Inside out - pilot project
Inside out will be a performative installation involving the audience as co-creators of the event. This interdisciplinary project is based on Karolina Bieszczad-Stie’s PhD on Butoh dance photography, and uses studies on consciousness to share with the audience the multi-modal experience of a dance photographer as an alternative to photographs. The project challenges the context in which the artwork is created by allowing participants to become artistic collaborators, performers and, finally, content in a digitally mediated work.
In the pilot project Karolina and Void's team focused on finding new ways of engaging the audience in a Butoh performance, where the public’s experience is part of the art itself.
The starting point was Karolina’s PhD research conducted over 10 years ago, in which she examined the Butoh dance photographer’s experience as a performance. She studied a split of a second when the photographer releases the shutter (takes a picture) and their consciousness/ subconsciousness in that very moment. She described this act as a multi-modal pre-thought gesture that “performs”, i.e. changes the encounter between the photographer and the Butoh dancer into what she called “a photo-performance”.
By its nature, the photo-performance can only be experienced by the photographers themselves and cannot be shared with others simultaneously as it happens due to its experiential exclusiveness and liveness. In this pilot project, however, we explored ways to create an event from which the audience will emerge. We took this self-exploration process as well as photo-performance aesthetics developed in Karolina’s thesis, a step further in order to pin down a possibility of placing the audience in a similar context to that of a Butoh photographer.
The pilot project will be further developed into a full scale production in the future.
Director: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie
Creative collaborator: Void
Visuals: Void
Photo: Joanna Helander
March - September 2020
Oslo, Norway
Funded by:
Kulturrådet