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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on fieldwork with actors and directors, for whom the role of chance was pivotal to creative production in theatre. I herein theorise the seeming oxymoron of what it means to 'rehearse serendipity'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on fieldwork with actors and directors, for whom the role of chance was pivotal to creative production in theatre. I herein theorise the seeming oxymoron of what it means to 'rehearse serendipity'.

For several years, I have accompanied German, Italian, and migrant theatre makers who worked in an idiosyncratic post-migrant theatre in Germany's Western industrial region. Their work has been characterized by a strange paradox: on the one hand, they were preoccupied with the power of improvisation and even adhered to a dogma that was frequently reiterated among interlocutors: 'directing theatre is to allow for serendipity'. On the other hand, the ensemble of actors and directors was particularly concerned with questions of habitus, propriety, and order; the director could be described as a charismatic authority and rehearsals were technically and socially extremely routinised spaces and modi of creative production. How then, can we theorise the rupturing potential of serendipity in a context that is not everyday but highly professional, neither free-flowing improvisation nor mere rule adherence, but defined by a belief in the capacity to rehearse chance, to create the conditions for serendipity. Drawing on fieldwork examples from many rehearsals that I observed, described, and analysed with the director, actors, and other members of the theatre ensemble, I seek to theorise the exceptionality of chance, serendipity, and the unexpected in professional performance creation.

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Paper short abstract:

1948 Palestinians' experiences of contemporary dance can be times when they reaffirm their national belonging. In a context in which they are excluded from the nation, specific dance events and practice connect them to their fellow countrymen and shape their body experience itself.

Paper long abstract:

By the emotions it generates and by the imaginations it conveys, dance is a strong social lubricant and participates in constructing national and transnational belongings. Moreover, in situations of displacement, dance practice appears to be a tool of identity (re)affirmation (Gibert 2007) and constitute a link between people through space and time. Even though this link is often build on continuous and long term involvement, some experiences, whether physical, aesthetical, or even social, can act as turning points in individuals' lives. This is the case for some of the Palestinian dancers based in Israel I met during my ongoing PhD research on Palestinian contemporary dance. My contribution focuses the experiences of contemporary dance practice of these 1948' Palestinians, understood as times when they reaffirm their national belonging. In a context in which these actors are administratively and geographically excluded from the nation (Maira & Shihade 2012), diverse dance events - such as creation processes, performances or the singing of the national anthem in a festival opening - appear to be life-changing moments. Building on participant observation in the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival and on interviews lead with Palestinian and European dance actors, I show how these exceptional experiences connect 1948 Palestinians with their fellow countrymen from the West bank and make them participate to a transnational solidarity network for Palestinian struggle. These moments have long-term consequences, as they shape the dancers social and political commitments. They also change the dancers' body experience itself, binding physicality and connection to the land.

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This paper is building around a series of key ethnographic moments during the rehearsal of a contemporary opera. The visual storytelling of the creation process will be intertwined with a commentary on the conduciveness of epiphanies on the team, on the singers, and on my documentation methods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is building around a series of key ethnographic moments during the rehearsal of the Parsifal staged by Jonathan Meese in 2017. Attending and assisting to the creative process of a prominent visual and performance artist over more than three years, documenting and experiencing the complex interactions of the experimented team around him, I took part in regular bouts of collective epiphanies. The rehearsal in Vienna was the peak time of the creative dispositive that was crystallized around the artist. Analyzing the key features of this generative constellation of actors consisted most crucially in finding out how those moments were sparked and sustained — in particular how the artist and his entourage were modulating the volume of his presence and how he would let the work unfold around the meeting tables, during various artistic interventions and on the rehearsal stage.

Affected by this atmosphere - and by the temporality of the rehearsal process -, my ethnographic method underwent a considerable change as I started introducing to my field notes drawings and watercolors. These drawings complemented the usual writing and photography, which, I found out, were not as efficient in order to capture those fleeting and singular moments. This epistemological epiphany should, I believe, be attributed to the atmosphere pertaining to this artistic production setting. During the presentation, the visual storytelling of the rehearsal/creation process of the opera in Vienna will be intertwined with a commentary of the conduciveness of epiphanies on the production team, on the singers, as well as on the documentation methods of the ethnographer.

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This paper explores transformative exceptional experiences of art: Patricia Hampl describes in her memoir, how she was "stopped" by a painting, "hammered by the image." An anthropological understanding of such experiences accentuates the role of serendipity in social life and anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

In her memoir Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, Patricia Hampl describes how she was late to a meeting with a friend in the cafeteria of the Chicago Art Institute, running through gallery after gallery without looking at the paintings: "Then, unexpectedly, several galleries shy of my destination, I came to a halt before a large, rather muddy painting in a heavy gold-colored frame, a Matisse labeled Femme et poissons rouges, rendered in English, Woman Before an Aquarium. But that's wrong: I didn't halt, didn't stop. I was stopped. Apprehended, even." Hampl did not have an interest in the arts. Yet she was "hammered by the image." How did this happen? This paper explores transformative exceptional experiences of art. As such experiences are affective, I suggest that two qualities are necessary for them to take place: recognition in the story of a piece of art and discovery in its form such as a new colour or surface. There was a recognition for Hampl in the gaze of the woman in the painting. The story of the image made Hampl aware of her unsettled status as a recent college graduate, but it was the special blue colour of the screen that suggested a world behind it, one of splendour. This was a liberation for her, indicating her way forward as a creative writer. An anthropological understanding of exceptional experiences of art accentuates different anthropological writing genres, methodological eclecticism, and the role of serendipity in social life and anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents the author's encounter with unanticipated incidents, out of the stream of chronological professional realia, that have challenged his perception and belief about the moral order of professional ethics, ethnographic reporting principles, and collegial communication.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents the author's encounter with unanticipated incidents, out of the stream of chronological professional realia, that affected his perception and belief about the ethics, methodology, and the interpretation of ethnographic observations. These experiential moments also raised some qualms about the norms of collegial communication. In particular, our discussion depicts the discourse concerning contradictory versions reporting on social-political conflicts in the society under study; the association and relevance of the ethnographer's national identity; the terms of personal communication between anthropologists exposing different viewpoints on ethnographic presentations or support conflicting political sentiments on wider world affairs. And last, reporting on impromptu circumstances engaging the anthropologist in mini-ethnographic ventures that lead to issues of wider social-cultural significance.

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An anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on their extraordinary collaboration in the making of the graphic book, "Light in Dark Times." The presentation illuminates a way of connecting with multiple audiences by engaging multimodal forms knowledge production and dissemination.

Paper long abstract:

In this joint presentation, an anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on aspects of their extraordinary collaboration in the making of "Light in Dark Times," their forthcoming graphic book rooted in nonfiction and comprised of fictionalized encounters with writers, philosophers, activists and anthropologists. A highly creative and intellectual endeavor, the production of this graphic book results from a series of interconnected, decades-long discussions in anthropology about "writing culture," the politics of representation, ways to demonstrate the relevance of the discipline to real-world concerns, and how to take advantage of multimodal formats to produce, disseminate and receive knowledge. In this presentation, the artist and the author describe the process of their artistic creation comprising place, space, dialogue, words, writing, sketching and illustrating in an exceptional experiment in art, aesthetics and anthropology. Their presentation itself conveys their dynamic as Waterston and Hollands discuss how working together on this project surfaced key understandings of social life. The final product is a graphic book that is aesthetically beautiful with a powerful story. Designed to reach multiple audiences from social science and humanities students to graphic novel and comix readers, the book conveys the drama of the world in dark times and difficult circumstances even as it reveals spaces of excitement and hope. The reflections on the production process in this presentation provide insight into new ways of communicating anthropological understanding, of engaging multimodal forms of anthropological knowledge production and dissemination, and of connecting with multiple audiences.

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In this paper I outline a fresh approach to writing about live arts-based events that is designed to capture the cultural value of participation: experiential literary ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

In the course of my research into live literature, I developed an experiential and literary approach to ethnography that is designed to capture the cultural value of participation in live literature and other arts-based events. In this paper I will introduce the approach, discuss how it evolved, and outline its potential application in other contexts.

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In drawing on arts-based experimentation inspired by concrete poetry and Fluxus I I explore if and how an imagistic modes of showing can assist us in mediating that which we experience as exceptional. This imaginistic mode will simultaneously relate to and depart from Johnson's novel Jahrestage.

Paper long abstract:

For me, reading Uwe Johnson's four-volume novel Jahrestage constituted an exceptional process and event. There was the excitement of his stylistic experimentation with narrative form, vernacular speech, continuously shifting temporal perspectives, and - perhaps paradoxically - commitment to the reality of fiction. Yet there was also the ability to create what I think of as ancillary memory: a form of memory marked by the ability to move readers beyond the "singular vision" (Hirsch) of always already existent understandings and explanations. This ability was important to me because in 1953 my grandparents, mother, and aunt had fled from the East German Republic. In 1956, Johnson also fled. For all of them, the GDR remained a ghostly reference point. Yet Johnson's experimentations opened up a way to experience the various political and cultural layers of their life in exceptional ways.

In drawing on arts-based experimentation inspired by concrete poetry and Fluxus I I explore if and how an imagistic modes of showing can assist us in mediating that which we experience as exceptional. Exceptional experiences are intensely bodily and deep. In concretely layering fragments of Johnson's writing with paintings, photographs, and other texts that mnemotically and imaginistically attach themselves to scenes from Johnson's Jahrestage, I seek to convey the physicality of the exceptional experience: the jolt - the body's throbbing and pulsations, ecstasies of the mind - that happens when reading Johnson. I also explore a possible mode of ethnographic thinking and description that does not necessarily seek to unearth meaning.

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Paper short abstract:

Examining two unexpected moments from a six-month theatre-making process with British Muslim youth in Manchester in late 2017, this paper highlights negotiations of British Muslimness, masculinity, and marginality, rendering the theatre workshop a respite from dominating sociopolitical realities.

Paper long abstract:

Devised theatre often seeks to create new performance based on the experiences of collaborating participants. Yet, it also results in unexpected moments that are tangential to the desired creative product. These unexpected moments tend to be cast aside in artistic creation, but they can be the heartbeat of ethnographic inquiry. Attending to such so-called "affective residue" (Cavanagh, 2013: 287) can offer insights into the social worlds of the individuals being worked with, and ultimately into the communities from which they hail. To that end, this paper draws on a six-month theatre-making process with British Muslim youth in Manchester in late 2017. It focuses on two such unexpected moments from a workshop early in the process. Coming back-to-back and instigated by a single male collaborator, these moments gesture to the different ways that theatre-making workshops can be a respite from reality. Indeed, each moment related to a problematic sociopolitical narrative with which British Muslim young men are associated: "conservative cultural politics" and "extremism" (Bayat and Herrera, 2010: 4). Yet in both cases, the incidents demonstrate how collaborators saw the workshop as a negotiated and relational space of relief from these overwhelming sociopolitical narratives -- a counterpublic space of "withdrawal and regroupment" (Fraser, 1990: 68) -- perhaps because the more "dramatic" narrative was being played out in the contemporary British public sphere. Ultimately, attending to these two unexpected moments highlights the social and interpersonal ways in which British Muslimness, masculinity, and marginality were negotiated in a community-based process of ethnographic theatre making.