How to Do Things with Performance in Hamburg – Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä Hampurissa?

The research project How to Do things with Performance participated in PSI #23 Overflow, the Performance Studies International conference in Hamburg June 8-11 2017 by joining the Artistic Research Working Group sessions called Excess and Abundance of Artistic Research with the following presentations:

Hanna Järvinen, Excess and Abundance in Documentation

Pilvi Porkola, Performance and Institutions

Tero Nauha, Thought of Performance

Annette Arlander, How to do things with performance – Performing with plants (first attempts)

JA SAMA SUOMEKSI:

Tutkimusprojekti Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä osallistui esitystutkimuksen konferenssiin PSI #23 Overflow Hampurissa 8-11 kesäkuuta 2017 liittymällä taiteellisen tutkimuksen työryhmän sessioihin Excess and Abundance of Artistic Research seuraavin alustuksin (otsikot karkeasti suomennettuna):

Hanna Järvinen, Dokumentaation ylenpalttisuus

Pilvi Porkola, Esitys  ja instituutiot

Tero Nauha, Esityksen ajatus

Annette Arlander, Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä – ja esiintyä kasvien kanssa (ensimmäiset yritykset)

Mitä tekijä voi tehdä? – What can an author (maker, factor) do?

Mitä tekijä voi tehdä? niminen artikkelini on julkaistu johdantona Teatterintutkimuksen seuran tuoreeseen julkaisuun, Annette Arlander, Laura Gröndahl ja Marja Silde (toim.) Tekijä – teos, esitys ja yhteiskunta, Näyttämö ja tutkimus 6. Siinä pohdin muun muassa suomenkielisen tekijä-sanan monia merkityksiä. Tiivistelmässä totean seuraavaa:

Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelen tapaa, jolla tekijyys on esitysten yhteydessä ymmärretty, kysyn voisimmeko ymmärtää tekijyyden laajemmin ja tarkastelen jatkumoa esiintyjyyden ja tekijyyden välillä. Esittelen Roland Barthes’n ja Michel Foucault’n kirjallisuuden alalla hahmottamia ajatuksia tekijyydestä ja ehdotan suomen kielen tekijä-sanan eri merkityksiin perustuen tekijyyden jaottelua kolmeen tasoon, signeeraavaan, valmistavaan ja vaikuttavaan tekijään, jota kehittelen lisäämällä teknologian, ympäristön osatekijät ja toisten teokset. Pohdin myös millä keinoin tekijän valtaa voi jakaa ja nostan esiin joitakin Fluxus -liikkeen piirissä käytettyjä strategioita tekijyyden jakamiseksi – sattumalle, esittäjälle tai katsojalle. Sivuttuani lyhyesti tekijän valtaa suhteessa tuotanto-olosuhteisiin tarkastelen lopuksi tekijälähtöisen tai taiteellisen tutkimuksen yhteydessä ilmeneviä eroja tekijän positiossa eri taiteenalojen välillä. Tiivistetysti: Suomen kielen tarjoama mahdollisuus tunnustaa tekijöiden ja tekijyyden laaja kirjo on tuleva haaste, jonka kohtaamiseen tämä artikkeli haluaa osaltaan kannustaa.

Artikkeli pdf tiedostona tässä: teats6_arlander Julkaisu sisältää myös muuta kiinnostavaa, mm. Hanna Järvisen artikkelin On the Author Function in Dance History ja on avoimesti saatavilla verkossa täällä.

What can an author (maker, factor) do? An article with that title has been published in Finnish as the introduction to a recent publication by the Finnish Society for Theatre Research, Annette Arlander, Laura Gröndahl and Marja Silde (eds.) Author – Work, Performance and Society, Stage and Research 6 (in rough translation). In that text I discuss the many meanings of the Finnish word ‘tekijä’ – author, maker, factor – unfortunately only in Finnish. Perhaps I will have the time an energy to translate the text into English at some point. The abstract goes like this:

In this article I look at the ways authorship has been understood in the context of performance, ask how we could understand authorship more broadly and begin by presenting a continuum between authorship and ”performerhood” (being a performer). After presenting ideas regarding authorship in literature by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault I propose – based on the various meanings of the Finnish word for author, ’tekijä’ – an understanding of three levels of authorship: the signing author, the making author (maker) and the influencing factor. The latter I further discuss in terms of technology, environmental factors and works by others. Based on strategies used within the Fluxus tradition, like giving decision-making power to chance, to the performer and to the spectator, I discuss attempts at shared authorship. After a brief discussion of the power of the author in relation to circumstances of production I look at the differences between art forms concerning the position of the author/artist in artistic research. In brief: the possibility afforded by the Finnish language to acknowledge the broad variety of authors and authorship, is a future challenge, which this article wants to encourage us to meet.

Link to the text (in Finnish) here: teats6_arlander The publication contains some interesting texts in English as well, such as Hanna Järvinen’s article On the Author Function in Dance History, and is freely available online here.

How to perform landscape with repetition – At the outskirts of the City

A seminar titled Site-specific Performance and the City was organised by Leena Kela and Christopher Hewitt as part of New Performance Turku Festival on Wednesday 5th and I was honoured to be invited to speak. See programme. This was right after our kick-off seminar the previous day, so I based my talk “At the Outskirts of the City”  – Harakka Island where I have done most of my work is at the outskirts of Helsinki, although it is fairly centrally located on the map – on an old text. It is published as part of the introduction to Performing Landscape – Notes on Site-specific Work and Artistic Research. Texts 2001-2011. Acta Scenica 28. Theatre Academy Helsinki 2012 and the whole book is available online as a pdf file, here. The fragment in question (arlander_as_28-fragment) is discussing the relationship of place and performance in general terms. In the background I showed the two videos I never had the time to show at our kick-off seminar, namely the first part of Year of the Horse  (2003) and the first part of Year of the Horse – Calendar (2015).

My brief and informal talk at the kick-off seminar at Theatre Academy on Tuesday concerned repetition, and was partly based on an article “Repeat, Revisit, Recreate—Two Times Year of the Horse” in PARSE Journal Issue #3 Repetitions and Reneges. 2016, 43-59, also available online, here. There I describe those two video works or rather the process of recreating an old work by revisiting the same site after twelve years. In my presentation I chose to show my small powerpoint notes-on-repetition, rather than take up time by showing the videos, especially since we had just seen some great live shows…

4th October Kick-off Seminar Program

 

How to do things with performance?

The four-year Academy of Finland funded research project “How to do things with performance?” will organise its kick off seminar at University of the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy, in collaboration with the Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke and the Finnish Network for Performance Studies.

We invite to join us in exploring and listening to what can be done with performance.

For more information about the project, see  http://www.uniarts.fi/en/howtodothingswithperformance

Time: October 4 2016, 10 am – 4 pm

Venue: Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki Haapaniemenkatu 6 Auditorium 1 / Tori

 

Preliminary Program

10:00  Leena Rouhiainen, opening words

Annette Arlander, presentation of the program

10:15  Heike Roms:  How to do history with performance

10:45 Hanna Järvinen: Jeux 1913 and 2016

11:00 Simon O’Sullivan: Performance Fictions

11:15 Coffee

11:30 Ed Scheer How to do things with performance (really)

11:45 Esa Kirkkopelto: Body and Object in Performance

12:00 Pilvi Porkola: What is ‘esitys’?

Discussion

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 Tero Nauha: Abridged thought of performance

13:45 Katve-Kaisa Kontturi: Performance and Event: The Case of Feminist Colour-IN

14:00 Kira O’Reilly: I came to the sea and I was scared, my heart was broken

14:15 Karolina Kucia: Perform and Not

14:30 Tuomas Laitinen: I have an idea

14:45 Coffee

15:00 Henna-Riikka Halonen: In the Labyrinth between explanation and experience

15:15 Saara Hannula: “something doing”

15:30 Kimmo Modig: from transformative to transfigurative

15:45 Annette Arlander: How to perform landscape by repetition

16:00 Discussion

 

As an appendix,  please find a text, how-to-do-things-with-performance-art by Ed Scheer.

4 Lokakuuta Kick-off seminaarin ohjelma

Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?

Nelivuotinen Suomen Akatemian rahoittama tutkimushanke “Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?” järjestää aloitusseminaarin Taideyliopiston Teatterikorkeakoulussa, yhteistyössä Esittävien taiteiden Tutkimuskeskus Tutken ja Esitystutkimuksen verkoston kanssa.

Tervetuloa katsomaan ja kuuntelemaan, mitä esityksellä voi tehdä sekä keskustelemaan aiheesta.

Lisätietoja hankkeesta:  http://www.uniarts.fi/howtodothingswithperformance

Ajankohta: 4.10. 2016, klo 10 – 16

Paikka: Taideyliopiston Teatterikorkeakoulu Haapaniemenkatu 6 Auditorio 1 / Tori

Alustava ohjelma

10:00 Leena Rouhiainen, avaus

Annette Arlander, ohjelman esittely

10:15 Heike Roms:  How to do history with performance

10:45 Hanna Järvinen: Jeux 1913 and 2016

11:00 Simon O’Sullivan: Performance Fictions

11:15 Kahvia ja keskustelua

11:30 Ed Scheer How to do things with performance (really)

11:45 Esa Kirkkopelto: Body and Object in Performance

12:00 Pilvi Porkola: What is ‘esitys’?

Keskustelua

12:30 – 13:30 Lounas

13:30 Tero Nauha: Abridged thought of performance

13:45 Katve-Kaisa Kontturi: Performance and Event: The Case of Feminist Colour-IN

14:00 Kira O’Reilly: I came to the sea and I was scared, my heart was broken

14:15 Karolina Kucia: Perform and Not

14:30 Tuomas Laitinen: I have an idea

14:45 Kahvia ja keskustelua

15:00 Henna-Riikka Halonen: In the Labyrinth between explanation and experience

15:15 Saara Hannula: “something doing”

15:30 Kimmo Modig: from transformative to transfigurative

15:45 Annette Arlander: How to perform landscape by repetition

16:00  Vapaata keskustelua

 

Liitteenä Ed Scheerin teksti how-to-do-things-with-performance-art

Performing Situated Knowledges

The 7th annual conference on New materialisms Performing Situated Knowledges: Space, Time, and Vulnerability 21-23 September in Warsaw (see website) was a good preparation for our coming work. Tero Nauha presented a performance: “A speculation on a body and posture in performance art practice”, which utilized prerecorded voice with a sophisticated philosophical argument and electronic sound together with their live manipulation, an experiment which he can describe better himself.

My contribution was  a small paper “Performing (with) Lichen as Situated Practice” (see performing-with-lichen, sorry for the large image files that are slow to load) in a panel in the strand New Materialism, Politics, and Organizational Experiments titled Ethics-relationality-vulnerability-violence-reconfigurations. The context was rather strange, but turned out to be interesting, in many ways. Besides papers by Karolina Kucia and Magdalena Gorska the panel included philosopher Marzena Adamiak’s discussion on Karen Barad’s thinking in relation to the problem of exclusion. My contribution was originally programmed for a panel called Situated Practices / Situated Movements on Wednesday, in the strand New Materialism Embracing the Creative Arts, where it would have fitted in better, but I could not join on Wednesday due to teaching duties, and was happy that the organizers found a place for me to join in later. The video work I spoke about, created during Easter 2016 between Sandkås and Allinge on the northwestern coast of the island of Bornholm, is publicly available for view on the Research Catalogue, Lichen and Allinge 1-2.

The theme of the conference, situated knowledges, and the classic text by Donna Haraway from 1988, which the call alluded to, seemed like a fresh and provocative choice. Reading Haraway’s witty text “Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, originally written as a comment and reply to Sandra Harding, was inspiring. Take a look at it yourself, here.

Kick off seminar on October 4th

How to do things with performance?

The four-year Academy of Finland funded research project “How to do things with performance?” will organise its kick off seminar on October 4 at University of the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy from 10 am to 4 pm, in collaboration with the Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke and the Finnish Network for Performance Studies.

We invite to join us in exploring and listening to what can be done with performance.

Professors Heike Roms, Edward Scheer, Simon O’Sullivan and Dr. Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, as well as some other guests and the members of the project will present their views.

For more information about the project, see  http://www.uniarts.fi/en/howtodothingswithperformance

 

Aloitusseminaari 4 lokakuuta

Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?

Nelivuotinen Suomen Akatemian rahoittama tutkimushanke “Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?” järjestää aloitusseminaarin 4. lokakuuta Taideyliopiston Teatterikorkeakoulussa klo 10-16, yhteistyössä Esittävien taiteiden Tutkimuskeskus Tutken ja Esitystutkimuksen verkoston kanssa.

Tervetuloa katsomaan ja kuuntelemaan, mitä esityksellä voi tehdä sekä keskustelemaan aiheesta.

Projektin jäsenten ja muutamien kutsuvieraiden lisäksi näkemyksensä esittävät professorit Heike Roms, Edward Scheer, Simon O’Sullivan ja FT Katve-Kaisa Kontturi.

Lisätietoja hankkeesta:  http://www.uniarts.fi/howtodothingswithperformance

Where to start? / Mistä aloittaa?

EN

At the inofficial meeting of our research group recently we decided we would all start by presenting ourselves on this blog. But somehow that seems too pretentious and unsuitable for this blog, which is supposed to be a more lighthearted and spontaneous collection of notes documenting the unfolding of the process. So where do you start then? You start where you are, and I am “here”, browsing through my dropbox, among texts that I have simply copied there in order to look at them later. And the first text I read at this leisurely moment when there is nothing I have to read  by tomorrow, is an inspiring interview with Iris van der Tuin, which is available online here. This interview is a text as good as any to begin with, I think, especially since it combines current ideas of feminism, new materialism and even the performative turn in the background, in relation to other contemporary modes of thought…. Perhaps this choice serves as a kind of personal presentation as well.

FIN

Tutkimusryhmämme epävirallisessa tapaamisessa vähän aikaa sitten sovimme, että aloittaisimme esittelemällä itsemme tässä blogissa. Mutta se tuntuu jotenkin liian tärkeilevältä ja sopimattomalta tähän blogiin, jonka on tarkoitus olla kevytmielisempi ja spontaanimpi kokoelma muistiinpanoja prosessin etenemisen dokumentoimiseksi. Eli mistä siis aloittaa? Aloita siitä missä olet, ja minä olen “tässä”, selailemassa dropboxiini keräämiäni tekstejä ajatuksenani palata niihin myöhemmin. Ja ensimmäinen teksti jonka luin tänä vapaana hetkenä kun ei ole mitään mikä pitää lukea huomiseksi on inspiroiva Iris van der Tuinin haastattelu, joka on saatavilla verkossa  täällä. Tämä  haastattelu on mielestäni oiva teksti aloitukseksi erityisesti koska se yhdistää ajankohtaisia ajatuksia feminismistä, uusmaterialismista ja taustalla jopa performatiivisesta käänteestä suhteessa muihin nykyajattelun suuntauksiin…. Ehkä tämä valinta samalla toimii myös eräänlaisena henkilökohtaisena esittelynä.

How to Do Things with Performance?

Here to begin with the public description of the project in the application:

In this project, we ask what can be done with performance – what actualises when a performance takes place, when it is documented, and when it is written about. Through these epistemological questions, we address the ontology of performance: in what ways can we understand ‘performance’ today, as a new materiality, as presence, and in the international, multilingual context where words, documents, and practices connote differently but are shared in online environments. We seek to update the theory of performativity vis à vis new materialist theories of agential realism and non-philosophy.

And here the press release at the University of the Arts Helsinki pages.