Lecture | Conversation
In the Making #6: Anna Scott, Jed Wentz, Laila Neuman, Emma Williams, Art Without Soul?
- Date
- Sunday 26 May 2024
- Time
- Address
- West in the former American embassy
Lange Voorhout 102
The Hague
The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) of Leiden University and art institute West Den Haag are pleased to announce their close collaboration in the new public series In the Making. In six public sessions they will present to the public different practices of research in the arts.
Artistic production has always expressed the forms in which we know, explore, and sense the world we live in. The current practice of research in the arts consciously assumes this exploration. In the past decades the focus on research in the domain of the arts has grown – as well as its role in universities and other research contexts – expressing its engagement with the realities of the world at large.
In the Making will address how artists conduct their research. Guest artist researchers and artist researchers from Leiden University will present their projects, approaches to research, methods and results. Each session will address questions inherent to these projects. In the Making aims to deepen a perspective which conceives of artistic practice not as the sole product of individual visionaries but as a collective endeavor embedded in society. It addresses the role of art in the construction of the present and the creation of possible futures.
In the Making #6
Art Without Soul? Embodiment and Historical Performance
Modern performance critics often scorn nineteenth-century actors and musicians, assuming that because they placed emphasis on exaggerated shapes and gestures they were merely showboating — engaging in empty posturing — rather than performing from the soul. Treatises of the period, however, suggest that this visual and sonic hyper-physicality was the means by which these performers generated, channeled, and communicated emotion; that they understood their art as originating not from the soul but from the body. Engaging with these practices today, therefore, is a necessarily embodied rather than abstract, intellectual endeavor; one that handles the performing body (both past and present) as a rich, creative resource rather than a soulless distraction.