Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges
Research Project by Saul Garcia Lopez aka La Saula
Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges is a three year project of transnational artistic residencies and workshops. Co-creation, performative exchange and relational aesthetics aim to create transgenerational works as a practical dialogue sharing and contesting knowledges.
How can artistic research in performance art transmit, question and share artistic legacies?
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How can performance knowledges from different geographies, indigenous and otherwise, coexist and co-create across bodies, materials and spaces?
​What strategies contest the generational and cultural isolation between performance artists of newer and older generations?​
This research includes embodied conversations and storytelling as co-creative performance art actions between elder, researcher, students and community. Each method from one elder artist is woven by the researcher into the next, forming a chain between all the participants. Tensions arise between artists' lives and their geographies, questioning performance art methods and futures. The artistic results will include diverse performative elements: podcasts, photo performances, living artifacts or props, costumes, prose, performance actions. The project concludes by curating a pedagogical handbook and a final exhibition of the chain of practices.
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These elders have transformed more than one generation of practitioners across national borders. Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a Chicano border theorist and indigenous artist working with the hybridity of language, installation art, video, and the spoken word; Varste Mathæussen, an Inuit actress and master of mask dance; Ron Athey, a queer performance artist associated with extreme body art; Annie M. Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artists and radical sex educators; and Geir Tore Holm, a Sami interdisciplinary artist whose projects question land use and ecology. They represent 20th century performance legacies from different geographies: Norwegian Sami, Mexico, USA and Greenland.
Activities
Radical Elders: Transgenerational Performance Knowledges places the methodological legacies of five elder radical performance artists into a series of practical dialogues. Five international performance art residencies and additional seminars on creative methods, cultural tensions and material practices inform this encounter of indigenous and other performance artists, resulting in a living exhibition and published handbook.
Performative Encounters / Activities
7 - 17 November 2022
Oaxaca City and Mexico City
Volume 2
Transiting the borders of time
with Guillermo Gomez-Peña
12 - 19 September 2023
Virtual and Norwegian Theatre Academy
Volume 3
Transgenerational Knowledges Summit With Radical Elders
with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Varste Mathæussen and Geir Tore Holm
25 February 2024
Østfold Internasjonale Teater
Volume 4
Intergenerational Academia Summit
with NTA Alumni Forum
11 - 15 March 2024
Geir Tore Holm´s farm and Norwegian Theatre Academy
Volume 5
Farming and hospitality as transgenerational contemplations and cultivation
with Geir Tore Holm
5 April 2024
Carmen's Home
Volume 6
Transnational, translingual, transatlantic, transgenerational nourishment ritual
with Sueli Carnerio, Carmen & Liv Solvik
7 June 2024
Porsgrunn International Theatre Festival at Grenland Friteater
Volume 7
Legacy: For the Chosen Ones or for all?
with elders from Odin Teatret, Gob Squad, Grenland Friteater and Verdens Teatret
11 September 2024
Volume 8
Radical Elders Sharing Across Borders
Seminar curated by FutureBrownSpace.
16 - 22 of September 2024
Svalbard
Artic Action Festival
Volume 9
COMING SOON
More details coming soon
30 Sep - 11 Oct 2024
Norwegian Theatre Academy, Fredrikstad
Volume 10
COMING SOON
with Ron Athey
22 - 25 October 2024
PKU Seminar
Trondheim
Volume 11
COMING SOON
More details coming soon