BACKGROUND
General Background
Gender and Sexuality
Divorce stories
I have also done one a play about divorce stories, The development of the stories is a movement from a C.V. like narrative ‘I went to this school and moved to Denmark. I did this and then I fell in love and I fell out of love’. And then I try to get them to find one point where they really feelt some defining moments. Moments wich was a transformative period in their lives. And then thy move to broaden this point. I may ask them to use their senses to describe this moment: ‘What was the colour of the room? How did it smell? How did it sound?’ Through using senses in the description you are actually on the way to making a piece of art, because you describe something that other people relate to at another level than through the brain.
The notion about relating to art through senses is perhaps one of the biggest quests in my artistic life. When they broaden their stories, we try to find different formats. They can be movements. They can be visual. They can be poetry, songs, rap, dialogue, monologue, and then at the end we mix them together often through the embedded dramaturgy in the topico like for example: I was a happy child. I thought that there was something wrong with my parents. They told me that they were going to get a divorce. I had a horrible time. Now I am looking back at it, and it is how my life is. This is dramaturgy in itself, and often I organise these stories by using the embedded dramaturgy.
Hooyo! - Our mothers & their children
§ 50 - Placed
This project was about young people who in childhood had been placed in foster care or in foster homes.Though this work I discovered the carefull balance it is to work with very troubled young people.
The dilemma of tending to their breakdowns and working artistic . It was nessesary to maintain to stay within the profession I know as a director and not try to be a thearpist. There was a lot of ethical considerations to incoorperate in the project
Dyslexia
Power structures
Most performance art, as well as most of society, organizations and businesses are led by top-down principles. In the top-down approach someone is very wise, makes a decision, and everyone is affected by it, and following support this idea. I am very interested in bottom-up principles. Understood as when new things has to be developed, everyone in the organisation contributes to this before the decisions are made. We collect ideas, and then we sort them, and based on the entire knowlegde and imagination of the organization, we solve the problems.
In the project Human Migration I wanted to work in a bottom up mode.
The animation below illustrates what I am interested in. And the project tries to reach this aim.
Framework
Creating frames for the artistic work developed in my studies the diploma in cultural management. Jan Molin, from Copenhagen Business School has been, for my practice, ground-shaking or transformative.
He writes:
‘A major showdown with the major management thought is the idea of refraining from substance control. An alternative management law can thus be decided as a framework and a process control. And such principles are the managerial challenge in risking letting go of supervision and direct influence on decisions and solutions. The management task is instead to create framework conditions and to facilitate initiative for the development processes that extend the range of action for co-workers. The rule of thumb here is that the more content is open, the more you have to manage frame and processes. The more leaders leave analyses of assessment and decisions to a group of co-workers, the more they must provide and maintain clear, well-structured and authorise framework conditions for work.’
Molin, Jan (2003) – Organisation og ledelse – i et udviklingsperspektiv “Leading capacity” Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen.
The difference between being the one who manages and controls content and the one who makes frames for others to create content. It really inspired me, to read this, and it changed my practice without This thinking has evolved into artistic response – a metod developed to make this thinking possible – A way to co-create scenic material.
In the project Human Migration I wanted to work in a bottom up mode.
The animation below illustrates what I am interested in. And the project tries to reach this aim.
Framework
In 2009, I was about the start rehearsing a play in Herning, Team Teatret in Herning, Denmark. I had prepared everything. I knew everything. I was kind of bored with myself, and I did not want to once again sit there with actors saying: ‘I do not think I agree with you . And who am I to be wiser than all these wonderful people I was working with? So in the middle of the rehearsal I decided that I wanted to try something. All these questions they wanted me to answer I would let them ask these questions themselves and answer them themselves. We read through each scene, and when they read a scene I said, ‘Do not ask me. Write it on the wall. Find the answers through a small piece of art, a diary, a video, a painting, improvisation, whatever. Find the solutions yourselves’. And we loved it. We laughed and cried, and they felt so secure when they performed the play. This was an amazing experience.
I have had many reflections on how – what I experienced in Herning – can be transformed into teaching, how I as a teacher can create conditions, that did not posit predetermined goals. Molin’s words on facilitating development processes that extend the range of action, have been key words in developing this new approach. I’ve also been very aware that it is essential to create very clear and well-structured frameworks.
The goal of the artistic response is to create a “first look” into a text that gives the team the possibility of discovering all of the imaginative, unpredictable and personal material that occurs when one has free rein. We take our starting point in the text’s themes, the relationships between the characters, the time in which the text was written, philosophical/ideological thoughts and the various readings of the basic conflict that existed in the text. The first step of the method is that the team read the text together. Then the team asks questions about everything one is allowed to wonder about the text. After the open brainstorming session an organisation of the questions takes place.
This illustration pictures who creates the content. If you think of the content as the yellow circle, the creator of the content is the black circle. In the first circle the director creating the whole content. working with artistic response I make frames for the collaborators to create content. In human migration I have actually stepped even further away to let my colleagues and the audience and the performers do it alle be the creators. Being in this position I think of my job as a film editor’s job. People create a lot of things, and I use my knowledge and skills to put it together in some kind of succession.