Malmö Theatre Academy and Inter Arts Center (IAC) invite you to a public seminar examining the contemporary field and discourse of performing and visual art work engaging communities.
Artists from the performing arts and visual arts are socially engaging with people, places, and communities over time. What are the artistic and ethical dilemmas they meet? How are the structural possibilities of creating new sustainable alliances between institutions, artists and communities?
A registration for the seminar at IAC is required. The deadline for registration has already passed.
The seminar is part of the programme of Malmö Community Biennal. Read more about Malmö II Community Biennal here – communitykulturcentrum.se/biennal
Download the programme and the list of participants here (PDF, 213 kB, new tab)
Programme:
13.00 Welcome
13.15 Shannon Jackson, keynote
The international history of socially-engaged artistic practice is long and varied, including movements in applied theater and community performance from the performing arts, including movements in activist art and social practice from the visual arts. What does it mean to excavate and join these genealogies of practice — politically and aesthetically—in our contemporary moment? Do contemporary socially-engaged artists have different political sensibilities? Are their aesthetic sensibilities reconcilable? This lecture reviews some key opportunities and debates around such questions, while setting the scene for a wider conversation amongst artists and artistic groups in the region.
14.15–15.45 Artistic presentations
Amanda Fromell (SE) With focus on Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatre’s production Unprotected and BeFrank Theatre’s Do We Do the Right Thing, Amanda will talk about ”verbatim theatre” – honing in on how it is being used as a form of audience engagement and seeks to open up the theatrical space. She will also talk briefly about how Malmö Stadsteater are currently working with community theatre.
Nasim Aghili (SE) will do a presentation about the two works Manifiesto de las Madres / Mödrars Manifest / Mothers’ Manifest and Şaneşîn.
Maj Hasager (DK) will do a presentation about the work Three structures touching in LA. http://majhasager.net/2021/11/06/three-structures-touching-2021/
16.00–16.45 Panel discussion
16.45–17.00 Summary
Hosting the seminar from the Theatre Academy:
Ditte Bjerg
Theatre director and prefect Malmö Theatre Academy
Theodor Ryan
Artist and alumn from Malmö Theatre Academy.
Tanja Diers
Dramaturg, curator and phd student at Malmö Theatre Academy.
Contributing are:
Shannon Jackson, (US) is Hadidi Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, at UC Berkeley, with appointments in History of Art, Art Practice, and the Center for New Media. Most recently, she served for six years as Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Publications include: Lines of Activity (2000); Professing Performance (2004); Social Works (2011); The Builders Association (2015); Public Servants (2016), along with numerous journal essays and catalogue essays. Jackson has won several awards, including the 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, and serves on the boards of various organizations, including the Kramlich Art Foundation, Tippet Rise Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oakland Museum of California. Her career survey book, Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and Public Life, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press (2022).
Nasim Aghili (SE, born 1980, Teheran) is a director, writer, performer and artist. Their participatory performances, theatre installations, art in public space and collaborative work often deal with the experience of existing and living in different forms of exile and the making of collective rituals and grievability. Nasim works in the duo aghili/karlsson together with the artist and horticulturalist Björn Karlsson and in the art collective Ful.
Amanda Fromell (SE) works as dramaturg at Malmö Stadsteater, holds a practise-based PhD in digital dramaturgies and freelances as a scriptwriter. She has worked extensively with the development of new writing, community theatre, arts&tech and pod dramas; for theatres such as Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatre, Curve Theatre, Birmingham Rep, Tinderbox Theatre och Manchester Royal Exchange.
Maj Hasager (DK) is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. She studied photography and fine arts in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, earning an MFA from Malmö Art Academy. Hasager’s artistic approach is research and dialogically based, and she works predominantly with text, sound, video, and photography. Maj Hasager has been Rector of Malmö Art Academy since 2021.
The programme will be updated continuously.
Photo: Sounding Pico, 2019, Santa Monica Youth Orchestra, Maj Hasager, Ask Kæreby