Dance practice is often hidden inside dance studios, where it is not available for dialogue or interdisciplinary critique. In this paper, I will look closer at one of th eaccents that my body has held since the year 2000.To Swedish dance academies, it is perhaps the mos tforeign accent I have in my dance practice. It has not been implemented as ‘professional dance’ in Western dance studios. This foreign accent is called Nihon Buyō, Japanese dance, also known as Kabuki dance. Nihon Buyō, Nō or Kabuki are local performing arts practices for professional performers in Japan. A few foreignersare familiar with these practices thanks to culturalexchange programmes, such as the yearly Traditiona lTheatre Training at Kyoto Art Centre. There is no religious spell cast over the technique or a contract written that it must be kept secret or that it must not leave the Japanese studio or the Japanese stage. I will compare how dance is being transmitted in the studio in Kyoto with my own vocational dance education of many years ago. Are there similarities to how the female dancer’s body is constructed? Might there be unmarked cultural roots and invisible originators of the movements we are doing today in contemporary dance?

Art’s primary function, at least for a certain tradition of thinking, is to criticize capitalist society. But what in capitalism should be criticized? And how can art perform such a critique? Taking these questions as its staring point this article argues for three things mainly. First, by expanding on Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno’s form theory, that art primarily should criticize capitalism through its form, understood as “sedimented content.” Secondly, taking Marx’s term abstract labour and the way it has been further theorized by contemporary thinkers such as Moishe Postone and Chris Arthur, that abstract labour is the main mediating social form of capitalism and therefore should be the main focus for critique. Finally that art can only negate the social form of abstract labour though its own form. These arguments are being discussed through American choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s (1934-) work, which can be categorised as “task-dance”, an artistic strategy that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by choreographers Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Rainer. Through Adorno’s understanding of form, I argue that Rainer’s early task-dance works criticise capitalism at the level of form rather than at the level of representation.

Cross-gender acts have saturated Japanese performance history, with men and women using gender as a performative act. This practice-led article investigates gendered embodiment and gendered spaces through the Japanese dance and walking technique suriashi (which translates as sliding foot). It is practiced in traditional Japanese performing arts and in martial arts. Gender in traditional Japanese dance/Nihon Buyō is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body, as well as through costume and cross-dressing. The original suriashi practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage, however my research asks whether suriashi could also be a method to act, as being active, or to activate, in other spaces outside the theatre. I exemplify gendered perspectives through a suriashi walk by myself and the drag queen Bruno the Bad Boy at the yearly Saiin Kasuga Shrine Festival in Kyōto. I propose that the suriashi style created to impersonate women is not only a gender construction, it is also a reminder of the continuous absence of women in Nō and Kabuki theatre, resulting from the 1629-1868 ban of women from stage, the adoption of Confucian cultural values, and teachings of Buddhism. Combining extended practice-based and situated knowledge with historical accounts, I elucidate the act of ‘becoming woman’ or ‘performing as woman’ in traditional Japanese dance. This helps to process a global conservatory performer training as well as processing gender issues in the contemporary society, explored through gender theories, performing Hélène Cixoux’s sexual difference and Judith Butler’s gender trouble.

In this article, we describe the results from the dance section of a ULF project. ULF is an abbreviation for Development, Learning, Research (Swedish: Utveckling, Lärande, Forskning). Dance is a school subject at upper secondary level in Sweden with its own curriculum and grading criteria. Previous research has problematised teachers’ diffi-culties in verbalising and articulating their grounds for assessment. The research model used, a learning study, with its methodological and theoretical implications, is intro-duced. The model is collaborative and iterative and is combined with teaching practice. The results, presented as three categories of description in an outcome space with critical aspects, answer the research question: How can qualitative aspects of delimited subject-specific dance knowledge, namely, to perform a parallel pirouette, be articulated? We discuss the project’s results, gains and challenges and argue that the model used can be a way to gain knowledge about knowing expressed in a physical form, knowledge which is described as partly tacit. Considering the notion of tacit knowledge can be a way to understand the formation of dance knowledge and how it can be researched, in order to develop a subject-specific language.

This article includes a study that examines how formative assessment in dance education is constituted in three Swedish upper secondary schools. The starting-point for the study is life-world phenomenology. A phenomenological way of thinking entails that the human being is intersubjective, linked with and within the world and that learning requires the bodily subject´s active experience. To turn towards the things themselves and to be open and adherent to things in the world is a basic rule and the starting point for research within phenomenology. This study is based on empirical material from observations of the phenomenon formative assessment in dance. Spiegelberg´s philosophical method was used as a base for phenomenological analysis. The analysis results in three themes: modes of communication, dance-related knowledge and function of formative assessment. Formative assessment was observed in the study to commonly involve teachers´ verbal communication and visualisation. The assessment practice is a continuous activity and very rarely involves any kind of self-assessment or tests. The results were discussed and related to a life-world phenomenological view of learning and earlier research.

The article examines the golden period in Yugoslav culture during the 1960ies and the early years of Bitef (Belgrade International Theatre) Festival in relation to the very specific Yugoslav cultural politics which was skilfully balancing betwee the East and the West during the Cold War political fragmentisation of the world. Although a socialst country, Yugoslavia never belonged to either of the blocks and had a very progressive and liberal cultural policy which resulted in the creation of one of the oldest and during the 1960ies and 1970ies - most radical festivals in the world - the Bitef Festival which played a very important role as the meeting point between eastern and western theatre artists untill the fall of Berlin Wall.

A growing number of neuroscientific studies use films as experimental stimuli, making filmmakers partners in investigations of the brain. The author provides his perspective as a filmmaker who has been conducting neuroscience experiments in collaboration with a team of neuroscientists at the Brain and Mind Laboratory of Aalto University, Finland, over the last five years. This collaboration led to the development of a novel method of investigating the subconscious brain using films as well as insights on how to create more empathy-evoking films. Finally, the author discusses the relationship between social bias and boundaries of collaboration between filmmaking and neuroscience.

”Blikket” er en refleksjon i relasjon til forskningsprosjektet “The performing tools of the dancer and its’ potential” finansierad av Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola. Syftet har varit att lyfta fram de verktyg som dansaren använder i det ögonblicket arbetet möter en publik. Projektet undersöker hur dessa utvecklas genom utbildning, koreografiska processer och annan praktik. Forskningen har kretsat kring arbetet med blicken. På vilka sätt kan blicken användas av dansare på scenen? Från t.ex. att vara ett verktyg där det används för att stödja tekniska och koreografiska syften, till att vara ett medel för att röra sig.

In times of climate catastrophe, refugee crises and Covid-19, the question of the responsibility that artists and scholars have is becoming increasingly urgent. What is the role of circus within society? How far does this form of art and entertainment correlate with historical and contemporary social interests? How does circus research position itself as a relevant field of research within academia in the 21st century? Those questions will be explored within the series Adventures in Circus Research– Facing a New Decade, curated by academic Dr. Franziska Trapp. By featuring circus researchers, we give them the space to explain the nature and significance of their research directly to the circus community and to highlight the practical impact of their research on the circus world and its relevance for society. 

In the sixth article of the series, Marie-Andrée Robitaille, PhD at the faculty of Artistic research at Stockholm University of the Arts in Sweden, provides insights into her doctoral artistic project in which she searches for ethical alternatives to human exceptionalism in circus art.

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo reflexionar en torno a la problematización del estudio de caso Garden State (Estado Jardín), el cual fue presentado en 2014 en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires en Argentina. La producción del proyecto se realizó en colaboración con el Centro Rural de Arte y el IIDAM (Instituto de Investigación del Departamento de Artes del Movimiento, UNA) en el marco del evento Espacios Revelados. A partir de las contribuciones teórico-críticas del arte contextual (Ardenne, 2006) y de la estética relacional (Bourriaud, 2008) serán puestos en cuestionamiento ciertos discursos curatoriales y artísticos que circularon durante el evento. Se referirá al concepto de colonialidad del hacer con el objeto de abordar la complejidad de ciertas continuidades y dominancias en las propuestas extranjeras que son presentadas en el contexto local.

We are constantly categorizing other people as belonging to our in-group (‘one of us’) or out-group (‘one of them’). Such grouping occurs fast and automatically and can be based on others’ visible characteristics such as skin color or clothing style. Here we studied neural underpinnings of implicit social grouping not often visible on the face, male sexual orientation. A total of 14 homosexuals and 15 heterosexual males were scanned in functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching a movie about a homosexual man, whose face was also presented subliminally before (subjects did not know about the character’s sexual orientation) and after the movie. We discovered significantly stronger activation to the man’s face after seeing the movie in homosexual but not heterosexual subjects in medial prefrontal cortex, frontal pole, anterior cingulate cortex, right temporal parietal junction and bilateral superior frontal gyrus. In previous research, these brain areas have been connected to social perception, self-referential thinking, empathy, theory of mind and in-group perception. In line with previous studies showing biased perception of in-/out-group faces to be context dependent, our novel approach further demonstrates how complex contextual knowledge gained under naturalistic viewing can bias implicit social perception.

This article focuses on methods by which editors shape character in editing. Given that editors’ choices of shot, take, and timing augment and vary actors’ performances and directors’ instructions, and that these choices shape the audience perception of film characters, we ask: what components of editors’ expertise are activated in shaping material to create characters that viewers can invest in emotionally? Editors’ expertise is generally referred to as ‘intuitive’, which is a shorthand for knowledge and experience that informs decision making at a pre-conscious level.  This article argues that ‘intuitive’ is not incorrect, however, drawing on the authors’ extensive editing practice and building on existing editing theory as well as ideas from science and film studies, we seek more specific identification and articulation of editors’ expertise. This article offers an original editing taxonomy in relation to editing character. The taxonomy includes explicit articulations of kinaesthetic empathy and implicit knowledge such as: laws of physics, reflex reactions, and cultural conditioning. Awareness of these pervasive but often unrecognised forms of knowledge, we argue, can enhance editors’ ability to develop multifaceted characters through editing, clarify discussions between collaborators, and even enhance understanding of the art of editing more generally.  

This article reflects some experiences of being a curator of live art in a black box theatre,like the Black Box Teater in Oslo. It touches upon the question of curating as such andhow it influences the notion of what theatre is when it is applied to such a context. Therelational aspect of theatre is being examined, using references to Michael Fried andAntonin Artaud.

De verzameling van voorstellingen die een choreograaf of een theaterregisseur heeft gemaakt, noemen we – tenminste als er een zekere consensus bestaat over het artistieke belang ervan – een oeuvre. Wat bouwen dansers en acteurs op tijdens hun professionele loopbaan? Welke symbolische en economische waarde genereert hun kunde? Zijn zij als uitvoerende kunstenaars ook ‘auteurs’? Een gesprek met Chrysa Parkinson, danseres voor onder meer Boris Charmatz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jonathan Burrows en Eszter Salamon, danspedagoge aan P.A.R.T.S. en directeur van de performanceafdeling van DOCH Uniarts in Stockholm.

The article discusses the relationship between dance and dramaturgy, and takes stock of the ongoing discussions and debates surrounding this relationship. The author goes on to advocate for 'dramaturgical thinking' as something which is shared by everyone within a creative process. 

Projektet Demmin – eine Stadt zum Klingen bringen (”Demmin – att låta en stad ljuda”) undersöker den tyska staden Demmins historia och berättelser genom att iscensätta en dialog mellan den lokala kören ”Peenechor” och platsen för Haus Demmin. Under en två veckor lång workshop utforskade Dobewall och amatörkören ”Peenechor” hur man skulle kunna ge plats och röst åt andra slags berättelser – berättelser om Demmins invånare och två försummade byggnader kända under det gemensamma namnet Haus Demmin (ruinerna efter en fästning från 1000-talet och en före detta herrgård). Med åldrande röster och en arkitektur i sönderfall, i sonisk dialog med varandra, skapades ett sjungande performance-verk under bar himmel. Berättelser, historia och sagor tog nya former genom sången. Denna platsspecifika performance väckte både besökarna och deltagarnas egna minnen men också deras fantasi, för att tillsammans bilda en holistisk upplevelse.

Layered, scattered and synthetic traces of a performer’s authorship. A series of harmonic partials. Materials include photographs, audio recordings and writings sourced from performances the author participated in between 2013 – 2017.

This articles discusses devising and dramaturgy and relational practice and aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud). With departure in the discourse on the relationship between subject/object, Behrndt discusses a number of examples from contemporary visual and performance practice where the supposed 'objecthood' of the 'work' and 'subjecthood' of the spectator are called into question. Behrndt goes on to apply these to a discussion of dramaturgical practice within collaborative and devised performance.

The article has been developed from a paper given at the 'Relational Aspects of Dramaturgy', co-organised by the universities of Ghent and Brussels together with KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Ghent) in March 2012. 

In this article1 I am discussing how traditions are reenacted by dance revival and reconstruction. My starting point is the experience I have of restaging choreographic works by the Swedish choreographer Per Jonsson (1956-1998), of whose artistic production I am in charge. Through examples from working with repertoire, I will develop my thoughts around how new interpretations of a movement material reformulate the tradition and inform the present. I will also discuss how dancers of today are researching and developing new methods for processing a movement material. This in turn leads to new ways of dealing with quality, dynamics and timing in reconstruction of a written material.

Epiphanies of an Invisible weave is an essay written during the processes of two different, yet overlapping, projects; the research project FACT stage one, and the solar driven, sound art project UNDER. The essay explores the specific capacities and possibilities of sound and listening through the specific mode of field recording, which is the sonic modality that I have exploring for more than 20 years. The essay aims to shed some light on the site-related, political, and hidden potentials of sound as it examines the possibilities of (re)-learning through listening in relation to both human and more-than-human explorations and possible “epiphanies”, imagining openings beyond stereotypical knowing. 

Ett osynligt stycke tyg är en essä som utgår från två olika, men ändå överlappande, konstnärliga processer; forskningsprojektet FACT stage one, och det soldrivna, ljudkonstprojektet UNDER. Essän utforskar ljudets och lyssnandets specifika kapaciteter utifrån min konstnärliga fältinspelningspraktik, vilket är den “ljudmodalitet” som jag har arbetat med i över 20 år. Texten diskuterar ljudets och lyssnandets platsrelaterade, politiska och dolda förmågor när det gäller att utmana det “vi tror vi vet” om mänskliga och mer-än-mänskliga organismer – och som ett möjligt verktyg för att hitta öppningar och uppenbarelser bortom stereotypt vetande.

The new audio technologies available today are forces in the evolution of sound and music in contemporary performing arts. New sonic practices for sound designers, composers and performers emerge, which in turn change the creative processes for productions, as well as the aesthetics of performances. This article focuses on how a creative rethinking of work with immersive sound, virtual room acoustics and sonic spatialization can be a dramaturgical, compositional and scenographic tool for performing arts. It is a new sonic practice that offers interactive and immersive elements that interplay with performers, transforms spaces and shapes evocative experiences for the audience. The article particularly considers the creative perspectives of the composer and the sound designer in how new ideas and possibilities may unfold with such an approach. This may ultimately merge the often-separated practices of musical composition and sound design and further expand them towards scenography and dramaturgy.

This article examines how dance knowledge is seen through syllabuses in Swedish upper secondary schools. A starting point is life-world phenomenology. A phenomenological way of thinking allows that human beings are intersubjective, linked with and within the world, which influences the view of dance knowledge and how research is elaborated. A basic rule and starting point for research within phenomenology is to turn toward the things themselves and to be adherent. Dance knowledge constitutes the phenomenon studied, as revealed in dance syllabus steering documents. Spiegelberg’s philosophical method is used as a base for phenomenological text analysis. The study is limited to syllabuses from two different curricula, labeled by The Swedish National Agency for Education as Lpf94 and Gy11. The analysis results in two images of how the essence of dance knowledge is manifested. Finally, the different constitutions are discussed and related to a life-world phenomenological view of dance knowledge.

This performative hybrid research and development project contributes knowledge about the decolonizing potentials and challenges that are articulated through an initial scanning of the dance pedagogical field as part of a large change project in tertiary dance education at the Department for Dance Pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts in Sweden. To do this scanning in a way that would promote collective learning, multiple perspective taking and creativity, we utilised design thinking. In total, 140 scan cards collected through the project were analysed. Both students and staff and other people in different parts of the world within the dance educational field created the scan cards. As a result, we suggest that the scanning of the field has pushed ourselves, the rest of the staff, students, and others into a process of collective learning, multiple perspectivetaking, and creativity, in which clear decolonizing potentials, as well as challenges to change are expressed.

Amidst the fourth industrial revolution, the sixth mass extinction, global warming, and a world pandemic, humans face an increasing amount of complex and challenging crises on planet Earth. Over the years 2020 and 2021, the performing arts sector has been paralyzed and now in 2022 we are oscillating between coming back to normal and moving to a new normal. Our modes of creation, production, and dissemination have been disrupted. On a larger eco-socio-political scale, during the pandemic, the impacts of human activities on Earth seem to have been made more distinctly visible, inviting us to ask: what does it mean to be human today? More specifically, however, the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing circus artists to revise how we work and think about circus arts. What does it mean to be a circus artist today? How can circus arts remain relevant? And what connections might circus arts have with the wider question of human involvement in the world?

In the history of the body, upright posture has been the theme of philosophical reflections on human nature and the object of scientific explorations and practical measures ensuring social norms. It is even possible to locate a certain discourse of the upright body as a model for understanding what it means to be human. However, humans have long experimented with the opposite: the inverted position. The handstand is probably the epitome of this endeavour to invert upright posture. Within circus performance, handbalancing has been developed into an art form of its own. This article examines how hand-balancing relates to the upright body. The article argues that circus hand-balancing participates in the discourse of the upright body in a paradoxical way, both inverting and reinforcing it. The article argues that this is expressed not only on a representational level but also on the technical and experiential levels of the practice.

The article examines the case of the groundbreaking Yugoslav production of Pupilija Ferkeverk in relation to Ygoslav socio-political landscape and a very unique cultural policy in the 1960ies and 1970ies.

The text is an introductory text for the 43rd edition of the Bitef Festival in 2009.

The text focuses on the selection for the main program of the festival, examining the effects of the 2008.political crisis on theatre as well as the artistic response to the crisis.

This text aims to show my collaborative artistic work with suriashi, a Japanese walking technique used in performing and marital arts, as a performative gesture and ritual. It is based on my own practice with master Nishikawa Senrei in Kyoto as part of my studies in traditional Japanese dance since 2000. It asks how artistic techniques could become more activist and critical, while asking questions about and to contemporary spaces.

Listening to the forest is a streamed video essay in which you are invited to pay attention to audiovisual relations between human, landscape and moving image. Moving images are explored through a camera-based field recording practice that emphasises them as part of an ecological materiality, inseparable from what they depict and how they are seen.

Rendering a forest as a visual site, a landscape, while collaborating with it in developing sounds and images, the essay explores how human management is inseparable from the conditions of the forest itself. It engages with Swedish forestry and its ecological consequences, and with the precariousness of relations between human and non-human through practices of attention (Ingold, 2015) and listening (Voegelin, 2012). Nature appears as compromised through plantation and its consequences, and at the same time as a cinematic collaborator, enabling the relationships that produce the images, relations between the life of the forest, bodies, and devices.

In a similar gesture the images are also treated as a site, not separate from the relations of the world it is depicting, but part of its ongoing processes and emerging in a network of interactions (Røed, 2014). Drawing upon the long history of framing in cinema (Gunning, 1994), the video plays with stillness and movement, panoramic motion, algorithmic automation, topographical thinking as well as structural strategies such as juxtaposition. For example, a split between juxtaposed images breaks the spatiality of the image as well as the verticality of the forest’s tree trunks while expanding the visual field, allowing the trunks to stretch further up, out of one visual field and into the next.

By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art (Voegelin, 2014; Benson & Montgomery, 2018) and applying it to the moving image, this research explores the capacity of video-based art for enabling movement, transience, and body; in other words, elements of performance characteristic to site (Kwon 2004, Kaye 2000). By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, it explores how the moving image can manifest as place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.

In a context of artistic practice, I ask how activities of listening and paying attention occurring through the moving image can be applied as a specific methodology to explore specific surroundings and to create artworks that operate across any dialectic opposition between experience, mediation, and representation, as a form of placemaking? Leaving behind phenomenological appreciation of being immersed in a natural world andbreaking with the aesthetics of the avant-garde, where the materiality of the medium is in a separate position disconnected from the relations of the world, the essayseeks to share a methodology where research occurs in a thick materiality through the situated practice of video art as it developed as a form of inquiry. (Bijvoet, 1997)

The aim of this study is to illuminate and discuss assessment within dance education in Swedish upper secondary schools through teachers’ reflections. The study investigates how teachers reflect upon the range of possibilities explored and difficulties encountered in their assessment practice. In order to be able to comprehend the phenomenon of teachers’ reflections regarding their assessment practice, both written and verbal teacher reflections were gathered by means of seven interviews with four teachers, and one trilateral talk. Four teachers participated in the study. In the analytical process, the phenomenon was seen, broadened, varied, and then condensed into two themes: Conditions for assessment for learning and Making space for assessment. Both themes have aspects, which are intertwined: both include conditions for assessment as seen through various modalities, methods and tools.

Denna artikel diskuterar genus och kön i nycirkus och särskilt hur cirkuskroppen tar oss rakt in i lejonkulan när det gäller diskusisonen om genus och kön. Diskussionen sker genom nedslag i konkreta situationer. fragment av berättelser om konfrontationen med kroppen i cirkus som praktik, samt fiktiva möten med Professor Challenger - en gestalt Gilles Deleuze's och Félix Guattari's verk Mille Plateaux. 

Most films tell a story. This story takes place in a constructed world that only exists in each specific film. It makes no difference if the story is set in a fantasy world, a historical or a future world, or even if it’s a documentary that depicts reality. Every film still creates it’s own filmic world, its diegesis.. Everything which happens inside this world is called diegetic and what happens (in the movie) outside this world is called non-diegetic. Traditional film music and voice-over narration are typical examples of non-diegetic sounds. The characters in the film are unaware of them, because they don’t exist in the same world. These sounds are messages from the filmmaker directly to his/her audience. Music played inside the film’s world, for example by visible musicians or from a radio seen on screen, is diegetic, as is dialogue and sound effects. The characters in the film are meant to be aware of these sounds. Whether the actors heard these sounds while shooting the scenes or if they where added during sound editing, they influence the audience’s interpretation of the characters, the situation and the narrative.

In classical music performance, if the only tool to sustain the great tradition may be seen to be perfectionism, it may hijack artistic expression and freedom. Possibly it will also limit the expressive potential of the performer. Taken together, the vast repertoire, the pressure to compete, and the institutional demands levied in order to make a career leave very little room for exploring new and radical parameters in performance or interpretation. ‘Potential space’ was Donald Winnicott’s term for an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others. This audio paper by Kent Olofsson and Francisca Skoogh is a sound composition focusing on portraying performance as a potential space, with interpretation as play material. In it, we hear Skoogh, a pianist with many years of experience performing Western classical music, express her performance values, i.e. how she manages emotions connected to expected behaviour on stage and to the repertoire. The authors proceed to transcribe Winnicott’s potential space into artistic practice in order to challenge both the relations between score and performer, and expected concert traditions. It explores one of the great sonatas of the piano repertoire, the Piano Sonata Op. 11 by Robert Schumann.