Theatre Academy

Designers and creative artists often have highly personal experiences of intuition in their creative process. Such experiences may feel extraordinary to designers, who have a great difficulty explaining the experiences. These experiences offer useful insights into the workings of personal creative intuition. However, it is common that these experiences are brushed aside as irrelevant. Alternatively, when such experiences are dealt with, they are sometimes over-fitted to various models with the purpose of validation/invalidation. Based on the authors experience in coaching creativity for designers, interviews with designers, and a survey of intuition literature, we propose a way to legitimize highly personal intuition experiences through the use of stories. In addition, we introduce alternative intuition models from the non-scientific literature for helping make sense of extraordinary experiences. We comment on their usefulness in understanding intuitive experience on personal level....

Introduction During the past decades the Pilates Method has become a widely popular exercise form throughout the Western world. The method has been hailed as an exceptionally refined and therapeutic functional bodywork approach and its founder Joseph Pilates has been ...

This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student's writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process-involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse

This article contemplates how the cultivation of breath through specific body awareness techniques might be understood to support a dialogical and ethical relatedness between collaborators constructing a performance through an open-ended process. The article introduces a teaching experiment based mainly upon exercises drawn from strands of body psychotherapy that took place within a larger experimental and cross-artistic workshop and performance project. This project aimed at enhancing the collaborative, creative, and critical skills of MA students in dance and theatre pedagogy of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. The article discusses the overall artistic project as well as the kind of bodywork the teaching experiment involved, and it makes a phenomenologically oriented reading of the written interview material gathered from the students. The specific theoretical perspective taken on the topic draws from two phenomenologically inspired thinkers, namely, Lu...

This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student’s writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process – involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse William J D...

Designers and creative artists often have highly personal experiences of intuition in their creative process. Such experiences may feel extraordinary to designers, who have a great difficulty explaining the experiences. These experiences offer useful insights into the workings of personal creative intuition. However, it is common that these experiences are brushed aside as irrelevant. Alternatively, when such experiences are dealt with, they are sometimes over-fitted to various models with the purpose of validation/invalidation. Based on the authors experience in coaching creativity for designers, interviews with designers, and a survey of intuition literature, we propose a way to legitimize highly personal intuition experiences through the use of stories. In addition, we introduce alternative intuition models from the non-scientific literature for helping make sense of extraordinary experiences. We comment on their usefulness in understanding intuitive experience on personal level....

During the past decades the Pilates Method has become a widely popular exercise form throughout the Western world. The method has been hailed as an exceptionally refined and therapeutic functional bodywork approach and its founder Joseph Pilates has been deemed to be almost like a self-made genius, a man way ahead of his time (Ahonen, 2007; Putkisto, 2001). As a dancer, dance teacher, Pilates instructor and scholar with experience of diverse

Somatics is a field of practice that consists of approaches to bodywork that aim at psycho-physical integration and enhance the well-being of an individual. This is mainly done through appreciating the first-person perspective on the body. Don Hanlon Johnson (1995; 1994) suggests that, in the Europe and North America of the 20th century, the evolvement of diverse somatic practices could be viewed as a historical movement of its own. The inter-links that the Pilates Method has with this movement are not generally known. Joseph Pilates created an exercise method that he himself called Contrology during the early and mid 20th century, while working both in Germany and the United States. This paper delineates the evolution of Contrology by linking it to the German Body Culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In so doing, it suggests that, while promoting especially functional and aesthetic efficacy of human movement, the Pilates Method shares historical roots with the somatic...

This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student's writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process-involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse

Opinnäytetutkimuksen tehtävänä on saada tietoa onnistumis- ja epäonnistumiskokemuksien syntymekanismeista, jotta ne tulevat tilanteissa tunnistetuiksi. Saamalla lisää tietoa onnistumis- ja epäonnistumiskokemuksen synnystä, teatteriopettaja voi kehittää itseään ja harjoittamaansa teatteritaidetta. Kysymys on: Mitä onnistumis- ja epäonnistumiskokemus tarkoittaa ja miten ne syntyvät oppimisessa, yksilössä ja ryhmässä?
Tämä opinnäyte on luokkahuonetutkimus, jossa on toiminta- ja tapaustutkimuksen piirteitä. Tutkimuksen menetelminä käytin havainnointia opetustilanteissa ja teemahaastattelua. selventääkseni ryhmän jäsenten välisiä suhteita ja taustoittaakseni ja asettamalla johonkin suhteeseen havaintojani, toteutin sosiometrisen analyysin, joka pohjautui haastatteluvastauksiin.
Keskeisimmät aineiston käsittelystä nousevat aiheet koskevat tunteita, sillä haastateltavat luonnehtivat onnistumista ja epäonnistumista tunteiksi ja ”fiiliksiksi”, ja päiväkirjamerkinnnöissä on paljon tunteiden ja tunneilmapiirin kuvauksia. Epäonnistumisen tunne, joka siis jossakin tilanteessa syttyy, vahvistuu tunteen herättävien tilanteiden toistuessa ja alkaa tunnepuuskaa miedompana mutta pitkäkestoisempana elää tappiomielialana. Mikäli epäonnistumiskokemuksen käsittelytaidot ovat heikot, pääsee epäonnistumisen tunne syöpymään luonnetyypiksi. Sama kehityskulku pätee tietenkin myös onnistumisen tunteeseen; onnistumiskokemus toistuessaan vahvistaa optimistista mielialaa. Opettaja toimii sosioemotionaalisena mallina ja hänen opettajan velvollisuudekseen piirtyi tehtävä opettaa käsittelemään kokemuksia, tunnistamaan ja erittelemään tuntemuksia ja ymmärtämään niitä. Kokemusten käsittely (reflektio) tapahtui tässä tutkimusryhmässä jatkuvana asenteiden vihjevirtana toiminnassa, jossa opettaja oli erityistarkkailussa.

The transition to a freelance employment policy from permanent working contracts has had various repercussions on artistic practices in Finnish theatres. This article examines the changes that have taken place in the working culture of statutory funded institutional theatre since the early 1990s, focusing on the shifting roles and positions of directors, dramaturges, producers, and artistic managers. The research material consists of theatre statistics, interviews, and public discussions in the theatre field presented mainly in trade magazines and seminar minutes. Although the theatres still have a significant number of permanently employed artists, the percentage of short-term visits has steadily increased. This goes especially for directors and dramaturges, who mainly focus only on their own productions and do not participate in the long-term development of the theatres' repertoires or artistic strategies as a whole. It is hard to create ongoing ensemble work and a spirit of a working community when a significant part of the artistic staff keeps constantly changing. In small and medium-sized theatres, the managers are now responsible for the artistic leadership without any collegial support of permanently engaged directors and dramaturges. They usually have to direct plays or undertake dramaturgical work without compensation, even if they do not have a proper education or experience in that field. In the changing economic conditions, the role of a producer has gained importance in planning and leading theatre activities and production work. This puts more emphasis on organizational, financial, and marketing issues than previously. Current priorities are now focussed on a high standard of artistic programming and the nurturing of public interest.

The Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars has increased its activity remarkably during the past year and the journal has gained more visibility since its transition to online open access. In 2017, NTS was selected for inclusion in Web of Science and Scopus as well as Ebsco and Google Scholar. The special number of Nordic Theatre Studies, "Turning Points and Continuity", based on a research project at Stockholm University, was published at the end of December 2017. The conference proceedings of "Theatre and the Popular" came out only two months later in February 2018. Two more issues are already in process: the proceedings of the conference "Rethinking Theatre" arranged by Aarhus University in May 2017, and "Theatre and Continental Philosophy", based on an open call. The fifth annual conference, co-arranged by a Nordic or Baltic university in collaboration with ANTS, took place in Kaunas 26.-28.4.2018 under the theme "Theatre and Memory Wars". The association has even more ambitious visions for the future. Discussions are ongoing about how it could take a more active role in facilitating scholarly networking and research collaboration between Nordic and Baltic countries. The intention is to develop websites into a joint platform for sharing information and mapping the situation of theatre and performance studies at the universities in the region. The older back issues, which are available only in printed form, need to be digitalized as soon as possible. Yet, all these efforts depend on funding, which has become increasingly hard to gain as the current systems of assessment are often unfavourable for small disciplines Theatre and Money