Prelude to a Method

In this practical workshop at the Society for Artistic Research 2022 Conference at the Bauhaus University Weimar, we invite participants from any field to experience interventions currently being developed for use with musical ensembles.

Participants will work with us through a collage of performative exercises and simple scores inspired by artists and scholars such as Augusto Boal, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Ben Spatz, and Pauline Oliveros. These are meant to bring specific ethical issues to the surface through practice. The session will be documented with video. We will then watch the documentation together and discuss how the work responds to questions such as:

• (How) do interventions that increase the visibility of practical ethics affect participants’ aesthetic values, and vice versa?

• (How) is the experience of being a self amongst others altered in the act of collaborative improvisation?

• What aspects of listening – to both the human and other-than-human – in improvisational practice are conducive to (individual and collective) ethical goals?

The workshop will help us weave together our working-processes-in-progress into a method for the musical Lab sessions (Mend); offer participants a condensed (pre)view of a topic of wide interdisciplinary scope (Blend); and show Artistic Research’s unique pragmatic potential for ethical inquiry (Attend).