21/10/20 — 16/12/20

PeARL: Performance Artistic Research Lab 2020 — 2021

Anna Furse
Liudmila Aliabieva
Irina Sirotkina
Roger Smith
Irina Sakhno
Tatiana Fadeeva
Alexandra Staruseva-Persheeva

Anna Furse with discussant Roger Smith

Starting from her chapter ’Being Touched’, that explores the touch sense in relation to how the ’artsport’ Contact Improvisation can be understood in an ethical dimension, in this presentation Anna Furse will discuss this in the context of todays’ touch-phobic society and ask how we might address this very basic human need, socially and artistically.

Irina Sirotkina with discussants Laini Burton, Alison Matthews David and others

Masks can be used as markers of the boundary between public and private, personal and impersonal, the disguised and the revealed, the self and the Other. We can think, for example, of medical masks, of ‘the Moscow Metro Mask’, a reserved and hostile facial expression Russian people wear in public, of the infamous American ‘Blackface’, of half-masks the French mime, Étienne Decroux, used to hide his face, ‘the instrument of lie, the apostle of blather’. Yet we can also think of masks that are fun, of Italian commedia dell’arte, carnivals, of the DIY transformative make-up, or else of masks as healing tools in the hand of psychiatrists and art therapists

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Roger Smith with discussant Jorella Andrews

This talk is about the semantic richness of movement as action and in
language. I relate this to agency, the power a person has to act, the
subjective feeling that goes with action, and the social and political
context of action. A performance always exhibits movement, about which
both performer and audience have feelings and to which they both
respond. The expression of agency in movement is central to identity.

Alexandra Staruseva-Persheeva and Tatiana Fadeeva
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Globalised media theorists since the time of McLuhan and Youngblood have been visualizing the newer society developed by communicational technologies. However this type of evolution needs more of an engine than just technologies — a new type of empathy is to be built up. We argue that VR-technologies today are an apt instrument not only of artistic statement and communication, but also means of social integration which makes permeable «membranes» of social units. In virtual reality a user is able to experience the new subjectivity, being-with-the-Other, or — to a certain extent — being the Other. When such «meetings» take place in a safe space of aesthetic experience a spectator can literally take part in these scenarios and experience the affects that would be unimaginable in everyday life, expand his own boundaries of subjectivity and go beyond the limits of an egocentric position.

Participating in projects using VR technology for social purposes (such as Rising, Blood and Sand, The Machine To Be Another, Equal Reality, Tree VR, Etc.) viewers are able to fully understand actions and emotions of the Other (be it a human, tree, or animal) via bodily «solidarity» — as one of the fundamental foundations of empathy.

Participants: Ksenia Gussarova, Jana Melkumova-Reynolds, Lily McMenamy, Jana Romanova and others
Moderator: Liudmila Aliabieva