Public defence

Public defence: Brynjar Åbel Bandlien

The public defence will take place on ZOOM between 12:00–15:00 on April 21.
Zoom registration here

Brynjar Åbel Bandlien is a Ph.D.-candidate at Oslo National Academy of Arts, Academy of Dance.

Brynjar Åbel Bandlien: My research project aims to articulate and develop a performative practice that I have been working on over the last fifteen years. This practice can be applied to artistic processes within the field of dance and dance making.

When a creative process is fully underway, certain situations, events, actions, movements, and states can be recognized as recurrent within the process. Recurrences, rather than being created or produced, manifest or emerge from the dancer´s practice. Once they have been recognized they can be understood and pursued as a forming aspect of artistic processes.

The artistic aim has been to follow, participate, co-create and navigate in artistic processes using recurrences. The performative practice of recurrences is articulated by the presentations of #dancingrecurrences and the reflection materials of my dissertation.

My two research questions are:
How can the practice of recurrences become a way to understand artistic work as it develops?
How can working with recurrences become both a performative practice within artistic processes and an artistic work in and of itself?

I have been researching these questions from the position of a dancer, and I have asked these questions in different ways; through dance, through drawing and by interviewing other artists, dancers and dance makers. I have initiated my own research process; #dancingrecurrences, together with four other dancer researchers, starting from practice and from there moving on to reflection. I approach recurrences both as a practice and a reflection, with the assumption that within a dancer´s practice the mind and body are so deeply connected that they cannot be considered separately. Reflection is a physical process as well as a mental one, and practice is a conceptualization process as well as a physical activity.

At the same time as I have been researching these questions on my own, they have also been explored following the artistic processes of the project Amphibious Trilogies by Amanda Steggell, professor of choreography at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). This makes the project an interesting collaboration both structurally and in content. However, in the final presentation of my work the focus will be on Dancing Recurrences and #dancingrecurrences.

The performative practice has resulted in three public presentations at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in the end of November 2019 and a final publication of my reflections written in three volumes consisting of texts, drawings and interviews informed by the artistic processes.

The appraisal committee: Rolf Hughes, Sophia Lycouris og Scott deLaHunta.

The Viva Voce will be held in English.

KHIODA