HeterotRopical Arts Lab

Abstract

This article explores the innovative field of ‘research-creation', on the threshold of multiple disciplines, between the arts and humanities. It focuses in on the artistic laboratory, as an evolving concept, format, space and processual zone dedicated to trans-disciplinary artistic, micro-political and social experimentation. In this time-space a group engages in a philosophy in action, shifting beyond the dualistic paradigms that persist both in relation to the body and in relation to thought, language, knowledge and culture. This article zooms into and offers a theoretical foundation for a practice-based nomadic performing arts laboratory that we have been developing, where we investigate dance, performance and physical theatre as complementary tools for activating collective practices and open artistic processes. The intention is to activate a field of exchange where subjectivity and corporeality is co-produced, in their singularity, during the artistic process. Artistic laboratories are part a larger phenomenon of the engagement of experimental artistic languages in social, collaborative and collective practices in the contemporary art world. These tendencies are in resonance with the broadening notions of (co) authorship, the politics of perception and spectatorship, which all work towards cultivating the creative agency of a new protagonist-participant, shifting away from traditional notions of the passive spectator.