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    More: Institute for the Performing Arts and Film

    Current Doctoral Projects

    Markus Gerber: Playing with hierarchies. Teaching and learning relationships in the actor training at higher education institutions

    The restructuring of the acting course at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is designed to promote independent learning. When the new curriculum starts from the autumn semester 2017, students themselves will be partly determining the course of their studies and thereby able to shape their own personal profile as artists. Acting courses at today's universities are traditionally based on a lecturer/student hierarchy. 

    The research project aims to investigate which factors shape the teaching/learning interactions between lecturers and students in the professional field of acting at ZHdK. The idea is to develop some awareness of traditional understandings of roles, ideas about norms, and anything predefined in structural terms, as well as the impact these have on teaching and learning. This historical and theoretical backdrop feeds into an analysis of the teaching formats associated with newly developed modules – with a view to coming up with new answers to underlying questions concerning how expertise is communicated in the field of acting.

    It is essentially a pilot project, with a view to developing a doctoral project in collaboration with the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

    Marisa Godoy: Generating co-presence: intuitions, practices and discoveries of dance artists in the making of improvisation choreography (working title)

    Collaborative creation processes in contemporary dance require a myriad of artistic skills. Among them are the generation of original, inventive movement material, and dancers’ engagement with embodied knowledges in the form of skills and states that are often tacit and challenging to articulate and document. Particularly in improvisation choreography, out of the ordinary modes of being, thinking and moving, as well as an enhanced perception of self, other and environment – which arguably foster creative modes of working – are crucial components of dance making and performance. Dance practices that seek to facilitate the development of such modes of being and operating only occasionally find their way into the wider dance community. In order to address this lack, my doctoral research – rooted in, informed and shaped by practice, both artistic and ethnographic – seeks to make accessible dance artists’ intuitions, practices and discoveries with regards to collaboration and perception processes. The work of dancer and choreographer Thomas Hauert with his company ZOO, and the creation of Flot (2018), which he realised in collaboration with CCN Ballet de Lorraine, constitute my case study. My inquiry is concerned with how such dance practices are developed and shared. What do artists draw upon in the process of designing them? What states and skills do they aim to achieve? From the dancers’ perspective, what do the practices facilitate? Questions related to the acquisition, maintenance, and transformation of skills and states are also addressed. How do dancers sustain, over time, access to the states in and through which they are required to operate? What is the role of the frequency of exposure to a given practice in the dancers’ appropriation of its various dimensions? My aim is to shed light on the multifaceted process of collective creation when linked to engagement with extra-ordinary modes of being, thinking, and moving. Furthering knowledge of how abilities and states developed in practice are maintained during creation and performance might improve understanding of the scope of the demands on dancers within certain contemporary dance processes. It may also help grasp crucial, if not indispensable, competencies for collaborative creation in the realm of improvisation choreography, and thus inform professionals who create, perform, teach and study dance, be it through practicing or theorising it.

    This investigation is embedded in the project Research Video: an online video annotation platform currently in development by web designers in cooperation with practitioners and researchers concerned with alternative, hybrid publication formats. I contribute to the development of the tool by engaging with practices of annotation – a key feature of Research Video and an underexplored area in dance. My aim is to progress practitioner-researchers’ knowledge of the utility of video annotation in dance analysis and publication. How can video annotation serve the purposes of dissemination of dance knowledge? As a vehicle for the sharing of findings, what are the affordances of the Research Video platform and its applicability in dance research? By assuming a discovery-oriented stance to video documentation and annotation, I interact with issues of expanded publications of research results – an inquiry process that potentially leads to fresh insights in the performing arts field with regards to new forms of viewing and reading research materials.

    Manuel Hendry: To Feel or Fake. Artificial "Intelligence" and the Art of Acting

    Will actors be replaced by computers? Based on a cognitive theory of emotion in acting, we use Science and Art to investigate the creative potential of Artificial "Intelligence" and its limits. 

    In coopertation with the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF.

    Ilil Land-Boss: Creating liminal and ritual spaces in participatory performance – The utilization of embodied ritual structures and principles, and therapeutic elements, to propose spaces of transitional and liminal experience

    The project aims at creating participatory and immersive performances and installations, in which audience can experience liminal and ritual aspects. The work will be based on investigations of elements of physical performance (gestures, postures, movements) in the context of death and mourning rituals in several cultures, including a search for possibly recurrent, cross-culturally appearing elements or principles. Based on the often reported lack of such in contemporary everyday life, e. g. for the shaping, marking and embedding of various transitions and processes of transformation, a central aspect will be the utilization of embodied ritual elements, structures, and principles for the proposal of spaces of transitional and liminal experience.

    Central research questions will be:

    - How can certain mechanisms and structures of rituals, and possibly therapy, be translated into theatrical and performative artistic contexts?

    - How can spaces be designed (including audience participation) to become possibly transformative spaces of experience for ‚audience‘?

    - How can movements, gestures and postures performed cross-culturally in the context of death and mourning rites be adapted in such a way that they mark, shape and accompany transitions on different levels?

    - What effects and functions could such elements take over, and why in the context of theatre and performance?

    Luka Popadic: 8k to HD

    PhD in Artisic Research on alternative aesthetics in cinema documentary together with the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts in Belgrade.

    Ilja Mirsky: Creative Artificial Intelligence on Stage

    Collaborative Ph.D. project on “Creative Artificial Intelligence on Stage”, University of Tuebingen (Institute for Media Studies, Prof. Dr. Susanne Marschall) and ZHdK (Institute for Performing Arts, Prof. Dr. Jochen Kiefer, Dr. Gunter Lösel)

    How will we interact with AI-based technology and how will we perceive human-AI interactions in our near future? By exploring theoretical and experimental ways for staging human-AI interactions this interdisciplinary practice-led Ph.D. project will search for artistic answers. For the practical part artistic approaches for visualizing and modifying AI-based chatbots will be explored and tested on stage. In parallel a theoretical framework on concepts of liveness, presence and the mediality of AI will be elaborated by encompassing research and literature from technological-, performative-, cognitive- and media-related fields. As we are entering an era of responsive machines, chatbots can be seen as prototypical representatives of this development. How will social, interactive AI-based technology shape our understanding of performance, theater and human-AI collaboration on stage?

    Ilja Mirsky is a dramaturg, programmer, and immersive media artist. He works at the “Institut für theatrale Zukunftsforschung (ITZ) im Zimmertheater Tübingen” and is lecturer at the University of Tübingen.