Join us for the festive launch of Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (Palgrave 2023) and the revamped Dramaturgy Database of Utrecht University. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Maaike Bleeker speak about making theatre as a process of thinking through practice and dramaturgy as attending to such practices of making-thinking. How can we conceptualize doing dramaturgy today…

    Laura Karreman concluded her lecture in the Transmission in Motion series with a couple of elements of the imaginary surrounding motion capture in performance that she had identified. One of these items was that motion capture can enable a kind of “saviour’s complex” toward dance and performance, trying to protect the art from…

In the session “Cultural Dreams of Datafied Bodies in Contemporary Performance” Laura Karreman discusses recent artworks arising from the cultural imagination of bodies in movement and motion capture. She does this by focusing on dance, illustrating the link between movement and the motion capture imaginary, drawing on her book Embodied Computation (preliminary title) that she…

Good-Bye VHS: The Political Scenography of Imagination by Olga Efremov     The sixth session of 2022-23 Transmission in Motion seminar series took place at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, current home of the exhibition Rewinding Internationalism. Scenes for the 1990s Today. The session included the introduction and viewing of the exhibition followed by a talk…

    “What if?” That is the question. Once belonging to the realms of the speculative fiction writing craft, ‘what if’ question has been steadily earning recognition as a legitima te mode of academic inquiry. According to Media, Arts and Performance scholar Theron Schmidt (2021), a speculative approach premised on the use of ‘what if’…

    In this session, Neo Muyanga presents the making of his recent production, ‘A Maze in Grace’, at the 34th São Paolo Art Biennale (2020). Amazing Grace was reportedly one of the hymns of solidarity that resounded spontaneously among those locals who gathered first at Ground Zero – the lower Manhattan district in New…

    My writing of this blog post is overshadowed by a tragic anniversary: one year from the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine. The past twelve months have been a trying emotional journey through the mediated theatre of the largest European military conflict of the 21st century that had inadvertently became a prism for…

    When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…

  A group of people dressed in beige costumes that distort them in many ways and make it almost impossible for them to move, share the same real but also virtual space. Immersed in the same virtual world, each participant has their own character and symbiotic role in the overall world and to each other….

    As Dan Hassler-Forest exposed in the seminar “Janelle Monáe’s Black Utopias and the Afrofuturist Imagination”, science fiction and thinking about the human future has predominantly been a Eurocentric practice. In the seminar through specifically focusing on Jane Monáe, Hassler-Forest illustrates how Afrofuturism focusses not just on the future but also the past and…