“Practicing Odin Teatret’s Archive: Training Transmission, Interaction and Creativity” – Adriana La Selva (UGent) en Laura Karreman (UU)

In this Transmission in Motion seminar, Adriana La Selva will share the first developments of a collaborative research project which draws on new approaches in Performance Studies concerned with the development of an epistemological framework for studying theatrical training techniques through archival reconfigurations in virtual reality. The aim is to investigate what it means to develop, practice and perform an archive through the activation of Odin Teatret’s (DK) embodied legacy in a virtual environment, addressing the translation of technique through Mixed Reality whilst developing dramaturgical approaches to archival practices.

At the core of this project lies an intense translation chain: from physical and vocal technique to metadata to an immersive textural architecture of archival navigation. Understanding translation as a performative and connective interdiscipline, this presentation engages with embedded embodied knowledge as a tool for investigating the complex web of techniques that link performers to subjectivities, histories, aesthetics, and creativity. This translation chain challenges a rereading of history as a reconfiguration of documents, oral tales, and reconstructions through affective transmissions, where poetic virtual spaces evoke particular intra-actions with knowledge itself.

During the presentation, Adriana La Selva will share audio-visual material from the Motion Capturing sessions and from the (in process) designed virtual translations, and invite the participants to think-with travelling concepts which will inform the navigation of the archive.

This seminar session is an initiative of Mobilizing the Archive: one of the interest groups of Transmission in Motion. The session will be hosted by Laura Karreman, who is also a member of the advising committee of the research project Practicing Odin Teatret’s Archive.

Adriana La Selva is a theatre maker and a researcher. She is currently a is a fellow FWO researcher, working on a Ph.D. at S:PAM (Studies in Performance and Media- Ghent University) – in association with IPEM (Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music), Utrecht University, Manchester Metropolitan University and Aalborg University. Her research investigates what it means to practice an archive, by addressing the transmission of embodied practices through virtual media and dramaturgical approaches to archival practices. In 2009, she concluded her Master’s degree in Contemporary Arts, practice-based, at the University of Lancaster, UK, on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming in relation to physical theatre. She is since 2015 member of the international theatre group The Bridge of Winds, led by Odin Teatret actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen. Adriana co-founded Cross Pollination together with Marije Nie, an international network of performers and researchers, which focuses on the dialogue in-between practices, new ways of knowledge building and understanding collaboration. She is the artistic director of comm’on vzw, an organization focusing on artistic exchange and applied theatre, based in Ghent.

Laura Karreman is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she teaches in the RMA Media, Art and Performance Studies, the MA Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy and the BA Media and Culture. She conducted her doctoral research at Ghent University. Her PhD dissertation was titled “The Motion Capture Imaginary: Digital renderings of dance knowledge.” Her research engages with epistemological questions about movement, representation and digital technologies, and investigates new notions of dance and performance knowledge. Recent publications include the book Performance and Posthumanism: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), which she co-edited with Christel Stalpaert and Kristof van Baarle, and the book chapters “Breathing Matters: Breath as Dance Knowledge” (in Futures of Dance Studies, The University of Wisconsin Press 2020), and “How does motion capture mediate dance” (in Contemporary Choreography, Routledge 2017).

*This session is an initiative from Mobilizing the Archive.

Mobilizing the Archive is one of the interest groups of Transmission in Motion.

This seminar is part of the Transmission in Motion seminar (2021-2022): “Practices of Translation”

Photo credits

Performer: Mika Juusela Photo: Bruno Freire

Adriana La Selva. Photo: Bruno Freire

Laura Karreman. Photo: Michiel Bles