Researchers Marleena Huuhka, Teemu Paavolainen, Riikka Papunen & Anja Keränen at The International Federation for Theatre Research World Congress IFTR2018, Belgrade, Serbia: 9-13 July
https://www.iftr.org/
Teemu Paavolainen
University of Tampere
Teemu Paavolainen is a research fellow at the Centre for Practice as Research in Theatre, University of Tampere. He is the author of two books with Palgrave McMillan, 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. Generously funded by the Academy of Finland 2012– 15, the Finnish Cultural Foundation 2015–17, and the Kone Foundation 2017–20, his current research project with Kone is humbly titled Plural Performativity: Theatrical Models Against the Inversion of Western Thought.
Performing the Anthropo(s)cene: Migratory Histories and Cartographic Inversions
According to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, Western modernity is characterized by a ‘logic of inversion,’ by means of which the plurality of life is systematically reduced to structures of interiority. In a time when both the climate crisis and the refugee “crisis” are met with ever more introversive politics, the logic of inversion is itself in crisis and the quest for alternatives ever more urgent. In this paper, I relate histories of inversion to the horizontally extended human performance – “All the world’s a stage” – that is now dubbed the Anthropocene, its ‘performativity’ argued in the Butlerian sense of reiterated practices regularly confused with essential nature: That the relevant range of practices from agriculture to automobility seem to virtually define human conduct and being, is because they are not only restored or twice-behaved Schechner but infinitely behaved, massively reiterated, and also non-humanly distributed. More specifically, I trace as much of world history as twenty minutes allows – based on a chapter by then well underway – along two very different trajectories: that of local migrations of human associates, and that of human attempts at global overview. The former ranges from migrant crops and animals, at the dawn of agriculture, through European germs as agents of colonial conquest, to the diffusion of plastics as one stratigraphic marker of the Anthropocene epoch the latter traces the cartographic inversion and abstraction of all such local trajectories into an externally observable ‘globe,’ performatively naturalizing not only national boundaries and geographical distortions, but the very separation between ‘nature/geology/climate’ and ‘humanity.’ A cosmic spectator above all local struggles, ‘the human’ becomes what Ingold calls an ex-habitant’ of the globe rather than an inhabitant of the world, logically blinded to the vast human migrations that the effects of global warming are likely to cause over the coming decades.
Key Words Anthropocene, Cartography, Global imagery, Modernity, Performativity
Anja Keränen
University of Tampere
Anja Keränen is currently working as a visiting lecturer of Finnish language at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters, Department of Hungarian Literary Studies Finnish Studies. She is doing her postgraduate studies in the University of Tampere in the doctoral program of Communication, Media and Theatre in the discipline of Theater and Drama research. Her research interests are focused in the drama and theater pedagogy, multimodal communication through improvisation, conversation analysis and the multiple resources students use in foreign-language communication.
The Colours of Burnt Orange – Language and Culture through Drama and Theatre
In this joint project we propose to explore the possibilities of adapting the methods of drama and theatre pedagogy in academic education, however, the practical results and conclusions may be hopefully integrated into a larger framework of experimental research in the field of drama in education, more specifically the teaching/learning of intercultural communication through drama and theatre. The techniques and strategies of theatre and drama may be adapted naturally in communication-focused language teaching. Using theatre as a method of learning a new language allows the students to see language in real use, and by stepping outside of their everyday roles they might experience the use of the target language simultaneously utilizing their whole being and body as part of their linguistic performances. In our previous teaching and research work at the Babeș-Bolyai University Romania we have explored the use of improvisation practices, drama methods and kinesics alongside more traditional language teaching methods, and, at the same time, felt the need to apply the interactive method, the improvisational and creative techniques in a broader field of philologist education: including the teaching of aspects of literature and culture. Laying emphasis on the cultural dimension of language learning in accordance with Michael Byram’s ideas about intercultural communication competence we intend to enhance the students’ in-depth knowledge of the target culture, and thereby their socio-cultural competence, by combining two apparently distinct fields: teaching literary in our case mainly dramatic texts in combination with creative tasks as well as theatre pedagogy rooted in improvisation philosophy and methods formulated by Keith Johnstone 1979, 1999 and Gary Peters 2009. The practical course of Finnish drama and theatre designed around the joint application of these principles and methods is meant to be open and interactive – the students and teachers working as partners in a team and the course project should evolve dynamically and flexibly, taking into account the contribution of students in the form of interpretive and creative tasks fulfilled at different stages of the process. Our aim is to demonstrate that traditional, memorisation-oriented methods may be significantly improved through the use of improvisation, role-play and creative writing, as well as a task-in-process approach throughout the learning process. Key Words drama and theatre pedagogy, cultural learning, improvisation, creative writing
Marleena Huuhka
University of Tampere
Marleena Huuhka, MA, is currently working as doctoral researcher in the Centre for Practice as Research in Theatre in the University of Tampere. Her PhD thesis examines video game worlds as places of performative resistance, and searches for new counterplay practices.
Into the Void – Examination on Non-Human Performativity, Errors and Immersion
Video games are a notorious for their immersive nature: the helpless player is sucked into a world of passive spectacle, from which they are unable to retreat. A harrowing but untrue scene – the player is anything but passive. Not only is gaming an active, physical experience, but also the mental engagement with certain kinds of games is much more complex than passive receiving. Gordon Calleja has argued that certain types of games invite players to inhabit the game environment, the virtual world. The world is in that sense real to the player, as the players’ actions have an effect on the world, and the world has an effect on the player. Video games are performative, the world is created through common sign language transgressing borders of materialities. In this paper, I analyze non-human performativity based on new materialist theory see eg. Bennett, Dolphijn & van der Tuin, Barad. The main goal of this approach is to reconsider the position of humans: new materialism is about giving space to the other. In my examples, the others can be anything from my controller to the individual pixels of the game environment. I argue that the non-human performer – especially when talking about video games – is able to reveal their agency through an error. This error can be technical, visual or auditive. Through game play examples I will demonstrate how performership and agency of the non-humans is created through unexpected mishaps. Further, I argue that this, performative, active error is a way to tackle the possible mental numbness caused by immersion.
Key Words immersion, performance, video games
Riikka Papunen
The University of Tampere
Riikka Papunen, MA, is a Doctoral Student in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Tampere in Finland. She has conducted an artistic PhD project titled “Acting with the other” since 2013. She has a strong background as a professional performer in several theater performances and she is a proud mom of her two little sons.
Acting With the Other – Politics of Inclusion in Theatrical Performance
The paper examines inclusion through a critical reflection between a theatrical performance 8 esitystäelämästäni 8 stories of my life, Papunen&Papunen, 2017 and theories of ethical encounter Ahmed, 2000 and cultural hybrid Bhabha. The performance is part of an artistic doctoral research conducted for a doctoral degree at the University of Tampere in the years 2014-2019. The title of the research is “Acting with the Other”. It consists of two artistic parts and a monograph reporting its results. The performance introduced in the paper is the second artistic part of the research. The ensemble includes an actor-researcher, an actor with Down Syndrome and a musician with bass and a laptop. The starting point of the performance was a desire for the two actors to work together with one another. The actors had a shared history of being relatives but to act together was unfamiliar to them. The process of learning how to act with one another and to devise a performance together challenged the criteria of inclusion in multiple ways. The paper understands inclusion as an experience of being with e.g. Ahmed, Levinas, Bhabha and especially as acting with. Through the performance process acting with is a way of acting together where actor’s goal is the same, but the activities are independent and different. Acting with does not require a mutual way of acting, instead the actors define each other’s acting from the very beginning to the phase of meeting the audience and, thus, re-defining the acting with again.
Key Words Inclusion, being with, acting with
https://www.iftr.org/media/3413/book_of_abstracts_final_spreads_net.pdf