Studio Practice Spring 2025:  On the Performance of Research

The course proposes a critical and creative approach to lecture-performance as a format to convey and expose artistic research. How do performative techniques and methods affect and shape the conveyed research? And the other way around, how do specific research questions or practices call forth and require their own performative approach? 

This course will study the format of lecture-performance and its development from the 1960s onwards. Beside looking at a selection of lecture-performances in relation to their respective social, historical and political contexts, we will focus on identifying the techniques, scores, formats and practices employed. We will pay attention to what repeats, what aesthetics become sedimented in time, how knowledge and authority are performed and/or critiqued. We will attempt to compile a toolbox and to engage in a tautological exercise: to collaboratively compose a lecture-performance on lecture-performance. With no need to perform publicly our exercise, this loose objective will nevertheless allow us to do a few things at once. On one hand it will allow us to practice and experiment with the various forms and techniques of lecture-performance as we encounter and collect them. On the other, it will allow us to play with and question the performance of authority that is implicit in any public exposition of research or knowledge-production, as well as its authorship.

The intensive workshop will unfold over 4 days (from 10am to 3pm) and will take place in the dance studio and theatre space at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus in Stockholm.