Workshop: Dramaturgy of the Performer: “Thinking’ from the inside”
Sodja Lotker and Karmenlara Ely
In HiØ/Norwegian Theatre Academy’s current international artistic research project Blind Spot: Staring down the Void, critique of performative media’s almost exclusive address of the visual senses is expressed as well as the notion of the human subject as a contested central figure in defining modes of perception.
We can think of our whole lives as ‘blind spots’: we can never see our lives from an outside, we can never fully grasp them. We can only see it from inside, continue moving on without knowing it, most often not having a clue what we are really doing.
Dramaturgy of the Performer is the same: it’s a dramaturgy of the insider who does not have the possibility to see things ‘objectively’ from some kind of an auditorium. And this ‘insider’ position has a very different logic:
It’s a dramaturgy of constantly shifting perspective, potential and becoming and not of resolutions and meaning.
It’s a dramaturgy of thinking while doing, where there is no separation between action and contemplation, where one thinks with one’s whole body.
It’s a dramaturgy that happens through meeting others – people, things, places, bodies… full of accidents and surprises, where there is no fake sense of control and strict planning. Where identity is a fleeting moment of meeting with others.
It’s a dramaturgy where creative and critical are not separate.
It’s a dramaturgy of embracing your blindness and the fleeting character of your own identity.
Further questions raised during the two-day workshop will include art and the everyday, institutions as creators of blind spots and contemporary performative practices as ways to create alternative ways of thinking. This event will happen through a series of practical tasks and discussion sessions with Sodja Lotker and Karmenlara Ely.
The closing discussion Dramaturgy of the Performer: ‘Thinking’ from the inside will be open to the METEOR festival public, where we will discuss together what it means to identify an artistic practice, and how it might differ from identifying with an artistic discipline or market. This includes, for example – ways of considering practices in terms of actions, habits and tendencies. Some agencies come to mind as life strategies – The collector, the liar, the bandit, the lover, the healer, the soul-eater, the cook, the destroyer…and one can reflect on the Dramaturgy of the Performer as a process of negotiating material/place/space through artistic agency. It is therefore central to the final discussion to take up Composer Sxip Shirey’s phrase “art as a tool for living” when identifying practices both from the inside, and out.
Workshop Spaces: 12 persons
Workshop 25 and 26 October:
Final Discussion 26 October Dramaturgy of the Performer ‘Thinking’ from the inside open to public (90 minutes)