The performances of I will carry you over hard times at the Amsterdam Fringe festival have just been concluded. Maarten Zaagman performed the work at different places in the South and West of Amsterdam, and a number of performances in the heart of the festival, the Compagnietheater.

Both audience as well as professionals were enormously positive about the work. Many of them were impressed by the rhythmical virtuosity of the synchronicity between live gestures and soundtrack, the immense physicality of the closing sections, and the diverse intersecting layers of musical structure, bodily movement and objects in the stage space.

It was fascinating to witness and to experience the enormous and unexpected flexibility of the piece. Outside, in black box theatres, during lectures and in university spaces. Falk and Maarten leave the festival with a few more thoughts for the performance’s further development, which will lead to hopefully exciting experiments during the upcoming performances in Rotterdam in October (see dates).

As the next season has just begun, there are a number of exciting announcements. Here is an overview of the activities during the next months.

Next performance series I will carry you over hard times

After the succesful performances at the Delft Fringe Festival, Maarten Zaagman is going to perform the intensely physical I will carry you over hard times again. He will perform the piece during the Amsterdam Fringe Festival in the heart of the festival, the Compagnietheater in Amsterdam. Afterwards there will be three more performances at Crimp, the multidisciplinary underground series in Rotterdam, curated and organised by visual artist Arnold Schalks. For all performance dates, see here.

Premiere of silencio

Falk continues to work on silencio, a new upcoming music theatre work with Dutch-Australian trumpet player Sef Hermans. Although the exact date and location of the premiere is not yet set, it will likely be in spring in Pamplona, Spain. Relevant news will be announced as soon as possible, for some first information of the piece, see here.

First artistic output Live video research

In the first half of the season, from autumn to winter, Falk will work on the first artistic output of the three year long artistic research project on live video in music theatre, as part of his work at the HKU Research Centre Performative Processes. The artistic work will use the outcomes of the live video lab earlier this year, and develop these into a performance installation in four parts. Each of these parts will provide a distinct concept of using live video in relation to musical gestures and the instrument, as well as present the double bass in a unique experimental setting that challenges its identity as a musical instrument. This will also be the first time since a few years that Falk will act as a performer. The concept of the work will be available shortly on the sub page of the research project.

Performative Processes in Cape Town

The core team of the Research Centre Performative Processes is invited to present their research of the IYANTWAY project at the Multimodal Landscapes conference in Cape Town. Within the “research” strand of the conference the team will present Transforming Absence. Art as bridge from multimodal experiences to transdisciplinary collaboration.

The contribution explores the work and creative process of a group of artists in the transdisciplinary research project If you are not here, where are you?, between medicine, neuroscience and interdisciplinary arts. Nine artists from different artistic disciplines work in a collaboration with a group of eight young people between eight and 28 years old. Aim of the project is to find a language for the often fearful and misunderstood experiences that children have during absence seizures. Together with the children the artists create artistic utterances (music, paintings, interactive installations, etc.) that match with the experience before, during or after a seizure; to make the invisible experience visible, audible, experienceable.

In most cases the experiences of the young people during were multimodal, and much more described as holistic experiences than concretely within one artistic discipline or medium. One of the challenges was creating artistic works that do justice to the nature of the experiences. The presentation at the conference will address the challenges during this transformative process from multimodal experience to interdisciplinary art works. It will discuss the possible relevance and impact – of both the artistic collaboration between artists and children, as well as the “performative research” methodology – on research outside of the arts.

Teaching at Master Artist Educator

“If art is to chance the world, then artists must become agents of change.”

John Johnston, Head of International Master Artist Educator

With the beginning of this academic year, Falk starts to work as member of the core team of the master course Artist Educator (IMAE) at ArtEZ Arnhem, headed by John Johnston. IMAE takes the artistry of practitioners as a radical point of departure for education. The students’ artistic work and practice, which largely happens in context, will be at the centre of this studio-based program. For more information about the program, see here.

From 1-11 September 2016 the Amsterdam Fringe Festival will happen. Falk Hübner’s new performance I will carry you over hard times with percussion player Maarten Zaagman will play at the festival. See below for a teaser:

In the summer and autumn of 2016 the new work I will carry you over hard times with percussion player Maarten Zaagman will be performed several times, including the official premiere at the Delft Fringe festival.

Falk Hübner and Maarten Zaagman have worked in a close collaboration on the performance since 2015. Parts of the work have been shown at various conferences as part of lecture performances by Hübner. For the exact dates see here.

The core team of the Research Centre Performative Processes (RECPEP) of HKU University of the Arts has recently returned from Prague. Nirav Christophe, Henny Dörr, Joris Weijdom and Falk Hübner attended the “Artistic Research: Is there some Method” conference. They presented a collaborative lecture performance that touched on three different research projects of the Research Centre:

1. Nirav Christophe’s theory of polyvocality
2. Performative Research as research methodology
3. The transdisciplinary research project “If you are not here, where are you?” as a case study

The lecture performance experimented with a mode between”talking about” and “doing it”. While the researchers elaborated on the research project and their own role between artist, researcher and collaborator, Christophe silently commented these elaborations with cards carrying the names of different “voices” (such as voice of the artist, of the ego, the child, the collaborator, and so on).

Read the full abstract here: RECPEP Prague abstract.

Next to the lecture as such, the team distributed a number of statements under the title “Prague Provocations” (see image).

On April 14th, the next edition of Setting the Tone will be about relations between image and sound in the performing arts, and the interdisciplinary creative processes in this kind of work. 

The guests of this edition are renowned composer/director Arnoud Noordegraaf and object theatre company Tamtam. They will tell about their work, and about the creative process that leads to intimate relationships between images and sound.

As always, Setting the Tone starts at 17:00 by having dinner together. Everybody is welcome to bring instruments. 

Click here for more information (in Dutch).

On thursday, 3rd and 17th of March Falk Hübner conducted the third live video lab at HKU Utrechts Conservatory. Both sessions focussed on involving and adding screen projection to the previous experiments. 

  

During the two sessions the work on setups for miniature pieces for prepared double bass, live electronics and live video continued. This was fueled by the visit of the head of the Research Centre Performative Processes, Nirav Christophe. He and Falk had an intense exchange on the 17th of March, which ended up in a collective making session where both gave shape to a series of four performance-installations as artistic outcome of the lab series, in a co-creative fashion.

  

The concept and result of this project will be anounced and documented soon.

  

On Thursday, February 11th, Falk Hübner carried out the second Live Video Lab session, as part of the larger live video research within the Research Centre Performative Processes. While the first session live video lab had focussed on the sound possibilities, this second one was dedicated to experimenting with first visual ideas.

During the session, Falk worked with the same preparations used previously, and photographed a variety of settings from different positions and in different framings.

This resulted in a series of images that evoke a variety of associations – such as lots of paper clips hanging from the strings that may evoke the image of a colorful curtain moving in the wind.

The double bass became utilized as a large landscape, building or structure, demanding to be discovered from unusual viewpoints.

The next two labs will shift the focus towards moving images and live projection. These will be the first experiments that instigate the relation between the (filmed) musical action and its processed outcome on screen.

Falk Hübner’s recent article “Hard Times. Lecture Performance as Gesturel Approach to Develop Artistic Work-in-Progress” is published by RUUKKU, a Finish online journal about artistic research; available here. The article, in form of an online exposition in the framework of the Research Catalogue, is one of the outcomes of Falk’s research at the HKU Research Centre Performative Processes.

The article discusses the approach of using a lecture performance format as a way of obtaining feedback both for research as well as artistic processes. Artistic work is often an essential mode of articulation within artistic research, specifically when practice is understood as both source and target domain of the research.

In the exposition, the format of a lecture performance is investigated and discussed as an explicit articulation through which the process of both artistic work and research is shared, rather than functioning merely as a format for disseminating findings. The format of lecture performance that is investigated here frames the artistic work and theoretical-conceptual framework as two distinct, yet interrelated, processes shared with a conference audience. This includes the deliberate choice for a live performance of artistic work-in-progress, adding a gestural and at times very kinaesthetic aspect to otherwise textually-dominated forms of presentation.

The exposition as such has two focuses that are strongly related to each other, approaching the form of a feedback loop: on the one hand, the creation process of a new experimental performance work by Falk Hübner is investigated. “Hard Times” refers to the title of this artistic work: I will carry you over hard times.

The exposition demonstrates how these conference discussions strongly inform the work process of the specific artistic work in question and attempt to shed an alternative light on the well-known concept of “audience talks”, which typically serve to generate feedback and insights into audience perspectives for artists after tryouts or performances of unfinished work. The audiences of conferences are, in most cases, considerably different in nature than “standard” audiences, offering the possibility of insightful input on quite different facets of both artistic work and research process––provoked by the very form of a lecture performance as described above. The exposition suggests that this type of lecture performance, explicitly including the audience at a conference as important source of information, feedback and peer-review, forms a gestural method of artistic research in itself, whose full potential within artistic research is yet to be explored.