tolstoy's work of 1893: The Kingdom of God is Within You. On Xmas Day 1918 in Tallinn harbor, a concert took place on board Wakeful. Museum-archived journals recall sewing sequins on frocks for sailors and music-hall songs. Amidst cold, hunger and the threat of bombardment, the ship’s crew played and sang. In the handwritten programme, I found tunes remembered from my father singing. I can hear them now: resonance in flesh and bone. Leading in to 1918, I will work with Russian, Estonian and German performers to explore the effects of cold and trauma on the voice and the percussive sound of shipbuilding. One hundred years on and our seas are still the site of conflict and prejudice, still carry refugees through contested waters.
Bio
Anne Robinson’s experimental practice is concerned with the perception and politics of time passing: duration, frame, exposure, sound and movement. She holds a practice-led PhD on temporality and art. Recent projects include: Inspiral London: a walking project on occupying urban space, Inside Out Blues for ‘Capital of Culture’ Marseilles, Thrashing in the Static in Pool at CGP London, Deptford X and Folkestone. Ghost On the Wire a Bermonsdsey Project Space and Objectifs, Singapore. She has participated in PSi since 2012, presenting: Enlarger Than Life: Song-Films and Irrational Gestures at PSi20 Shanghai and Phonogenie for PSi21 Fluid Sounds, Copenhagen with an audio paper for Seismograf journal. Recent publications include: See Red (Four Corners Books, 2016). She is currently Programme Leader for Media Foundation at Middlesex University.
www.annerobinsonartwork.org

Gry Worre Hallberg, independent artist.
Sensuous Learning and The Poetic Self
Sisters Academy, Radical Live Intervention into the Educational System. Sisters Academy is a performance experiment in search of a society and educational system that values the sensuous and the poetic – A 1:1 experimentation of the school in a potential future world that we term Sensuous Society. When we manifest we take over the actual leadership of a series of upper secondary schools, which we transform completely through immersive and interventionist strategies. We work from a performance-methodology of developing a ‘poetic self’. The poetic self is not a character, it is not a fiction; we define it as our inherent poetic potential that we might not unfold in our everyday life but that we discover, give an image and donate our flesh to. By doing so we experience an expanding spectrum of possibilities, new spaces in which we can be. We don’t change; we liberate new potential; we expand – Overflow, perhaps...
Bio
Gry Worre Hallberg operate in the intersection of performance art, research, activism and future studies continuously executed in 1:1 co-created experiments such as Sisters Academy, Dome of Visions,  and In100Y. Currently work on the project The Sensuous Society: Beyond economic rationality – Suggesting a sensuous mode of being in the world. For many years she has aimed at enriching environments with an aesthetic dimension through interventionist, interactive and immersive performance art strategies. Gry is the co-founder of a range of organizations and movements within the field of performance art applied in a series of different everyday-life contexts, among them Sisters Hope (ongoing project: Sisters Academy), House of Futures, Fiction Pimps, Club de la Faye, Staging Transitions and The Poetic Revolution.
Gry is a member of the global, urban network Theatrum Mundi initiated by prof. and urbanist Richard Sennett (NYU and LSE) and have completed several projects, articles and publications on intervening and relational performance art and new societies. Also see here.
Gry is currently conducting a practice-based PhD at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Culture, Theatre- and Performance Studies, and is an external lecturer at Performance Design at Roskilde University. She carries a MA in Theatre- and Performance Studies from The University of Copenhagen and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Gry is also curating the performance-art program at the Roskilde festival and is the artistic director of the Dome of Visions.
For an overview of her activities please see: http://www.sensuous.dk

Sarah Blissett, University of Roehampton, UK:
Tidal Tea 
A performative food-based sharing, joining together a range of ingredients, human and nonhuman, through the pouring and eating of seaweed broth. An invitation to taste the ocean and reflect on ecological narratives around human consumption, marine ecosystem collapse and the role we play in these processes. This 10-minute sharing is part of my PhD research, investigating Food and Ecology in Performance, focusing on interspecies connections through food webs and exploring algae organisms in performance.
Bio
Sarah Blissett is an Artist/Researcher and Performance Studies PhD candidate at University of Roehampton. Her PhD research investigates Food and Ecology in Performance, through a study of algae organisms and ecosystems, engaging with posthuman notions of performativity, intra-activity and transdisciplinary performance practice. blissets@roehampton.ac.uk|http://sarahblissett.wix.com/work

Ray Langenbach, University of the Arts Helsinki
Performance Paper: Hyper-connecting the Mnemosyne Atlas
Between 1927 – 1929, Aby M. Warburg developed his Mnemosyne Atlas in his circular library in Hamburg. The Atlas included around 2000 images, which were mounted on black cloth-covered boards in “visual clusters” based on the associative affinities between specific iconic art works and nodes of visual culture, substantially presented without the intervention of the spoken word. Warburg was interested in visual and historical contiguities, cultural continuities/discontinuities: the hyper-connective tissues of sensibility cohering cultures, signs, images. Warburg’s work was picked up in a different register by the idiosyncratic late-structuralist Russian Jewish historian Leo Bronstein in his Fragments of Art, Metaphysics and Life, and other works. All of Bronstein’s works maintain a thread of archaeological performativity strongly evident in Warburg’s Atlas. A reading will be presented of the psychotropic excesses of consciousness in Bronstein’s Fragments and Warburg's Atlas, as part of a broader consideration of the immersive cognitive complements of order-disintegration, memory-dementia-dismemberment. 
(This paper may be presented in either in either a 30-minute or 15 minute form.) 
Bio
Dr. Ray Langenbach, professor of performance art and theory, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy and Star Foundation Professor, Faculty of Creative Industries, Tunku Abdul Rahman University, Malaysia, a performance artist, event convener and scholar who is dividing his time between practice and theory in Finland and Malaysia. He served as Co-convener of the Asian Performance Research Workshop in Penang (2003), and the Performance Studies international Conference in Singapore (2004). He has curated several other Performance Art festivals and Biennales in Asia and Europe.

Hanna Järvinen, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy.
Excess and Abundance in Documentation
I will present on a 2015-2016 choreographic research project based on archival materials – documents of not only a past performance but of plans for a past performance, documents describing a performance prior to its first performance. This performance about the re-performance of a past performance disturbs the chronology of what was first, event or its documentation, and questions how we define documentation and its role vis à vis performance. Although the archive is usually seen as insufficient for any re-creation of a past performance, in the process of re-imagining what might have been, the collaborators in this project found that even the few traces that remain create an over-abundance of possibilities. At the same time, creating a new performance of a performance about a performance inverts the relationship of document and performance asking what is the significance of past performance and documentation in the present and what is the role of the absences and silences in allowing for epistemological inquiry about performance, documents, and re-performance?
Bio
Dr Hanna Järvinen is a Senior Researcher in the Academy of Finland research project How to Do Things with Performance? 2016-2020 and a University Lecturer at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. She holds the title of Docent in dance history at the University of Turku and is the author of Dancing Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) as well as articles in journals such as Senses and Society, Dance Research, and Dance Research Journal.

Pilvi Porkola, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy.
Performance and Institutions
This presentation explores how the performative turn can be understood in the context of public institutions: in a library, an elementary school, and an art museum. I am interested in what kind of performing, performances, and actions these institutions produce; how institutions can be understood as experimental places; and what performance art can do in that context. In this presentation I focus on my project Library Essays, a series of audio performances taking place at the Maunula Library, Helsinki, in 2016-17, and on questions of public and liminal spaces in real and imagined places.
Bio
Pilvi Porkola has a Doctor of Art (theatre and drama) and is a performance artist, writer and the founder of magazine Esitys. Among other things she has taught performance, contemporary theatre and performance studies as well as written and directed several performances and short films. 

Tero Nauha, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Thought of Performance
This presentation connects with schizoanalysis and posthuman philosophy. My aim is to investigate the non-philosophical reading of ‘the decision’ in relation to performance art practice and political theory. The decision is a gesture of thought, which cuts matter through analysis, reduction, and withdrawal. Through decisional devices jurisprudence and philosophy allocate meaning for the exception: a victim, refugee, migrant, etc. In short, a crisis is a decisional operation. The presentation focuses on 1) how a decisional cut produces an event and 2) how performance as a practice may produce excess and exception.
Bio
Tero Nauha, performance artist and visual artist, holds a Doctor of Art (theatre and drama). Nauha’s doctoral dissertation at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki took a critical look at the relationship between artistic work and immanent capitalism. Nauha’s artistic work has been performed at several theatres and festivals both in Finland and around Europe.

Bruce Barton, University of Calgary.
Excessively Intimate / Intimate Excess: The Trace That Remains (and Doesn’t)
Trace (2014) was a ghost telling, a highly intimate exchange between 2 performers and a small group of audience participants (10 – 40), a structured sharing of sensory-triggered memories that engaged each audience member individually, leading to an always unique and thoroughly collective narrative experience. Trace (2017) will share many of the same characteristics as its 2014 counterpart—with the critical difference that it will be performed to/for/with up to 125 audience participants in an international festival context. My company, Vertical City, is currently attempting to reimagine the 2014 understanding of the performance for 2 or 3 times as many people without sacrificing the highly individualized orientation of the original configuration. As one of the performers has framed it, “We have to learn how to fall in love with 125 people at once.” My presentation will introduce the strategies employed in the original production and explore how these are being modified, expanded, and reinvented to embrace the production’s current mandate.
Bio
Bruce Barton is a creator/scholar whose practice-based research and teaching focuses on physical dramaturgies in devised, immersive and intermedial performance. He has published in a wide range of scholarly and practical periodicals, including Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, as well as numerous national and international essay collections. His book publications include At the Intersection Between Art and Research (2010), and Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising (2008). Bruce is also an award-winning playmaker who works extensively as a director, writer and dramaturg with many of Canada’s most accomplished physical performance companies. He is the Artistic Director of Vertical City, an interdisciplinary performance hub located in Calgary. In January 2015, Bruce became the first Director of the new School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. For a full bio see http://brucewbarton.com/about-3/. For information about Vertical City, see http://brucewbarton.com/vertical-city/.

Johanna Householder, OCAD University, Toronto.
Live Streaming
Taking into account the ubiquity of live streaming attempts (if not successes), this performance-studio-action-interaction will encourage a reconsideration of screen space through small performance gestures.
Bio
Johanna Householder works through performance, dance, feminist theatre (The Clichettes), video and intermedia art. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her largely collaborative practice. She recently performed at Performancear o Morir in Chihuahua, at undisclosed territory in Java, at M:ST in Calgary, AB and reset her 1978 solo on dancers at Toronto Dance Theatre and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). She is a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art which held its 11th biennial in October. She has two books edited in collaboration with Tanya Mars: Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2005); and More Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women; Artexte, Montréal / YYZBooks (2016) and with Selma Odom contributed to Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s (2012). She is a Professor at OCAD University.

Annette Arlander, University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts.
How to do things with performance – Performing with plants (first attempts)
To perform and co-operate with plants and especially trees is an artistic research project, which develops and specifies the question How to perform landscape today?, a question I have worked with in various forms during several years. The question is not rhetorical; our relationship to the environment has dramatically changed due to global warming and other more or less manmade disasters, and demands new approaches. A posthumanist perspective prompts us to rethink the notion landscape and to consider how the surrounding world consists of creatures, life forms and material phenomena with varying degrees of volition, needs and agency. What forms of performing, realizing or activating landscape could be relevant in this situation? One possibility is to approach individual elements in a landscape, such as specific trees, and explore what can be done together with them, for instance how to perform for camera together. This presentation will briefly describe my first attempts within this project, look at the role of repetition as a key strategy in performance, and demonstrate how the simplest digital documentation produces an overflow of material over time.
Bio
Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue. She is one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. She is educated as theatre director, Master of Arts and Doctor of Art (theatre and drama). She was professor of performance art and theory (2001-2013) at the University of the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy and professor of artistic research (2015-2016). At present she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki and artist-researcher at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. See https://annettearlander.com


Technical and spatial requirements:
For the purposes of these sessions we need a studio space (a room with free floor space to move in), the ability to show video and image presentations on a screen or monitor (including sound), and internet access for accessing the online Research Catalogue.

We plan for three separate sessions of minimum 90 minutes each. All sessions will be open to anyone interested; all artists and artist-scholars attending the conference are invited to join us and give short reports/presentations.

On behalf of the working group,

Annette Arlander: annette.arlander@uniarts.fi
Johanna Householder: jact@sympatico.ca