Research Academy 2015–2021

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Su Jin Kim, Research Academy participant 2017. © ZHdK

  • Futures of Liveness or Hello, Liveness. Where are you?

    Where are we in terms of Liveness today? Without a doubt, the pandemic has intensified the longing for Liveness at the same time as making it disappear - perhaps forever? Will it come back, and, if so, will it look and feel the same as it did before the covid 19 cessation of live events? What does this mean for artists? Will digital forms of Liveness permanently take their place alongside co-presentational forms? Will audiences return to live events, and how can their differences from “non-live events” be marked?

    As the quality of Liveness is ever changing and interacting with the landscape of media, one might ask: Have the conditions for Liveness shifted - through the internet as the new leading medium, through streaming services, through digital interactive media, through the gaming industry?
     

    1. Digital Liveness:
    Is there a thing as “digital liveness”? What does it look and feel like? What is "real time" in times of connectivity? How has interactivity changed through collaborative digital settings? What is Liveness in the context of "online spectatorship"?

    2. Disappearance:
    And what about the ephemeral? Did disappearance disappear now that artefacts of Liveness are seemingly doomed to circulate in the digital world forever and ever? Is artificial disappearance of digital content, as in Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc., a new path to Liveness or a false promise? Should live artists insist that their performances be deleted from the digital world?

    3. Machinic Liveness:
    As machines become more and more interactive, will they eventually be able to create a live experience? Can we say that digital autonomous agents can perform "live"? Can something that is not alive generate a live event? If so, is Liveness still a parameter of being human?

    4. Feedback Loops:
    Where is Liveness located within a performance? In the practices of the performers? Or in the perception of the audience? Or is it an intermediate phenomenon that unfolds in the autopoietic feedback loop between audience and performers? What are the preconditions for feedback loops? Are they emergent? How can artists work with them?

    5. Perception of Liveness:
    Is Liveness a matter of framing? How then does the transition of the audience into the frame "This is live!" take place? What performative practices on the performer's side will support this shift? Which ones will kill Liveness?

    6. Legal and Economic aspects:
    Last but not least, legal aspects come into play: What legal and economic mechanisms is Liveness at the mercy of today? How is it marketed? What role does it play in the earning potential of performance artists? Who awards the label "live" with what intention, with what right, and with what effects on artistic production?

  • Philip Auslander is Professor of Performance Studies and Popular Musicology in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication oft the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He has written seven books, including two editions of LIveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999 and 2008), Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (2018), and In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (2021).
    → Website

    Gunter Lösel is an actor researcher in the field of theatre and acting. He is heading the Research Focus Performative Practice at the Zurich University of the Arts and published on the themes of improvisation, collaborative creativity and artistic research.
    → Website

  • THE SITUATIONAL SELF – Acting and Identity 

    Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) 
    28 November to 3 December 2020 in Zurich, Switzerland

    Why can`t I be more than just one person? Who is keeping guard at these borders between you and me? May I play you? Will you play me? Are we allowed to switch roles? Do you want to borrow my identity (please don`t steal it)? 
    Acting puts an individual’s sense of self in play with a fictional character. How do we navigate the transformations of the everyday self into and out of the fictional selves that we play? And how does this relate to identity? Does a fictional character have an identity? Or does this only emerge when the character is embodied by an actor? And what are the parameters of identities that an actor can ethically assume in her or his transformations?

    In this RESEARCH ACADEMY we want to explore the promises and limits of acting; ethical affordances as well as practical issues of acting and theoretical concepts that respond to current discourses and develop artistic research in this field. We are addressing artists and researchers who dare to explore those limitations and liberations in a praxis-based approach. The RESEARCH ACADEMY provides a supportive environment for experimentation and discussion, each participant pursuing her or his own research, sharing and taking it to the next level with the help of peer-to-peer feedback. The process will be facilitated by Rick Kemp and Gunter Loesel, performance practitioners who both teach and conduct research. Both are engaged in the confluence of ideas that arise from the melding of neuroscientific information with acting practice.

    In this field, theories of cognition, of social cognition, of embodied cognition, the theory of mind, concepts of altered states of mind, theories of emotion and personality all have a bearing on the process of acting. The phenomenon of “perspective-taking” is considered to be a fundamental feature of the process of empathy and the development of the self. Perspective taking is a key feature of an actor assuming a role – the imaginative projection of one’s own awareness into the circumstances of another. This recruits both physiological and mental processes to create what has been called a “Situational self” (Kemp, 2012) - a temporarily altered sense of self that is congruent with a fictional person’s perspective in a fictional situation. What are the actions that help an actor to shape this self? And when does this self become an identity?  How does this process relate to current theoretical and political discourses on identity? The boundaries are clear when it comes to cultural identities that should not be represented by outsiders – and this questions the core qualities of acting as a pathway to empathy. Acting hovers between understanding and appropriating the other.

    The RESEARCH ACADEMY will be rounded up by the symposium “HOW TO ACT – positions on acting on the stage and beyond” at the Zurich University of the Arts. Participant are invited to be part of this event too.

  • Professor Rick Kemp

    Rick has worked with theatres and companies such as the Almeida, BAC, Cockpit, Complicite, Riverside Studios, Soho, Tricycle, and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Toronto’s Harbourfront, New York’s Perry St. Theatre, Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, and Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord in Paris, as well as touring his solo clown show Coming Home worldwide. As the co-founder and Artistic Director of Commotion he has received the British Telecom Innovations Award, and multiple Critics Choice awards from The Guardian and Time Out London. He has also received the Institut Français Award for Theatre and the Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award.

    In the USA, directing credits include Hamlet, Riddley Walker and e-lectricity for The Pittsburgh Playhouse, his own play, Shrew and The Comedy of Errors for the Unseam’d Shakespeare Company, and seven devised shows for Squonk Opera. He has numerous acting credits for Quantum Theatre, and with Dan Jemmett has devised and performed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The Museum of Desire, and faustUS, and collaborated on Twelfth Night at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski.

    Rick is Professor of Theatre and Head of Acting and Directing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA, and a Fellow of The Salzburg Global Seminar on Neuroscience and Art. His publications include Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (Routledge 2012), The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (Routledge 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (Routledge 2019).

    → Rick Kemp’s website

    Dr. Gunter Lösel

    Gunter heads the Research Focus Performative Practice at the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He holds a PHD in theatre studies and a diploma in psychology. His research interests comprise the history and practice of improvisation in theatre, collaborative creativity and practices of artistic research. He is also working as an actor, being a member and artistic director of the award-winning “Improtheater Bremen”, the duo “Stupid Lovers” and various improvising theatres.

    Currently he is the main applicant of the ongoing research project “Research Video” (2017-2021), exploring the possibilities of annotated videos as a new standard in the publication of results in artistic research.

    His publications include Can Robots Improvise?, (Liminalities 2018), The Improviser’s lazy Brain (Routledge 2018),  Research Video- Annotated Videos as a Tool for the Publication of Artistic Research, Academy for the Performing Arts 2018 Prague 160-169 and Playing Games with Frames, SubTexte 2017.

    Gunter has organized and designed the Research Academy from 2015-19 and is now part of the faculty.

    → Gunter Lösel’s website

  • The Talking Dead – Explorations on the Absent Present

    Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) 

    7–12 September 2019

    The Mobile Academy Berlin invites dramaturgs, writers, and performers to a Research Academy in the literal sense of the word: We will practice how to research, what is neither absent nor present, but rather absent-present. By getting to know and trying out practice-based methods like critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman) and others, we will attempt to describe and explore such absent present phenomena for the stage. Our three fields of research will be: the communication with the dead, the gaps in archives and museums, and the absent presence of contemporary data streams.

    1. The Dead and the Undead
      When dealing with the dead, one is faced with the presence of a body and the absence of any direct possibility of communication with the person that once inhabited it. Death itself has no representation, but rather marks its limits, an absence present in words, images, and gestures that surround it. But that does not mean, there are not manifold ways of conversing with who or what is absent, may it be in stories that we tell, photos we once took, writings, or simply memories. To make matters more complicated, cryogenic techniques and new bio-technologies have broadened the interval in-between life and death. How do we give those beings and modes of existence “in-between” a voice – may it be a vigil coma patient surrounded by life-sustaining machines or a transhumanist deep-frozen in a tank in a warehouse in Texas? Which narratives and what pictures can describe their state? The Dead and the Undead create a representational, epistemological, and dramaturgical problem. 

    2. The Archive and the Museum
      Classic spaces to research absence-presence are archives and museums. Here, we are especially interested in testing out methods that deal with that which has not made it into the archive. How do we write, enact, speculate with that or those, who have not left a trace, have disappeared, or were made to disappear? Which research methods, essayistic techniques, poetic forms, and modes of critical fabulationcan we engage with, when faced with the gaps in the archive? On the other hand, there are all those things and beings that probably shouldn’t be where they currently are, boxed up or displayed in ethnographic or natural science museums. What shows here – and what doesn’t, what is displayed – and what is not, what or who is looking at us? For example, through the eyes of a taxidermied animal? Or a displaced mask?

    3. Big Data and the Inner Monolog
      Finally, we would like to get a glimpse into the gigantic contemporary archive of our bureaucratic, data-based culture. New data technologies have turned the whole world into a big archive, in which everything is constantly present-absent: monitored, recorded, and processed by algorithmic logics, we cannot perceive, but which are ever-present. How do you describe the metaphor-less state of the digital? How can we imagine processes, we cannot see, but that constantly provide us with images and makes us see? How can we capture and enact the constant rush of data that runs through us, too fast to perceive and too flighty to read? Maybe contemporary machine learningalgorithms can give us a hint here by allowing a new perspective on a classic genre of theater and literature: the inner monolog. If a machine can decipher its opposite’s inner code by analysing its output, can we humans finally learn to read each other’s inner monolog – or even start to understand the machines?

  • Hannah Hurtzig is an artist and curator, who develops large-scale public assemblies and installations in which discourses of experts, activists, and amateurs cross paths on vexed problems of modernity. She started the Mobile Academy Berlin in 1999 as a platform for research projects that investigate topics in relation to different cities and their specific contexts worldwide with changing collaborators and in varying formats. These include Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-knowledge (since 2004), Archive of the Undead (since 2011), and The Milieu of the Dead (since 2013). Her latest works include:

    How to speak of the land. 168 narratives to a question, 2018, Halle (Saale); Mapping the Gap -Ggpping the Map.Living in gaps, transit camps, and waiting rooms, 2018, Braunschweig; The Milieu of the Dead, Part 2: Absences. The afterlife of slavery and the gaps in the archive, 2017, Berlin; The immobilized, or salle des pas perdus, 2017, Hamburg; The Extraordinary Ordinary! Disability, Techno-bodies, and the Question of Autonomy, 2016, Hamburg.

     

    Marian Kaiser is a media theorist, concept developer, and author from Berlin and Kinshasa. He studied Media Theory, Literature, Philosophy, and Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and has lectured and researched at universities in Berlin, Dresden, Yogyakarta, and Giessen. From 2011–2013 he was a fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the post graduate programme “Transnational Media Events” at the JLU Gießen, working on a history of psychiatric media in colonial situations between Asia and Europe – and their impact on theory production in the 20th century. From 2013-2014 he was assistant professor at “FAST-Framing Art, Science, Technology”, a cooperation project of the HFBK, TU and HTW Dresden. Marian Kaiser is a permanent member of the Mobile Academy  Berlin, where he develops dialogue-based performances and installations with Hannah Hurtzig, often on the dead, e.g. at Silent Green Berlin, at Kampnagel in Hamburg, and for the Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk. He is currently preparing a Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-knowledge on “Red Vienna” and the urban socialism of the future. His latest publication, James Hoff in conversation with Marian Kaiser, has just come out in the series “ ” (quotationmarkquotationmark) at NERO.

    → Website of the Mobile Academy

    → Online Archive of the MAB

  • Perform. Record. Enrich. Share. 
    Opening up and publishing processes in performance creation 

    — 
    20 to 26 October 2018 at the Zurich University of the Arts & Tanzhaus Zurich 

    In 2016, the Research Academy explored the affordances of language in the context of making performance (moving through words) also asking what modes and registers of language might be used for reflecting or documenting artistic processes. In 2017, the Research Academy focused on the use of video to support creativity in making performance and the documentation of such processes for study and analysis, investigating the ‘afterlife’ of recordings. RESEARCH ACADEMY 2018 

    In 2018, these two strands will be brought together as the Research Academy explores the integration of language used in the studio with video and film recordings with the aim to render body-based performance practices more explicit and sharable through documentation. This will include experimentation with new video annotation software, innovative moving image recording (e.g. 360 degree film) and digital animation processes. Providing context for the RA2018 is the Research Video practice-based research cooperation and software development project of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film and Cast/Audiovisual Media degree programme. One of the key aims of Research Video is to generate processes and prototypes for the publication of results of artistic research in performance. 

  • Dr. Scott deLahunta has worked as writer, researcher and organiser on a range of international projects bringing performing arts with a focus on choreography into conjunction with other disciplines and practices. He is currently Professor of Dance, Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University (UK) and Senior Research Fellow, Deakin Motion.Lab, Deakin University (AUS). He is co-directing (with Florian Jenett) Motion Bank, a project of he initiated in 2010 with William Forsythe, now hosted by Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Sciences. deLahunta was Research Fellow Dartington College of Arts (2000–2009) where he worked with choreographer Wayne McGregor, eventually directing the interdisciplinary research department for Studio Wayne McGregor until 2013. From 2006–2010, as Research Fellow Amsterdam School for the Arts, he worked closely with the dance company Emio Greco|PC, culminating with the two year research project Inside Movement Knowledge (2008–2010). He publishes widely and is on the editorial boards of Performance Research and the International Journal of Performance and Digital Media. deLahunta is frequently invited to speak internationally and has taught for various education programmes including the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam School of the Arts, where he co-developed the Masters in Choreography. He currently supervises a number of PhD projects. www.sdela.dds.nl. 

    Suzan Tunca, MA, is dance researcher and performing artist currently responsible for the research activities at the International Choreographic Arts Center ICKamsterdam, teacher/coach artistic research for dancers at the BA dance department CODARTS Rotterdam, first cohort member of DASresearch THIRD! and PhD candidate at PhDArts Leiden University/The Hague. Suzan studied theatre dance at the highschool for the arts in Arnhem (1994–97). Since 1998 she has worked as a dancer, choreographer and choreographic assistant in the Netherlands and internationally, among others with Krisztina de Châtel and Dylan Newcomb. With “solo” works, she invested in a long term dialogue between the dancing body and the development of interactive music technology transcribing motion into sound. Between 2005–2013 she danced with Emio Greco | PC. 2015 she completed a rMA artistic research at the University of Amsterdam with a video work and live performance at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. With her work as a dance researcher in professional and educational contexts and as a performing artist, she aims to contribute to the continuous regeneration, resourcing and advancement of dance as an autonomous art form and as an invaluable medium for embodied knowledge and understanding. 

    The team will also consist of Dr. Gunter Lösel (ZHdK), Marisa Godoy (ZHdK), Martin Zimper (ZHdK), Eric Andreae (ZHdK), Martin Grödl (Process Studio), Moritz Resl (Process Studio). 

  • Project Partner in 2018: TANZHAUS Zurich.

  • 15–21 July 2017

    Performance practices like dance and theatre have a complicated and at times antagonistic relationship with video or film documentation. Leaving aside theoretical debates about the ephemerality of performance versus its documentation, video can still be seen to be replacing the live event with a kind of surrogate, stealing attention from the real thing and selling it to a world that has less and less time for live-events while busy recording. Especially now as nearly everyone has a video camera in his or her pocket for simultaneously preserving and communicating experiences – able to upload video live, even involuntarily, to the Internet. Is there a danger of “over-documentation”, of total surveillance or conservation as the market-compatible substitute of aesthetic experience? Critical reflection on these issues is necessary. On the other hand, there is also a cooperative relationship. Video is an affordable and accessible medium for recording performance and has been the documentation tool of choice for artists since the 1980s. Video bypasses written notation and captures a copy of the event for repeated viewing. When used in the studio for this purpose, video recordings are integrated into creative work, used to store emerging material, small and large bits of process not necessarily intended for public distribution.

    Video has also become an important tool for research used in other fields such as ethnography and anthropology; often to provide a version of an event or activity for repeated viewing, for deeper analysis and study of culture. In the field of visual anthropology, intense critical debates have co-evolved with filmmaking: Whose reality is being portrayed in the recording? How does the act of recording itself implicitly alter events? How is it possible to acknowledge the perspective of those being filmed?

    This multi-level relationship between performance and its documentation, social-media and the information society, critiques of representation and the use of video in research and furthering knowledge opens up a wide field of related questions: How can we use video with the aim of supporting artistic creativity AND to further the study and analysis of creative work? Can a reference to the use of video as a research tool in other fields, for example anthropology, help us to test and develop the concept of arts practice-as-research? What kind of strategies do we use to become more aware of, enrich and possibly reduce the – potentially unlimited – production of video as data? How do we think of these interconnected questions and topics so as to create new perspectives, new insights and questions?

    The Research Academy 2017 takes these questions as a framework to go beyond documentation into a space for reflection on the multiple realities involved in the process of translating and transcoding live performance practices into another media and back into the artistic process. To open up these questions in a practical sense, we will focus on two aspects of video in research: Recording processes in the studio (the camera in the studio) and the after life of these recordings; what does one do with them? How is the survey of the recorded material feeding back to the production of new recordings? The focus will be on capturing the essence of making and rendering unique and highly specific creative processes available to investigation, to research, to reuse, to reference, to review, to study, to transmission. The process of the analyses will feed back to the setup of the camera and production of the document.

    This will not be a complicated technical workshop; as already noted, nearly everyone today has a video camera they can use. We will use a simple method for analysing and annotating video material.

  • The RESEARCH ACADEMY will be directed by an expert faculty from dance, video, and theory:

    Dr. Scott deLahunta is currently a full-time Senior Research Fellow with Deakin Motion.Lab, Deakin University (AUS) and Visiting Academic at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University (UK). With Florian Jenett, he is Co-Director of Motion Bank @ Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Sciences. http://www.sdela.dds.nl/

    Andrea Keiz is an educated biologist and teacher for dance improvisation, and is working with video as a tool related to movement. She has been doing documentation of dance as well as live video work in performance and artistic video work. Besides filming, she is also editing, advising students in documentation and offering workshops in video//dance and perception.

  • With the generous support of Gebert Rüf Stiftung.

  • 26 August – 3 September 2016

    The RESEARCH ACADEMY is an international platform based at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). It aims to develop artistic practices and foster research through the strong interaction between fellows, faculty members, the artistic community, and the general public. The RESEARCH ACADEMY seeks to explore artistic strategies of contemporary performance practices in order to ask how they speak back to the cultural and economic environment, the political landscape and social values.

    “Tarantallegra” means 'dancing feet spell', a charm that induces another person's legs to dance uncontrollably.

    In 2016 the RESEARCH ACADEMY interrogates the affordances of language in the context of making performance. How do we set someone creatively 'in motion' through words? How are words able to get in touch with the body? How are they used to stimulate creative processes? When we say “Could you please pass me the sugar?” in the context of the everyday we expect someone will pick up the sugar and hand it to us. But other translations are possible in art. The question is then: How can we use language in another way? What kind of speech-­acts might be useful? How can language as a stimulus, trigger, inducer, instigator (or spell) be used to generate performative acts in dance and theatre? Additionally, what various modes and registers of language might be used for reflecting artistic processes? And would this interact with the use of language as performative generator? What is this relationship and how do artists move between these kinds of language? It is across this landscape of relations that we intend to put forward our main questions: What else can language do, when language is itself taken as a practice?
    Over 9 days of artistic research, we will explore these questions integrating practical experience with critical engagement and reflection on a high level. The participants will take part in a series of artistic experiments to develop their own creative starting points, questions, methods and strategies for 'moving through words'. These experiments will include exposure to very different kinds of texts (poetry, story, rhetoric, description, instruction, recipes, etc) in small amounts and the generation of own and co-­created compositions through writing, reading, drawing, speaking, scoring, gesturing, act(ion)ing and moving. We will also engage with documentation, the recording and annotation of these experiments as a reflection on how they are made, what they produce and how they function with regard to evidence and imagination.

    The RESEARCH ACADEMY is a cooperation between the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and the Institute of Theatre and Dance Studies, University of Berne. The course directors will work closely with the appointed fellows in a series of intensive workshops and open working sessions.

  • Scott deLahunta (UK)

    Dr. Scott deLahunta has worked as writer, researcher and organiser on a range of international projects bringing performing arts with a focus on choreography into conjunction with other disciplines and practices. He is currently a full-­time Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University (UK) and Visiting Academic with Deakin Motion.Lab, Deakin University (AUS) and Co-­Director of the Motion Bank Institute, which he directed from 2010–2014. From 2008 to 2013, he was the Director for R–Research the interdisciplinary research department for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. From 2006–2010, deLahunta was Research Fellow with the Art Theory and Research and Art Practice and Development Research Group, Amsterdam School for the Arts, where he worked closely with the dance company Emio Greco | PC, a project which culminated with the two year research project (2008–2010) Inside Movement Knowledge. He served as an advisor on the Siobhan Davies Digital Dance Archive project and Synchronous Objects, for One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe and serves on the editorial boards of Performance Research and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. deLahunta's PhD (2010) from Plymouth University is on-line at: www.sdela.dds.nl/


    Karin Harrasser (A)

    Prof. Dr. Karin Harrasser is professor for cultural theory at the University of the Arts in Linz, Austria. In the recent years she has been engaged in questions about the performative quality of knowledge. On one hand in the developement of formats for stage, film and exhibitions (i.e. Night Lesson Nr. 1 for the Manifesta 7, 2009 in Trento, Die Untoten. Life Sciences und Pulp Fiction, Kampnagel 2011, both with Hannah Hurtzig, Plumpe Spekulation, Garage X 2012), on the other hand in research projects like The Art of Knowing (the limits of knowledge) (funded by WWTF, 2010/2011). In her publications she deals – among other themes – with questions about bodies and embodiment in the age of digital media: Prothesen. Figuren einer lädierten Moderne, Vorwerk8 2015, Körper 2.0. Über die technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen, Bielefeld (transcript) 2013.

  • 28 August – 5 September 2015

    The RESEARCH ACADEMY is an international platform based at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). It aims to develop artistic practices and foster research through the strong interaction between fellows, faculty members, the artistic community, and the general public. The RESEARCH ACADEMY seeks to explore artistic strategies of contemporary performance practices in order to ask how they speak back to the economic environment, the political landscape and social values.

    "Part of the crew, part of the ship", the title of 2015, is a quote from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The crew of a doomed ship sings it to enact their total loss of corporeality, their bodies actually melting into the wooden planks. The ship is absorbing the individuals and using their bodies as material for the very institution, they are serving.

    What is the contemporary relationship between body and institution? How does the 'contemporary body' react to and subvert the power, claims, and marks of the contemporary outside world? Is the body the last hideaway of the subject, an asylum for individual truth and freedom? Or is the body just another institution one has to submit to? How do, again, institutions react on the corporeality of individuals, regarding their economical, political and educational commission? Does the institution become part of the body? Does the body become part of the institution? How is the relationship between corporeality and institution being acted out? What does this mean for the phenomenological body and what does it mean for the performative body?

    These are the questions that are going to be explored in 9 days of artistic research, linking practical experience with profound reflection on a high level. It will be directed by an expert faculty from dance, theatre, and theory: Elizabeth Waterhouse (Dresden/Bern), Ulrike Quade (Amsterdam), and Franz Anton Cramer (Berlin/Paris).

    The RESEARCH ACADEMY is a cooperation between the Department of Performing Arts and Film/ Zurich University of the Arts, the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film/ Zurich University of the Arts, and the Institute of Theatre and Dance Studies/ University of Berne. The course directors will work closely with the appointed fellows in a series of intensive workshops and open working sessions.

  • Franz Anton Cramer

    Franz Anton Cramer studied philology and theatre in Berlin, obtaining a PhD at Freie Universität in 1998. Besides his extensive activity as dance journalist he has been working on dance archives since 2003. He currently conducts the research project “Records and Representations. Media and constitutive systems in archiving performance-based art” at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) Berlin where he also co-directed the BA course “Contemporary Dance, Context, Choreography” from 2007 until 2010, together with Gisela Müller and Boris Charmatz. Between 2003 and 2008 he collaborated with the Leipzig Dance Archives, the Centre national de la danse and the Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra de Paris in a project investigating dance in the 1930s and 40s. He has also been part of an initiative to federate several German dance documentation centres between 2008 and 2012 as part of “Tanzplan Deutschland”, resulting in the online tool www.digitaler-atlas-tanz.de. Together with Barbara Büscher, he is co-editor of the special-interest magazine “MAP Media-Archive-Performance” (www.perfomap.de). From 2007 to 2013 he was a fellow at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In 2013/14 he collaborated with several French and German festival venues in the workshop series “Transfabrik”, at the invitation of Institut français. He regularly lectures in and outside the academy.

    Recent Publications:

    • Transfabrik Deutschland/Frankreich – Begegnungen mit zeitgenössischer Bühnenkunst (ed.). München 2014.
    • In aller Freiheit: Tanzkultur in Frankreich zwischen 1930 und 1950. Berlin “Experience as Artefact. Transformations of the Immaterial”. In: Dance Research Journal Vol. 46 Nr. 3, December 2014.
    • “La scène et le musée, une dynamique contemporaine”. In: Critique d'art. Actualité internationale de la littérature critique sur l'art contemporain, Nr. 43, autumn 2014.
    • “Warfare over Realism: Tanztheater in East Germany, 1966–1989”. In: Susan Manning und Lucia Ruprecht (eds.), New German Dance Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


    Ulrike Quade

    The Ulrike Quade Company produces visual theatre performances under the artistic direction of Ulrike Quade. Contemporary and existential themes are given shape through monumental scenography and varied dramatic mediums, including life-size puppets. In search of new theatrical forms, the Ulrike Quade Company often collaborate with other artists and institutions on national and international co-productions. Recent partners include Jo Strømgren Kompani (N), Nicole Beutler Projects (NL) and Stadttheater Basel (CH).
    Ulrike Quade (b. 1971, Neuss, Germany) graduated from the University of the Arts in Utrecht as a theatre maker. She studied Puppetry in Japan and received a Master Degree in Scenography in collaboration with the St. Martin's Collage of Art and Design in London. With an impressive command of performance and technology, the company under her direction bring handmade human figures to life with such skill that audiences see humans instead of puppets. Quade makes theatre that is committed and layered, but also surprisingly elegant, surreal, ironic and poetic.
    The Ulrike Quade Company has produced the following performances: Krabat, Meester van de Zwarte Molen (2014), De Schreeuw van de Zonnebloem (2014), The Painters – Munch & Van Gogh (2013), Antigone (2012), Radio Exit Live (2011), Hondenliefde (2011), Lisa's Grote Reis (2009), The Writer (2009), The Wall (2008), Second Goodbye (2008) and Me Too – a side show (2007).
    Ulrike Quade Company works on innovation. The Company gets support to scout and develop new talents and to do research in the field of puppetry and visual theatre.


    Elizabeth Waterhouse

    Born in upstate New York, Liz received her first dance education at Albany Dance Institute and the School of American Ballet. She graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor degree in physics and completed her Master degree at The Ohio State University in dance. Reconciliation of art and science continues to be a central tenet of her work.
    Liz is currently a doctoral student at the Graduate School of the Arts in Bern. Her thesis takes the scientific concept of entrainment – the capacity of systems to synchronize – as an opener: asking what philosophy of movement and the body is necessary to theorize practitioners' experience of entrainment in contemporary dance, delaying the theoretical problem of understanding whether improvization and choreography are justifiably distinct or co-operative processes, and yielding when the melt of examples and severed discourses is ready to deal with subjectivity, material, and process in the real of dancing together.
    Liz was invited by William Forsythe to join Ballet Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company, where she was a dancer from 2004–2012. She has also performed with Marcus Schulkind, Sebastian Matthias, and Collective Ludwig. Working as a freelance choreographer, her recent works include the Ingeborg Ruvina Project at Theater Rigiblick in Zürich, Josefine at Opera Krefeld and “Don't Play! Eine Spectralgymnastic” at the Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig. Her performance-lecture series “Dance | SPEAK TO ME!” was produced by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in 2014. As a dramaturg she has worked with William Forsythe on Sider, the collective MaMaZa on Eifo Efi, as well on projects in design and photography. In 2013 she was awarded a fellowship for dramaturgy from Akademie Musiktheater Heute.
    Liz's writing on dance is published in diverse sources, including Contact Quarterly, the International Journal of Digital Media and Performance, Etcetera Magazine and the book Theater Ohne Fluchtpunkt. She is also engaged in new forms of digital and internet publishing, for example as a consultant to the online project “Synchronous Objects” and the workgroup “Dance Engaging Science”.
    As a teacher she has offered workshops and lectures internationally, including at the Universität Bern, the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, The Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (HIPP) and Stanford University. Liz teaches regularly in Frankfurt for Tanzlabor21 at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Liz was a member of the project InnoLernenTanz at the Palucca Hochschule and was on faculty at Emerson College in Boston. She is certified instructor of the GYROTONIC® method and a certified Pilates Mat instructor from the Kane School of Core Integration in New York City.
    Liz's current projects adhere to the following principles: non-hierarchical work structures (i.e. teamwork, collaboration, working alone); working productively with doubt towards invention; simultaneously pursuing aesthetic, embodied, and discursive rigor; meaningful communication to novices and experts; and maintaining a sense of humor. Her research interests include aesthetics and metaphysics of choreography, entrainment, object usage, documentation of collective practice, musicality, and notation forms.