Description

1 Day Symposium 

14th May 2025, 09.00-17.00

at the The Art and Science Interaction Lab (ASIL), De Krook- Ghent

The growing convergence between the performing arts and digital technologies is revealing, at a fast pace, new perspectives for the documentation, recording, and transmission of embodied knowledge. Especially in Performance Studies, there is a growing concern about how to handle immaterial aspects—often invisible yet profoundly concrete to the artist—within other media. Whether it manifests through bodily memory, subtle energies, or processes of embodiment and reenactment, this intangible dimension remains one of the main challenges: how do we make the invisible visible? How do we notate, document and archive something that continually actualizes and transforms within the performer’s body?

At the heart of these reflections lie the so-called intangible archives—archives that are not limited to documents or physical objects but are expressed through corporeal practices, rituals, affective relationships, and constantly reinvented creative processes. Through virtual platforms, motion capture technologies, and immersive environments, what a performer would understand as a studio begins to expand, transcending physical boundaries and unfolding into multiple layers of action and interaction. In this sense, dancing the invisible in the midst of these archives is not just an aesthetic act but also a way of discovering and reinscribing the body itself into new states of presence.

This symposium, therefore, aims to unfold a key question: how can the performer’s presence and practice be articulated within expanded documentation processes whilst preserving the—albeit invisible—substrata of the performative experience? How can it be transmitted and generate new bodies of knowledges? Throughout this research day, the traditional theatrical laboratory will be reconfigured and broadened. The Art and Science Interaction Lab of Ghent University (ASIL, www.xrhil.ugent.be), its Motion Capture and 3D sound installations will be revisited and renegotiated, making room for new practices that generate novel forms of presence, modes of documentation and possibilities for reception, in which the invisible paradoxically becomes the most concrete element in the construction of artistic and embodied knowledge.

Sweating the Archive is organized in the context of the FWO-funded research project Practicing Odin Teatret’s Archive: Training transmission, interaction and creativity and Adriana Parente La Selva’s PhD defence within it. This symposium is a collaboration between Ghent University’s research groups S:PAM- Studies in Performing Arts and Media and IPEM- Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, funded by FWO and the Meet the Jury programme of Doctoral Schools.

Programme

09.00- Reception/ Coffee

09.30- Introduction- Adriana La Selva, Christel Stalpaert and Pieter-Jan Maes

10.00- Cross Pollination- Collective performance lecture: On Invisible Techniques: Embodied and Virtual Archives in Transmission

11.00- Tatiana Chemi (Aalborg University, DK)- (im)material affective pedagogies “on the floor”: building caring and creative ecologies

12.00- Lunch break

13.30- Vinicius Torres Machado (State University of São Paulo, BR) - Performance lecture: The Archive as an Open Wound

14.30- Laura Karreman (Utrecht University, NL)- Intellectual Generosity in Transdisciplinary Practices: How to Teach Robot Dramaturgs?

15.30- Diana Taylor (New York University, US)- Archiving Performance/ Performing the Archive

Book of Abstracts

Registration via this page is free and required. Please note that due to the limited capacity of the Lab, your registration will be held until 09:45. After this time, any unoccupied spaces will be offered to those on the waiting list. Instructions for accessing the lab will be sent in due course.