What Makes us Act? On the Potentials of Exercises in Live Art Education and Performances

Abstract

This thesis is focusing on the exercise as an event in live art, participatory art and live art education. The thesis looks at the potential of exercises to facilitate for an inclusive space and the unknown future. The thesis consists of four peer-reviewed published articles and a summary article (“kappe” in Norwegian). The studies are practice-led research, using a diffractive analysis, based on the authors performances, live installations, workshops and teaching within live art. This thesis, as well as the artistic practice, is interdisciplinary. It lies at the intersections between artistic practice and research, performance studies, art pedagogy and post qualitative inquiry, drawing from a theoretical framework of posthumanism and new materialism, more specifically agential realism. The special interest here is in what way exercises can be active agents and operate as part of a complex landscape in intra-action with the surroundings to initiate action, meanings, knowledge and questioning. The thesis shows how the material-discursive exercises are performative agents that are in intra-action with the environment in multiple ways, and that what an exercise can be is manifold. The different studies emphasise performative agents, such as place/site, audience, performer, embodiment, formulation, materiality/performance objects, time, social media, multiplicity and affect.

By being aware of the complex process regarding how the entities are organised, how the exercises are mediated and how they might intra-act, it is possible to accommodate an event, which can lead to a space for participation, inclusion, diversity, and unpredictability. The exercises have potentials for imagining and creating new realities and can contribute to the continuous development of live art and its pedagogy. Keywords: intra-action, exercises, performance art, live art, pedagogy, participation, artistic research, future practice, unpredictability