ALEXANDRIA NOVA Vilnius: Presence and Distance
Downloadable booklet for participants
Presence and Distance: Artistic Research in Performing Arts
The workshop is a part of Erasmus Strategic Partnership project ALEXANDRIA NOVA funded by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union
For one week (September 23-29, 2021) young performers-researchers from the different theatre schools, namely Den Danske Scenekunstskole (DK), Uniarts Helsinki (FI), Listahaskoli Islands (IS), Stockholms Kunstnarliga Hogskola (SE), Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch (DE), Kunsthogskolen i Oslo (NO), Lietuvos Muzikos ir Teatro Akademija (LT) and Sao Paulo Theatre School (BR; participating online), in Vilnius, Lithuania to create a space for relaxed focus/defocus on the notion of artistic research in performing arts.
The idea is to take situations/topics/stories, questions, problems and join the sites discovered in Vilnius as an occasion for spontaneous performers reactions. At the end, groupwork results will be shown in the circle of Alexandria Nova participants and will be followed by discussion sessions on different creative perspectives. The project aims to explore how an artistic research approach can be employed to future thinking itself and as a result discover new, explorative processes that can be applied to long term creative elaboration.
Workgroups
After a long period of isolation, we invite you to reconsider the concepts of Presence and Distance using the tools and methods of artistic research. Performing art as the art of presence per se was questioned during the lock down as theatre makers were forced to search for various substitutes. Many questions have emerged: is it possible to be present without direct carnal experience? What are the possibilities of compensating the lack of the direct presence? How can we transform distance into presence?
One of the possible ways to look into these questions is artistic research suggesting flexible and miscellaneous methodology and initiating unfinished thinking. We propose to choose the field that corresponds your area of professional interest and analyse it in relation of the concepts of Presence and Distance:
- Storytelling;
- Site-specific performance;
- Children theatre;
- Documentary theatre;
- Interdisciplinarity of a contemporary performance.
Together with the mentors, you will be invited to carry out a little research within the group of performing arts students trying to explore the problem which interests you the most. Take it as a creative adventure – without strictly formulated goals or defined results. You will be absolutely free to play, improvise and provoke while posing urgent questions linked to the reality we are living in.