Themes

The ATD Lectorate conducts values-led practice research in performance in three thematic areas:

Social justice, access

Climate, regeneration

Care, wellbeing, grief & loss

Entangled themes and intersectionality

Separating our research into three thematic lines helps to create structure and clarity. But at the same time, we see the themes as thoroughly entangled and are most interested in activities that allow us to investigate how they inform each other. As stated, our Lectorate takes an intersectional approach to social justice, based on the assumption that individuals and communities experience multiple overlapping forms of inequality and oppression and where forms of oppression are not considered as separately as single issues but as related to and implicated in one another. Our sense of the interconnectedness of these themes reflects this intersectional framework and polycrisis discourse that informs our vision.

For example, our work in the Climate Imaginaries research program is informed by a climate justice approach that emphasises how the unequal distribution of climate change effects reproduces systemic inequalities and foreground the importance of attending to colonialism as one of the root causes of climate crisis.

Likewise, The Grief Project is specifically concerned with grief from a social justice perspective: addressing how grief can be a shared phenomenon and a site of solidarity, but also highlighting the specificity and inequality of how grief manifests and is constituted by and for different bodies and groups, for instance as Black grief in the context of ongoing anti-Black violence.

Social justice, access

Taka Taka presenting his research on drag mothering at the THIRD Annual Forum 2023.

With this theme, the Lectorate contributes to a more just and access-centred society and working field by conducting research into, among other things, systems of oppression and exclusion within the arts.

This theme is explored in long-term research programs like Arts Beyond Ableism which investigates how to contribute to dismantling ableism and support the flourishing of disabled and neurodiverse ways of being and relating in the arts and arts education. It has also been investigated through shorter-term projects like the 2-year Erasmus+ project, Change Now! where the ATD was one of 5 European theatre schools who came together to explore power, oppression and equity in theatre education.

Projects and researchers give focus to particular perspectives grounded in the lived experience of belonging to different communities, foregrounding processes related to specific identity categories and engaging with distinct discourses, whilst maintaining an intersectional view. In this way, projects can be broadly grouped across the three subheadings of:

Anti-racism and Decoloniality - eg. Listening in Spiral Time; Somatic Laboratory; Performing Indigenous Knowledge;
Queer and trans* experience - eg. In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP); Drag Mothering as Pedagogy;
Disability and Neurodiversity - eg. Arts beyond Ableism - including shy*play, Interdependence and Dance beyond Ableism.

With this theme, our research has broadly three dimensions, with researchers often exploring how to strike a balance between: critical, creative and care work. In terms of criticality, we explore how artistic, creative and pedagogical practices in performance can contribute to dismantling systems that unfairly create, uphold and reproduce systemic inequities across categories of difference including race, gender, sexuality, disability, HIV status and species. In terms of creativity, we investigate the role of performance practices in “creating positive propositions” that forge “new and celebratory ways of relating to one another”, built on the value of difference (Taka-Taka, Professional Doctorate candidate). In terms of care, our research is fundamentally situated in researchers’ own participation in and care by/with/for the communities it relates to; researchers are not doing research about communities, but by/with/for them in ways that are inseparable from the mutual care work that comes with that embeddedness.

“Working under the creative conceptual frame: “End of violence, creation of joy,” we firmly believe, based on our firsthand experience, that drag activist practice is defined by creating positive propositions. It requires patience, repetition, and long-term commitment to experimentation, in order to facilitate a fertile ground for expanding knowledge and a greater capacity to existence in our society. We celebrate the personal urges, desires, and histories of the individual members, not just accepting but forging new and celebratory ways of relating to one another.” (Taka-Taka, Professional Doctorate candidate).

Climate, regeneration

Stefan Schafer Every Day is Earth Day when — You’re Dead — Every Day is Earth Day when — You’re Dead, Ok version, s†ëfΔ/\/ schäfer, 2024.

As a society, we are confronted with climate breakdown - rapid and irreversible damage to our planet’s climate and ecosystems - as an urgent, deeply complex reality with a long history. The devastating effects of the climate crisis impact people, non-human species and ecosystems unevenly, highlighting the disparities between those contributing to climate change and those most affected by it. Regeneration is about creating the conditions for life to flourish - both human and nonhuman (Benyus 2002). Reimagining our worldviews, perspectives and values through performance practices, we can establish a more regenerative and just coexistence with each other, with the broader spectrum of life, and ultimately with the world itself. Research in this area departs from the perspective that we need to move beyond a paradigm of sustainability - which implies maintaining the status quo - and to work towards regenerative one. In terms of climate, the regenerative paradigm moves away from the focus on “doing less bad” – eg. producing fewer emissions or waste, less energy use – and towards “doing more good” and the repair or reversal of past and ongoing harms. Whilst we connect regeneration to climate here, the regenerative is also about humans and their embeddedness in larger ecosystems - where regenerative systems are understood as those that renew, restore, repair, or otherwise revitalise their own materials and sources of energy, including people.

Under this theme, the research group wants to investigate what contribution artistic and creative methods can make to climate injustice, for example by telling different stories about the relationship between humans and other living organisms including those informed by the colonial past. This theme is explored in overarching research programs like Climate Imaginaries which includes: the Power of Water project investigating how participatory research can empower young people in Suriname, Curaçao and the Netherlands to exchange perspectives on climate change through spoken word and photography; Emilie Gallier’s project Gleaners and the Worms using artistic research to exploring how to imagine and embody regenerative ways of attending to and caring for soil and earthworms in dialogue with soil scientists, farmers and very young children; Stëfan Schäfer’s Professional Doctorate project Breaking Apart Together which uses a performance-informed speculative design approach to explore how to create new rituals for ecological grief with dying mountains and glaciers (2023-2027); and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca’s project Performance Philosophy and Animals (2019-ongoing) which investigates how performance can contribute to an epistemic shift in the ethics of knowledge production in relation to nonhuman animals, including the expanded publication project An [Interrupted] Bestiary and the edited book Interspecies Performance.

In future, we are looking forward to further embedding the project Regenerative Art Education led by our associate Lector Anthony Heidweiller into this thematic line - which explores how to nurture regenerative principles not only in education at the ATD but also to bring them into the national sector agenda for art education in the Netherlands. This takes place through Heidweiller’s leadership of the ongoing research into Regenerative Art Education within the Lifelong Learning working group of the Sector Advisory Board for Art Education (SAC-KUO).

Care, wellbeing, grief and loss

Under this theme, the Lectorate wants to bring a social justice, regenerative and more-than-human perspective to questions of care, wellbeing, grief and loss: themes that have come to the fore again in recent years due to the corona pandemic and the ongoing violence in multiple genocides and global conflicts. Care and wellbeing theme is primarily addressed through the ongoing research of the Health and Performance research group (H&P) which is gradually implementing a structural change towards a regenerative approach to student wellbeing across the ATD. As group lead and department head, Sofia Ornellas Pinto puts it:

“H&P research believes that a student that learns and thrives in an environment that privileges and prioritizes health and wellbeing, will bring that way of working to the professional field to their self-management and to the teams, institutions and communities that house them. We also believe our work ripples through and contributes to elevate standards and concepts of care in a sector where the professional artist navigates an often precarious way of living; where healthcare practitioners have little affinity with the lived body; and where occupational and behavioral discomfort and pain are too rapidly medicalized”.

(Sofia Ornellas Pinto, Self-evaluation 2024).

Grief and loss are addressed in The Grief Project through which a transdisciplinary research group took a social justice approach to investigate how artistic and creative practices can support diverse groups to be-with and learn from (rather than seeking to overcome) grief and loss, culminating in a week-long grief space and event series in Research Month and a multimedia journal issue: With the Dead edited by the Lector and Rajni Shah with our US-based partner Will Daddario: a clinical mental health counselor, performance philosopher and clinical addictions specialist at Nova Transformations in Matthews, North Carolina. Research in this theme also includes the ongoing On Grief and Death strand of the THIRDtalks platform and a small-scale collaboration with alumni of the Bachelors Theatre in Education, Chaja van Kollem inviting them to residency to continue their performance research into putting on clothes of deceased loved ones and setting up a Grief Group for ATD students in collaboration with H&P research. Future planned projects include the Skeletjes project of Dwayne Toemere and his ongoing research into mourning within Indigenous Surinamese culture, investigating how rituals and traditions surrounding grief and loss can support healing and well-being, both individually and collectively.