Doktorand: Tanja Hylling Diers
Who Cares? – An embodied practice of caring and listening
This research project seeks to investigate artistic processes in performantive projects involving lived experience set in a theatre institutional framing. The research evolves around how lived experiences are transformed into artistic material through a joined creative process involving non-artists with specific lived experiences and trained artists with a specific artistic skillset.
The project takes its departure from a dramaturgical practice that it seeks to expand and challenge through a socially engaged and ethically aware position mainly achieved from various listening practices such as Deep listening, carefull-listening and slow listening. This artistic practice is positioned in a sensitive field with many ethical dilemmas that this research projects meets with a practice-based approach.
In the artistic projects artists and non-artists work together in a creative process to make a performance. The collaboration between the two group and how the groups merge during the process affects the outcome of the joined work aesthetically and ethically. A main focus of this research is how listening and caring can function as tools to give more agency to the non-artist in the creative process based on their lived experiences. These collaborations have shown to be empowering for all involved, but only if power relations are managed attentively since lived experiences often are connected to traumatic experiences and vulnerable life conditions.
