The artistic research group Performance Practice in Perspective (UP) is all about performing music and drama. By performing we mean playing existing scores or texts, improvising, reconstructing, creating while playing. In short, our research centres on all possible implications of acting artistically, as a creative and performative act.
What happens while you play?
What is performing?
In what context do you find yourself as a performing artist?
How do you relate to the past and present?
To your fellow players, your audience, the score or text?
How do you deal with your instrument, your voice, your body?
What kind of sound do you want to create?
What is the message you want to convey?
The research can focus on performance practice in the different disciplines, but can also involve interdisciplinary cooperation. Since it largely takes place at the Arts Campus in Antwerp (a synergy of the Royal Conservatoire and deSingel), research, education, and performance are closely related. This reflection creates new dynamics in art education, and contributes to critical and innovative artistry. Collaboration with partners outside the Conservatory opens up the boundaries even more, and confronts the obtained experiences with the realities of the "stage" and the wider arts field.
Through our daily activities, the annual UPday, the publication series “UPschrifts”, and the UPletter, our dynamic group of young and experienced artistic researchers is further developing and expanding. Our task is to stimulate, support, inform, connect, and embed.
Artistic research is the forefront, today’s avant-garde, the place where everything is possible, where everything still has to be invented, the breeding ground for tomorrow. It creates openings, new places, a utopia. It broadens and deepens artistic visions. We are proud that we can contribute to this, and help realize dreams.
For the current policy period (2021-23), we want to cultivate the theme of polyphony with UP. It is our aim to be(come) and remain an every more diverse and polyphonic research group. Polyphony is a research line, but above all a source of inspiration for existing and future artistic research projects. Beyond and besides obvious (quite literal) musical implications, it manifests itself as a "strong" and "weak" theme at the same time. As a "strong" theme, regarding subject and method it can be (in a broad sense or quasi-metaphorically) about creating space for expression for a diversity of (sometimes underexposed or suppressed) voices and perspectives. The result can be harmonious, but also "concerting" or even “dissonant”. As a “weak” theme, it reflects de facto the diversity of current and new UP projects.
Focus: Performance practice, music, stage arts
Team: Eugeen Schreurs (chairman music) and Clara van den Broek (chairwoman drama), Liselotte Sels (coordinator), Frank Agsteribbe (inspirer)
Contact: Liselotte Sels - Liselotte.sels@ap.be
