Davide Giovanzana
University Lecturer
Davide Giovanzana is an Italian and Swiss theatre director, theatre pedagogue and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. He has a strong background in physical theatre, mask and object theatre. His doctoral artistic research, Theatre Enters!, examined the playful manifestation and political application of the play within the play in post-dramatic theatre. His post doc artistic research, The Imagination of Violence, reconsidered the potential and limits of the representation of violence on stage. He is Honorary Professor of the Latvian Culture Academy, he has been visiting professor of artistic research at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki and he is currently university lecturer in acting at Tampere University. His current research, Digital Presence; Dis-Connected Spaces (embodied performing practices in a digital/virtual era), examines to what extend digital technologies transform theatre. Rather than perceiving technology as an external instrument to be used, this research reverses the assumption and consider the performer, the user, the spectator as the extension of the digital platform.
Pauliina Hulkko
Professor
The research interests of Pauliina Hulkko relate to the theatre arts, dramaturgy, performing and ethics.
The dramaturgy of an actor that she outlines in her research offers a way to analyse and teach the special physical thinking of an actor. It also serves as an avenue for the application of various acting techniques.
Marleena Huuhka
Doctoral Researcher
Marleena Huuhka’s doctoral thesis Exploring Counterplay in Video Games through Artaudian Performance Theory examines performance and performance space in video games through Antonin Artaud’s concept of theatre. The goal is to recognize and produce new ways of shaping and taking control of virtual and physical space during the game event. Huuhka’s research is positioned in the crossroads of three research traditions: performance research, game research and new materialism.
Esa Kirkkopelto
Professor
The aim of Esa Kirkkopelto´s research is to understand the nature of the artistic phenomena and how they contribute to construction of the human experience, action and knowledge. His special interest lies in the corporeal and compositional aspects of the artistic phenomena as well as in their inter- and transdisciplinary affinities.
He is the chair of the Boundaries of Performance research group and the second vice-chair of the Taru Research Centre for Communication Studies
Samuel Kujala
Doctoral Researcher
Samuel Kujala is in the CONVERGENCE of Humans and Machines research field
within the Doctoral Programme of Humans and Technologies – DPHAT
Riku Laakkonen
Doctoral Researcher
Since 2020, Riku Laakkonen has conducted his artistic doctoral research at Tampere University. His research is entitled Performing Objects as Actors and Interactors – An Artistic Study of the Collaborative Possibilities of Object Animation. It combines the practices of object theatre, the study of performing arts and the theory of recognition. It is based on more than 20 years of artistic object theatre practice, which Riku has developed in different contexts. In his research, he is interested in how people build intra-active performances together with material objects and how these objects can build human agency.
https://researchportal.tuni.fi/fi/persons/riku-laakkonen
Samuli Nordberg
University Lecturer
Samuli Nordberg started his doctoral studies in the research of arts at the beginning of 2017.
The title of his doctoral dissertation is Jaettu tekijyys: ruumillinen näkökulma.
The research focuses on the physicality of collective working, particularly the physical thinking of the performer and its effects on the decision-making of an individual and a group.
Susi Nousiainen
Grant Researcher
is interested in utopias and re-imagining planetary well-being in participatory art and research. He is working on a collective comics project with youth studying in vocational school. In his Phd research, Nousiainen is practicing Boalian drama to focus on care during diversity-related conflicts at the workplace.
Teemu Paavolainen
Senior researcher
Teemu Paavolainen has researched performativity and theatricality in politics and everyday life, as well as ecological approaches to objects, scenography, and cognition. He is the author of two books with Palgrave Macmillan, Theatricality and Performativity: Writings on Texture From Plato’s Cave to Urban Activism (2018) and Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold (2012). He has published e.g. in Performance Research, Performance Philosophy, and Nordic Theatre Studies, and in the edited volumes Cognitive Humanities (2016) and The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold (2022).”
Riikka Papunen
Doctoral Researcher
Vappu Susi
Doctoral Researcher
Vappu is a visual artist-researcher in the field of cultural studies. She is working on her doctoral research on traffic cultures and everyday movement, especially cycling. In her work, Vappu is developing an arts-based method, “cycling as research”.
Vappu explores the communication, mediation, and aesthetics of moving bodies in a shared milieu, the traffic space, focusing on how we encounter others, including non-human actants, and how we communicate the desires that guide our ways.
Tiina Syrjä
University Lecturer
Tiina Syrjä’s key research interests focus on acting in a foreign language and the (gendered) physicality of voice.
Acting in a foreign language can also help students to analyse the musical and physical meaning levels of their native tongue and the effects that voice and language have on an actor’s body image, physical perception of presence and self-esteem.
