Cecelia Wee. Documenting Live Art.
An examination of the practical, epistemological and aesthetic issues involved in the documentation of Live Art. Completed 2012.
Asma Mundrawala. Theatre for Development in Pakistan.
An examination of the impact of western NGO and Aid agencies on the development of theatre and performing arts in contemporary Pakistan. Completed 2010.
Dylan Robinson. The relationship between musicology and musical performance.
A practice-based project to reassess the relationships between musicology and music performance, developing performative and artistic methodologies for musicology and conceptually-based performance practices for music. The research addresses the importance for musicology to develop performative and visual research methodologies that critique the limits of written discourse and explore alternative modes of critical inquiry. This research challenges the assumption that artistic methodologies are fundamentally ineffective forms of knowledge transmission. Completed 2009.
Daniel Ploeger. Sonic Prosthetics in Digital Performance: hypermediacy and spatial presence.
A practice-based project on the sonification of biometric signals in performance art.
From the mid-1990s, sensor interfaces for personal computers have become available to artists at relatively low cost. Since then, a substantial amount of research has been done into the use of biometric data for sound synthesis. However, this research has almost exclusively been concerned with technical innovations and has rarely addressed issues of presence and the politics of the technologized body in performance art. Correspondingly, most performance art based on the sonification of biometric signals has primarily been focused on creating original sonic material, rather than thematizing the relationship between the employed technology and the performing body.
My research project is aimed at connecting recent technical research on body sonification in sound art with current debates in media theory and posthumanism, specifically with discourses on changing understandings of the concept of 'presence' within mediatized environments. Accordingly, the project is aimed at the analysis and development of artistic approaches to body sonification that draw attention to hypermediate interactions between the visceral body and technological extensions, and, within this context, instrumentalize different methods of sound spatialization to explore the experience of a sonified body's presence. Starting point of the project is a conceptualization of sound generated with biometric data as 'sonic prosthetics', which is based on a posthuman notion of the subject as a material-informational entity. The theoretical discourse of the project functions as a framework for the development of a novel type of performance body suit, equipped with biometric sensors and loudspeakers. The outcome of the research will be a written thesis and a performance work with the developed performance prosthesis.
Mario Frendo. The Musicalisation of the Theatrical Performance.
A practice-based project taking Grotowski's theory and practice of the musicalisation of theatrical performance as the basis for an examination of the potential of such approaches from the perspective of a composer.
Justin Grize. The Animal on the Musical Stage.
A practice-based project.
My research is centred on the presence of animals as characters on the musical stage - an extremely fertile source of metaphor and meaning which is just now beginning to be exploited. This will include exploration of the possible ways of collaboration between biologists and performance makers, with a view to creating a work of music theatre which has as its main focus not the human experience, but the insect experience. I am keen to have the final piece informed as much by scientific as dramatic or musical thinking. The possibilities are very wide-ranging, from a "traditional" human-performer-as-insect approach, to approaches which incorporate the audio or visual presence of insects into a performance, or which use technology to mediate between insect performers and a human audience - or even vice-versa. The project is informed by current thinking about the ethics of human beings' relationship to the non-human world.
Ae Jin Han. Transnational Flows in Korean Popular Performance
My research has pursued interdisciplinary and intercultural research in the globalized context of Korean popular performance. This research particularly explores the inter-cultural, cross-cultural and transnational flows in Korean musical dance-theatre and popular dance on music video through the dancing bodies. The research will delve into Korean Wave (Hallyu), which is the spread of South Korean culture around the world, to examine the culture industry and the transnational popular culture phenomenon. It examines the ways in which Korean popular performance emerged as an identifiable cultural form and why Korean popular performance and Korean Wave have appeared on the global stage. Accordingly, this research explores how Korean popular musical dance-theatre shows public perceptions of cultural industries issues as well as how popular dance on music video influence and make for contemporary social and political debate.