Abstract:
Dilemmas of consent-making have taken center-stage in today’s performing arts processes.
Parallel to tendencies of juridification and horizontalization of rehearsal dynamics, it remains an engaging question for practitioners, throughout the field, how we agree in artistic contexts. In this perspective, the artistic constellations marked by a significant power differential (i.e. actor-director, student-teacher) find themselves not only under scrutiny but harmful suspicion. Even more so when such asymmetric relations enter sensitive and possibly transgressive explorations, which in modern and postmodern histories have been of central value for art’s capacities for societal critique or to transform relations.
In this work-demonstration, Johannes Maria Schmit (director) and his collaborator Anders Carlsson (actor) share their research findings from a 4-week pre-study. In the start, the participants get briefly introduced to the Wheel of Consent; a therapeutic model drawing on the practical knowledge of body workers, synthesized by chiropractor and “self-propelled erotic adventurer” Betty Martin. The facilitators Anders and Johannes then step-by-step transpose the therapeutic practice into a method for theater rehearsals, gradually embedding it in the actor-director dynamics.
The ambition is to create a non-restrictive space that normalizes mutual negotiation and contextual limits;, showing/testing to what extent this method may harbor a transgressive performing arts rehearsal work, summoning including phantasmatic projections and unconscious transference processes.
BIO:
Johannes Maria Schmit is a PhD researcher at SKH Uniarts Stockholm. His project prefigures possibilities of a re-invented director’s theater in a post-disciplinary performing arts field. Anders Carlsson’s is a PhD researcher at HSM Gothenburg university. He investigates acting through the fictional character Bartleby, as an instituent practice via the recognition of complex and asymmetric mutualist relationships between art and institution.
Anders and Johannes met in the context of Malmö‘s independent theater scene, where they were active as founders of the theater collective Institutet and within the performance Duo White on White.