Searching for Transgenerational Performance Knowledges

A new and groundbreaking NTA research project seeks to find out how artistic research in performance art can transmit, question and share artistic legacies.

Studio photo showing group of artists who participated in a radical elder workshop.

Bringing artists together: During the next three years Norwegian Theatre Academy will lead an international search for transgenerational performance knowledges. The photo was taken as part of a Pocha Nostra workshop with radical elder artists in Australia 2019, focusing on the body as a stie for identity reinvention and activism. (Photo Radical Elders 3.0 by Donatella Parisini)

The project «Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges» recently received a total of 1.9 million NOK from the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (PKU).

The key questions that the Radical Elders project will promote are:

  • How can artistic research in performance art transmit, question and share artistic legacies?
  • What strategies contest the generational and cultural isolation between performance artists of newer and older generations?
  • How can performance knowledges from different geographies, indigenous and otherwise, coexist and co-create across bodies, materials and spaces?

During the next three years Norwegian Theatre Academy and Østfold University College will host transnational artistic residencies and workshops. The residencies will take place in USA, Mexico, Greenland and Norway. Co-creation, performative exchange and relational aesthetics aim to create transgenerational works as a practical dialogue sharing and contesting knowledges.

"The objective to preserve and transfer knowledge across generations in a field as historically invested in the new as performance art, is both valuable and timely."

Statement from the artistic panel that evaluated the project

Galleri F15 in Moss is a partner in the project which starts in June this year and will be finalized in 2025. 

Placing NTA at the forefront of artistic research

The research project will include embodied conversations and storytelling as co-creative performance art actions between elder, researcher, students and community.

The project will be led by NTA Professor and researcher Saul Garcia Lopez.

Photo of NTA Professor and researcher Saul Garcia Lopez
Leading the project: Program Coordinator of the MA in Performance, NTA
Professor and performance artist Saul Garcia Lopez. 

- For NTA, the research represents an opportunity for the institution to be recognized as a center for innovative studies in the field and at the forefront of artistic research at national and international level, and nurtures relationships with different institutions and universities such as The University of California Santa Cruz, The Artic University of Norway, and performance art organizations such as La Pocha Nostra, he says.

The elders participating in the project represent 20th century performance legacies from different geographies. These are the “Radical Elders”-artists:  

  • Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a Chicano border theorist and indigenous artist working with the hybridity of language, installation art, video, and the spoken word
  • Varste Mathæussen, an Inuit actress and master of mask dance
  • Ron Athey, a queer performance artist associated with extreme body art
  • Annie M. Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artists and radical sex educators
  • Geir Tore Holm, a Sami interdisciplinary artist whose projects question land use and ecology

Bringing artists together across generations

The artistic results of the project will be presented in a variety of formats such as podcasts, photo performances, living artifacts or props, costumes, prose and performance actions. The project concludes by curating a pedagogical handbook and a final exhibition of the chain of practices. The exhibition will be staged in Norway.

According to the project description each method from one elder artist will be woven by the researcher into the next, forming a chain between all the participants. Tensions arise between artists' lives and their geographies, questioning performance art methods and futures.

Prior to the PKU grant the project has been subject to a thorough evaluation from an artistic panel. This is said about the project in one of the evaluations:

“The objective to preserve and transfer knowledge across generations in a field as historically invested in the new as performance art, is both valuable and timely”.

In one of the other assessments, it is underlined that the Radical Elders project will provide a strong foundation for the further development of performance education both at NTA and internationally. Also saying:
“It has a strong ethical and democratic approach to bringing artists together across generations, nationalities, and institutions, at once challenging and strengthening the scope of artistic and educational institutions.”

 


 

Tags: performance, research, performative, radical, transgenerational, knowledge, body, material, space, legacies By Ann-Kristin Johansen
Published Feb. 16, 2022 8:42 PM - Last modified June 20, 2023 2:50 PM