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Current Seminars and Courses
This document contains information pertaining to a set of seminars and lectures Laskewicz is presenting, based on his recently completed doctorate. He has also recently designed a number of courses aimed at graduate students based on his research material. A seminar would consist of a series of lectures with some possible workshops, whereas the courses are twelve week programmes including lectures, tutorial sessions (discussing readings) and workshops. These workshops are intended to help students combine their talents to produce performances based on the contents of the courses.
As mentioned, the three seminars described in this document are based on the contents of Laskewicz's PhD. This extended work involved primarily musical textuality, application of post-structural theory to musical discourse and Indonesian contemporary performance. These seminars can be given over the period of a single week, although a weekend with an intense lecture programme could also take place. The courses were designed to take up a complete semester (half year), although it would be possible to complete them over a shorter period if the students were able to work through the material intensively.
Seminars
1. The Embedded Musical Sign
These lectures are based on Laskewicz's research into music semiotics. They involve a dynamic process - based approach to musical signification.
2. Balinese Performance Old and New
These lectures are based on field-word held in Indonesia pertaining to Bali in a rapidly changing world economy and the consequences this has had for both new and traditional performance.
3. Stage-Fright
The subject of these lectures is the way art actively influences, how life sometimes imitates art and other pertinent metatheatrical metaphors. In short, it involves the terror of discovering that the sea of meaning one is immersed in is basically a set of empty signifiers.
1. Music as Episteme
This course is a detailed exploration of a new trend in musical understanding. Here Foucault’s notion of the ‘episteme’ is extended into musical discourse and other post-structural theoretical developments are made accessible to musicologists or graduate students interested in music and/or philosophy. Music is explored as a dynamic tool to comprehend our changing environment, a way of experiencing our reality.
2. The New Music-Theatre
This course is designed to provide an introduction to theatrical participants (actors and directors) as well as composers and musicians to the theoretical and analytical aspects of this new movement in contemporary performance where the tools of the artist are extended to include word, sound and image.
3. Performance Theory and Practice
Performance is more than just theatre; it is about human symbolic behaviour in all its complexity. Performance theory is an attempt to comprehend how and why we ritualise and formalise our behaviour, very often for the participation of others in some way. This course is designed to provide students with an array of both theoretical and practical performance-based tools which are used through regular tutorials and workshops to create performance events.
The Embedded Musical Sign
In this seminar the intention is to explore a number of new ways to look at musical signification. Many of the standard all-encompassing systems generally applied in the musicological world are questioned and new influences from various disciplines are introduced and analysed. The contents of this seminar is basically a series of lectures and possibly an analytical workshop.
The lectures are as follows:
[1] Structuralism, Power and Musicality: removing generations of unquestioned dogma
[2] The Musical Text
[3] The Embedded Sign
[4] The Embodied Musical Sign: Post Merleau-Pontian philosophy and cognitive musicality
[5] Multimedial Musicality: the product/process paradigm
[optional]
Workshop with students discussing musicality as means rather than an end
Balinese Performance Old and New
In this seminar we take a look at modern influences in contemporary Balinese culture and more specifically what we can learn from the Balinese. It includes a discussion of theoretical agendas and the very specific interests behind intercultural interactions (both scientific and artistic) between Balinese and European culture. It also questions the role of Bali as a pawn in the creation of the Indonesian nation, and also how the youth of today are adopting to a changing world.
The lectures are as follows:
- The Self-Reflexive Balinese Myth
- The Balinese Performing Arts
- The Balinese Sense of Textuality
- Desacralisation and Decontextualisation in
- Contemporary Balinese Culture:
- Bali and its Role in Contemporary Indonesia
- Balinese Kreasi Baru, Musik Kontemporar and the Arts Festival in Denpasar
- Balinese Youth and the Influence of Contemporary
- Western Popular Culture
Stage-Fright
Stage-Fright is the moment of terror we experience on realising that we are merely playing roles in an empty system, a meaningless game without end held together by an empty set of signifiers. This particular existential subject has a wide range of applications in understanding contemporary culture and the products it produces. In this series of lectures we discuss contrasting expressions of this emotion or episteme in both the theatre and everyday life, from Balinese culture to the man next door.
The lectures are as follows:
[1] Stage-Fright and the Balinese Culture
[2] Self-Reflexivity in Cultural Analysis
[3] The Utter Terror of the Non-Discursive:
an exploration of Beckett's theatre and Stage-Fright
[4] From Radical Experimentation to Enforced
Machination in Avant-Garde Art
[5] Liminality as a Necessary Evil in Performance
[optional]
[a] Workshop/tutorial involving readings taken from Beckett, and Stoppard and other writers
[b] Stage-Fright and Self-Reflexivity in Contemporary film.
Music as Episteme
This is generally intended as a semester long exploration of music, signification and the epistemological role it plays. It is based on a series of 12 lectures. The students are provided with a set of readings which accompany the lectures. The intention is also to provide weekly discussions in small groups about the issues discussed in each lecture.
The material in this course is primarily theoretical and does not result in the creation of a performance (unlike the other courses) Included hereafter is a basic plan for the lecture series. More detailed discussions can be attained from Laskewicz by contacting him directly (zachar.laskewicz@pandora.be).
Lecture 1: Transcending positivism in musical analysis: defining music and musicality
Lecture 2: The dangers of a purely structural approach to musicality: fixity & flexibility
Lecture 3: Foucault's 'episteme' and the importance of his methods.
Music as Episteme
Lecture 4: Phenomenology and its use as a tool to understand music
Lecture 5: What we can learn from Frank Smith and contemporary psycholinguistics
Lecture 6: Understanding the importance of multimedial musicality: from product to process
Lecture 7: Molino's dynamic model for artistic communication: an exploration of musical 'textuality'
Lecture 8: What we can learn from Bourdieu's sociology of the arts
Lecture 9: Merleau-Ponty and embodiment in musical understanding
Lecture 10: Anthropology, ethnomusicology and Blacking's Musical Intelligence'
Lecture 11: Javanese and Balinese musical epistemes
Lecture 12: The Musical Episteme and its adoption in contemporary research
The New Music-Theatre
This course explores the role played by a relatively new movement in the contemporary arts: the New Music-Theatre. It is unique in that it doesn’t follow a set of guidelines; the existing set of signifiers which contemporary directors and composers alike used are manifold and come from a number of different sources.
The intention here is to provide a creative source by tapping the material and themes which have influenced existing artists who have composed in this medium. In the context of the course, the intention is to produce some creative result thanks to intensive workshops which follow the lectures.
Included hereafter is a basic plan for the lecture series. More detailed discussions can be attained from Laskewicz by contacting him directly (zachar. laskewicz@pandora.be).
The New Music-Theatre
Lecture 1: Defining Music
includes tutorial based discussion on material
Lecture 2: Ancient Music-Theatre
readings cover early western and eastern forms
Lecture 3: Ritual, ritualisation and music-theatre
Victor Turner and liminality
Lecture 4: Opera: history and influence of western classical music-theatre
Lecture 5: Artaud and Partch: the theatre of cruelty and total theatre
Lecture 6: Stage-Fright: Beckett and his bleak musical theatricality
Lecture 7: Music-Theatre and Aleatory the music-theatre of Cage and the Fluxus movement
Lecture 8: Music-Theatre and Technology contemporary music-theatre and the machine
Lecture 9: Performance Art graphic arts, installations and the body
Lecture 10: Kagel and the new music-theatre movement
Lecture 11: Problematic of notating performance includes workshop on notation methods
Lecture 12: Composing music-theatre includes discussion on possible subject-matter
Performance Theory and Practice
Performance theory and practice is becoming an increasingly important subject as our world increases in complexity. Using human performance as a basis the intention is to provide the students with a better basis for conceiving the reasoning and functionality of performance forms as variant as sports, music and ritual.
Included hereafter is a basic plan for the lecture series. More detailed discussions can be attained from Laskewicz by contacting him directly (zachar.laskewicz@pandora.be)
Lecture 1: Defining performance
Lecture 2: Semiotics of performance
Lecture 3: Performance and ritualisation
Victor Turner's liminality
Lecture 4: Post-modernism and its implications for performance theory
Lecture 5: Performance as an expression of the self
Lecture 6: Performance, endurance, sport and other extremes
Lecture 7: Self-mutilation for performance goals an intercultural perspective
Lecture 8: Javanese and Balinese performance old and new
Lecture 9: Indian performance from Kathakali to Bharata-Natyam
Lecture 10: Music as a unique type of performance
Lecture 11: House, Rap, Techno and other forms of popular performance
Lecture 12: Performance Today: what can we learn from performance?