The First Week at School

I am start­ing the first new series in A Mem­o­ry Lane to Ana­lyze the Phys­i­cal­i­ty. It is about the stud­ies I’ll do at Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts. More details of the study project here.

Start­ing the School series will con­cen­trate on shar­ing my begin­ning at Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts. I feel like that will be theme of at least the first few months, maybe the whole autumn. For a two-year pro­gram I won­der when it feels like I am actu­al­ly not “start­ing” any­more, but final­ly “doing” and “fin­ish­ing”. Most like­ly there will be anoth­er series when I have got over the first impressions. 

This post here is about my first school week. I tell what all hap­pened, and my per­son­al thoughts on it. In this post I con­cen­trate on the Start of the Autumn Term pro­gram and to the intro­duc­tion lessons that we got about the first actu­al course of the program.

Experiencing the First Week of School! 

I came to Stock­holm a week before the cours­es actu­al­ly began. I did this to have time to land to the city (as you might know: I believe to reserv­ing time to the process­es), and to par­tic­i­pate to the week-long Start of Autumn 2023 Pro­gram.

The intro week was fas­ci­nat­ing in many ways. I felt like it was an ease­ful way to briefly con­nect with oth­er per­form­ing arts stu­dents. I did also have time to rumi­nate all the infor­ma­tion I got and to inter­nal­ize it to some degree. I met the per­son­nel which felt nice: learned some of their names, roles, research areas and short glimpses to their per­son­al­i­ty. Now I have also my keys, know how to access the library and found out some ways on how to orga­nize food dur­ing the school days. The first week was a very suc­cess­ful week already with all the ‘soft’ infor­ma­tion I got!

Besides these per­son­al by-prod­ucts of the week, we had actu­al pro­gram dur­ing the week.

Intro Monday

Mon­day start­ed with a wel­com­ing speech by the vice-chan­cel­lor Paula Crab­tree. Fol­low­ing them a cir­cus artist and one of the doc­tor­al can­di­dates, Erik Åberg.

After the speech­es we got to learn a bit of the dif­fer­ent depart­ments, stu­dent unions and research depart­ment in prac­tice: a few tasters of the cur­rent works-in-pro­gress­es at dif­fer­ent depart­ments, I under­stood. The thing that I remem­ber best was the prin­ci­ples behind the work of the research depart­men­t’s doc­tor­al can­di­date Hen­drik Quast. They work with per­form­ers with and top­ics of chron­ic ill­ness­es. This top­ic was some­thing I am con­sid­er­ing with my own MA research project about phys­i­cal­i­ty. I could do well to remem­ber to fol­low Hen­drik’s work dur­ing the next few years, that is.

Tuesday

Tues­day was a day when we had our first actu­al les­son: an online lec­ture. After the morn­ing les­son, the after­noon pro­gram was two pre­sen­ta­tions about Equal Con­di­tions. First pre­sen­ta­tion was by Fri­da Wettmark. Then we had a stage deep­er ele­men­tary lev­el dis­cus­sion about racism lead by the uni­ver­si­ty’s advi­sor Anna Adeni­ji. I do under­stand that with this large a group we have to keep the train­ing at a very basic lev­el, and I still felt like there is an inten­tion for the uni­ver­si­ty to grow. As anti-racism is one of the Core Val­ues of IDC, I am glad that there might be oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­tin­ue the work also at this university. 

Wednesday

Wednes­day was short­er day focus­ing on the prac­ti­cal­i­ties and dif­fer­ent par­ti­tions of the orga­ni­za­tion. Besides the depart­ments of edu­ca­tion, there are report­ing struc­tures and oth­er prac­ti­cal stuff. 

Thursday

The intro week’s Thurs­day was a long day. It com­bined anoth­er online les­son, and then… a four-hour set of lec­tures, pre­sen­ta­tions and final­ly a film.

The lec­ture was giv­en by a social antrophol­o­gist, schol­ar of reli­gion and pub­lic speak­er Bri­an Palmer. It con­sist­ed of exam­ples on how art might let us sit with huge top­ics. The tools of humour and beau­ty might even help sit with things like the loom­ing nuclear dis­as­ter. After that would have been the lec­ture by Char­lie Åström, but it was sad­ly cancelled.

After Bri­an’s lec­ture I had to take a per­son­al half-an-hour meet­ing for an upcom­ing Union event I am orga­niz­ing, so I missed part of the next pro­gram. When I came back to the lec­ture hall, I learned about the sys­tem cre­at­ed by researcher Lina Pers­son and pro­duc­er Lena Kempe. The sys­tem was a won­der­ful new online tool to esti­mate a film pro­duc­tion’s car­bon foot­print, Elsa.film. I did get an intu­itive par­al­lel with EU-wide OIRA, that helps to plan the risk assess­ments of the pro­duc­tion. I feel like the impacts on well-being and envi­ron­ment are some­thing that we should always con­sid­er as respon­si­ble peo­ple work­ing on per­form­ing arts, and not mere­ly the cold, hard bud­gets of money.

After the lec­ture, we watched a film, After Work, which was a many-sided pre­sen­ta­tion around the idea of work. 

Friday

Fri­day was a day off, when I sat down to write the first draft of this post, and took my time to rest. I also got an idea that I should be actu­al­ly write some­thing about the prac­ti­cal arrange­ments. I am try­ing to be quite eth­i­cal here while bal­anc­ing the life neces­si­ties, my acces­si­bil­i­ty needs and fol­low­ing a very strict stu­dent bud­get. I am also quite curi­ous how these dif­fer­ent aspects of sus­tain­abil­i­ty will affect my work with­in my degree project. 

The First Course during the First Week

The first course we have is called Bod­i­ly and Vocal Prac­tices in the Per­form­ing Arts. We did go through the syl­labi, course plans, and study guide­lines for the course. We went through the elec­tron­ic libraries full of lit­er­a­ture, per­for­mance record­ings and oth­er won­der­ful mate­r­i­al we can use to do our future research. I felt that the ref­er­ence guides will help me to make even this blog clear­er: cur­rent­ly these are my own thoughts, but in the future, I plan to tell more of what has been done, and then I feel like refer­ring in a smart way might be a necessity.

We also got an inter­est­ing prepa­ra­tion task around map­ping our prac­tices that I will be telling more later.

Learning Outcomes

As a teacher, I was very inter­est­ed in the quick­ly-men­tioned learn­ing out­comes of the course, and the ped­a­gogy of the course and school in gen­er­al. Here are the learn­ing out­comes as they stand on our Study Guidelines: 

1. demon­strate the abil­i­ty to explain select­ed cur­rent prac­tices and the­o­ries relat­ed to bod­i­ly and vocal prac­tices with­in the field of per­form­ing arts;
2. using rel­e­vant tools, meth­ods and ter­mi­nol­o­gy, demon­strate the abil­i­ty to analyse and reflect on their own and oth­er people’s work and prac­tices relat­ed to bod­i­ly and vocal prac­tices;
3. demon­strate the abil­i­ty to con­tex­tu­alise and crit­i­cal­ly review their own work in rela­tion to select­ed the­o­ries and artis­tic approach­es relat­ed to bod­i­ly and vocal prac­tices; and
4. demon­strate the abil­i­ty to broad­ly artic­u­late and demon­strate how their own artis­tic approach can be fur­ther developed.

As far as I read these, every­thing is about explain­ing, about abil­i­ty to ana­lyze and reflect, abil­i­ty to con­tex­tu­al­ize and crit­i­cal­ly review and broad­ly artic­u­late and demon­strate. That is, the course will not be about tech­ni­cal skills that we learn but about the skills to under­stand the dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal skills. This approach to work­ing feels very use­ful at this point of my career, and I feel like there has been sim­i­lar side­tracks in my pre­vi­ous studies.

With­in Novia Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences, at phys­i­cal the­atre pro­gramme, we had to artic­u­late a lot of the phys­i­cal prac­tices we use. Sim­i­lar­ly, with­in the ped­a­gogy degree at Novia, we worked with our exist­ing ped­a­gog­i­cal prac­tices. Final­ly, the Inti­ma­cy Direc­tor train­ing by Inti­ma­cy Direc­tors and Coor­di­na­tors did make me reflect on my own prac­tices from a eth­i­cal, tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive. To become the best Inti­ma­cy Direc­tor I can be, I have to keep on grow­ing and stay­ing accountable.

I am wait­ing eager­ly to see, how these are approached in practice. 

Examination Process

Anoth­er thing that inter­ests me cur­rent­ly is the exam­i­na­tion process. We have to both sub­mit a text and cre­ate a more per­for­ma­tive pre­sen­ta­tion. I will let you know more of these lat­er on. I have nev­er seen any­thing like that before, which makes me curi­ous of what I can pro­vide. When I am not look­ing for­ward to learn­ing new per­former skills, how the pre­sen­ta­tion should be.

Prac­ti­cal­ly, I am start­ing to get inter­est­ed in the pro­gram, and start­ing to under­stand how much work it will mean. I am also hon­oured to be here and to learn more with this won­de­ful cohort and these won­der­ful teachers.