Workshop in Norway

I have just returned from giving a workshop for Master students at the Universitetet i Agder: Institutt for visuelle og sceniske fag within a module on Interdisciplinarity. Through theoretical debate and practical exercises we explored a range of interplays between music, performance, and visual art, taking inspiration from practitioners ranging from Adolphe Appia, Vassily Kandinsky, John Cage to Heiner Goebbels, Carola Bauckholt or Robert Wilson.

It was particularly interesting to work with students whose background was largely not in theatre, not music (with a few exceptions), but in visual art and photography. This allowed us to question and compare notions of "composition", "rhythm" or "score" between different art forms and attempt translations and transformations between the disciplines. Almost as a by-product, we also stumbled upon questions of acting and not-acting and the theatricality of executing musical instructions in a theatrical environment.

One notion that we kept returning to was that of the 'frame' within which we place an artistic practice and how influential this frame (as a mindset, a training background, an institutional set of parameters, or as a predisposition of the spectator/audience) is for how we 'read' interdisciplinary art.