6,662 research outputs found
Massimiliano Balduzzi: Research in Physical Training for Performers
Get PDFThis essay begins the process of contextualizing and analyzing Massimiliano Balduzzi’s solo physical training practice by introducing six newly created video documents. It locates Balduzzi’s work in a wider historical and artistic context – touching upon the work of Konstantin Stanislavski, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba, as well as acrobatics, martial arts, and Balinese dance – while arguing that the documented physical training constitutes an original research contribution to the field of embodied technique. The essay has three main purposes: First, to give verbal articulation to some important aspects of Balduzzi’s practice, as he begins to teach more widely in New York City and beyond. Second, to test and develop a theoretical framework that conceives of embodied technique as a field of knowledge in which rigorously framed research can and does give rise to new knowledge in the form of new technique. Third, to explore the epistemological status of multimedia documentation through a focused case study. Each of these goals has the potential to expand and clarify current discussions of actor and performer training, movement analysis and documentation, and practice-as-research
LMYE Library #2: Ben Spatz - Making a Laboratory (2020)
No full textIn this oral introduction Ben Spatz talks us through the epistemological concerns and methodological discoveries found in their book Making a Laboratory: Dynamic Configurations with Transversal Video (New York: Punctum, 2020). This interview was recorded on 03.09.2020
“Sequence of Four Exercise-Actions” (physical training led by Ben Spatz)
No full text“Sequence of Four Exercise-Actions” is a dense linear video document based on an extract from a session of physical training held at the Centre for Psychophysical Performance Research, University of Huddersfield (12 August 2015). The session was led by Ben Spatz, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance, and is based on a form of physical training developed by Massimiliano Balduzzi, which Spatz previously documented and analyzed in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 5:3. This training can be used to enhance a performer’s physical precision and sense of musicality as well as the ability to integrate dynamic movement with interpersonal awareness and imaginative associations. Also participating in the training session are Sobhia Jones (undergraduate alumna) and Chris Lomax (second year undergraduate).
In addition to sharing a moment of studio-based pedagogy and another glimpse of Balduzzi’s exercise-actions, the purpose of this video is to explore how layers of textual commentary and embedded video citation can increase the density of a video document to level appropriate for rigorous scholarship. The implicit argument is that scholarly videos should be to mainstream documentaries what scholarly monographs are to popular nonfiction books, i.e. more densely saturated with knowledge. Extending the argument put forward in the book What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015), I demonstrate here how the field of embodied research can be supported by an approach to video documentation that focuses neither on the ephemerality of the live event nor on the specific formal qualities of video as a medium, but rather on how best to expose the density of specialized embodied practice.
The main video shows Spatz demonstrating solo work on a sequence of four exercise-actions. Jones can be seen matching Spatz’s rhythmic impulses while she observes from the side, while in the latter part of the video Lomax takes a turn in solo practice of the same sequence. Additional layers of epistemic density that provide contextualization and analysis of the core video include: textual annotation indicating the names of practitioners and exercises; textual references, as would commonly be founded in footnotes; embedded videos from other parts of the same training session, showing the layered density of technique within a given practice session; embedded videos and imagery from external sources, locating the documented practice in a wider epistemic context; textual commentary explicating all of the above; and continuous time code allowing others to make stable references to specific sections of this video
Race and the forms of knowledge : technique, identity, and place in artistic research /
No full text"Crafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge"--Crafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge""Crafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge"--Includes bibliographical references and indexCrafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge
Introduction III:Mad Lab - or why we can’t do practice as research
No full textThis introduction/intervention responds to the title and underlying assumptions of the present volume rather than to its content. Intended as a speculative polemic, it probes the boundaries of what is possible and what is desirable in PaR, highlighting some of the tendencies and assumptions that the concept of performance brings to research. As I see it, performance is both indispensable and limiting: an essential genealogy for the work discussed in this volume, but one that increasingly requires critical alternatives in order to continue pursuing its promise. In this piece I compare performance with practice as a basis for PaR, gesturing towards what may be an impossibly radical notion of experimentation in practice. I ask, without knowing the answer, where the epistemological and political boundaries of the PaR movement truly lie. While I do not attempt to analyse the specific contributions to this volume in these terms, I hope to pose a question that may be applied to these and other case studies – namely, whether research is unfolding through performance or through practice – and to show why that question matters
What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research
No full textIn What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that understanding technique as both training and research has much to offer current discussions around the role of practice in the university, including the debates around “practice as research.”
Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz argues that technique is a major area of historical and ongoing research in physical culture, performing arts, and everyday life
Editorial
Get PDFThis is the editorial video essay for 'Journal of Embodied Research', Volume 1. It takes the form of a “talking head” video, attempting to balance the accessibility of social media with the scholarly rigour of a traditional journal editorial. Journal Editor Ben Spatz introduces the concept of the videographic scholarly journal and touches upon the history of audiovisual documents of embodied research across the twentieth century. After this brief overview of the form, Ben summarizes each of the four video articles included 'JER' 1.1 and invites submissions for the next volume
Towards a Queer Laboratory
No full textIn this essay, Ben Spatz offers practical suggestions and considerations for the implementation of a “queer laboratory”: an artistic research space that emphasizes and actively explores the circulation of powers, roles, and identities. These proposals are based on their own practice, which incorporates audiovisual embodied research as well as the critical theorization of embodiment and identity. Ben firstly describes their own journey in performance-based embodied research and shares how their genderqueer and other identities have led them to push against the edges of what currently counts as “performance.” In the next section, Ben shares a set of proposals for designing a queer laboratory—or “laboratory of powers”—in which gender and other identities can circulate across subject/object boundaries. The chapter closes with a consideration of the audiovisual body in the era of digital audiovisual networks
Between Death and Ceremony
Get PDFTracing matters of death and ceremony across black studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical decolonial jewish studies, I find myself most interested in that other death, the preliminary death, which precedes biological death. This is not “social death,” the murder of kinship structures. Nor is it the death of the physical organism. This death is ceremonial, practical, and transformative. It is a kind of death practice, a daily practice of dying. Photo essay with images from the 2017 Judaica project embodied audiovisual laboratory: Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel
Massimiliano Balduzzi: Physical Training for Performers
No full textThese six videos document a research in solo physical training developed by Massimiliano Balduzzi over more than fifteen years. In them, Balduzzi is shown practicing a sequence of exercises/actions, integrating floor work and impulses/isolations, and finally putting all of these elements together in a session of ‘open work’. The videos were recorded and edited by Ben Spatz at Leimay/Cave in Brooklyn (2013), with additional videography by Manuel de la Portilla. See commentary for more details.
Massimiliano Balduzzi is an Italian performer, director, and teacher based in New York City. He is currently working on a solo called REQUIEM with dramaturge Susan Mar Landau and with Helga Davis on CASSANDRA, set to premiere at BRIC in 2014. With Ben Spatz and Urban Research Theater, Massimiliano created and performed in PLAYWAR (Abrons Arts Center) and directed THEATRICALE (Lincoln Center Atrium). Massimiliano has been a resident artist at Movement Research and LEIMAY-CAVE. Before moving to New York City in 2008, Massimiliano worked for five years with director Anne Zenour in Siena, co-founding the performance group Teatro della Pioggia. Massimiliano has also worked with Stefano Vercelli and with Mamadou Dioume. In 2006, he spent six months living in Bali, studying Balinese dance and song.
www.massimilianobalduzzi.co
- …
