Wednesday seminar: Documentation of research project with Sacks and Ancker

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this spring “Processes of Documentation”, where we explore a wide range of processes of documentation emerging within the field of artistic research. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

This page may be updated.

Stina Ancker, Professor in Opera:

I plan to present some thoughts revolving around the search for a singing acting that is truly musical. I am thinking about questions like how to develop awareness about the spectrum of music-dramatic and performative possibilities for interpretations and push the boundaries of acting in opera, embodying the music?

I have just started up a collaboration with collegues at Malmö Musikhögskola, that I might be able to say something about, if we have been able to start some practical work, by then.

Stacey Sacks, Professor in Acting:

what is a joker without a joke 
or 
donkey normal times 
or 
it’s a shit show

a performing essay by and with dr. NuTT

A professional actor/writer/director/researcher/clown, Sacks has taught and supervised at BA, MA and PhD levels in South Africa, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and the USA; was a Fulbright Scholar in Connecticut, USA (2021-2022); presented The Walls Have Tongues or... at the Research Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 2017); published their PhD 'thesis' SQUIRM (2020), and is co-author of The Clown Manifesto published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama  (2015).

Interested in trans-generational and intra-cultural haunting, Sacks' artistic research frequently experiments with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort in multi-modal ways, attempting to discover sharper ways of giving attention and making safe space for generative failure. Via a series of inter-disciplinary corporeal and material experiments, the ongoing research explores if and how clowning generates a kind of ethico-poesis, particularly examining how satire and parody might destabilize and rethink issues relating to power, race, privilege and identity. Or not. 

Searching for what asemic clowning may be, dr. NuTT (a clowter - performed entanglements of clown and character) emerges as a space/body/state to retreat to, a soft strategy for hard times, a mask to inhabit a short while. 
As doctor of ARS (Latin: ART), dr. NuTT offers a performing essay in the form of a pontifuckation of the moment that presents itself. He will reveal his circus of plastic cocks, read a shit poem, and perhaps sing a song or prayer. 

Mostly, the room will encounter 'nothing special' as potential antidote to the techno-geo-political-hellscape our species currently finds itself in.