Thinking with Performance: Research-Based Aesthetics in Times of Conflict and Crisis
Public Defence of PhD thesis by Sofie Volquartz Lebech.
Thinking with Performance: Research-Based Aesthetics in Times of Conflict and Crisis is an artistic research project, in which Sofie Volquartz Lebech examines how to critically think with performance. The main thesis is that research-based performance uses research to respond to conflict and crisis and to create spaces for thinking where artist and audience can reflect on the represented material.
The project has two dimensions: on the one hand, Lebech develops two performances using different research strategies; on the other, she identifies a research-based working mode visible in a number of artistic practices that use, create, and perform research in order to imagine and represent other realities.
The two performances are both personal and political reactions to conflicts in the body of society and in the individual body. The first performance, Precarious Life, is a performance lecture about terror and autoimmune diseases drawing on Jacques Derrida’s conception of “democratic autoimmunity”. The second performance, This is for her, is about torture and therapy reflecting on reenactment and testimony as a way of bearing witness. Both performances use facts, affects, and documentary strategies to represent the researched and reflected material.
Assessment Committee
- Associate Professor Karen Vedel, Chair (University of Copenhagen)
- Professor Adrian Heathfield (University of Roehampton)
- Rector Mads Thygesen (The Danish National School of Performing Arts (DDSKS))
Moderator of defence
- Associate Professor Stig Jarl (University of Copenhagen)
Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:
- At the Information Desk of the Library of the Faculty of Humanities
- In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
- At the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Karen Blixens Vej 1
