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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 

10 - 16 October 2022

Norwegian Theatre Academy

Volume 1

Mask Dance as trangenerational interface

with Varste M. Mathæussen

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

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