workshop as art: Seances

Anna Ádám considers workshop as one of her artistic medium. At the intersection of performance, mise-en-scène, and workshop, in form of these interactive and immersive Seances, she creates social and spatial contexts, develops new forms of collective aesthetics based on interactivity, participation, connection, and physical presence. Situated between relational aesthetics and new media theories of interactivity, Seances allow the participants to immerse themselves in a hybrid space, collaborate with the artist, who acts both as choreographer, dramatist, scenographer, and workshop leader, and therefore gain a more intensive and personal experience. During Seances, following the artist's instructions, partitions, and scripts, participants realize exercises, execute tasks, and they are, without realizing, slowly involved in a performance as makers, performers, and spectator at the same time. Based on collective creativity, Seances have always an artistic outcome (installation, objects, photo series, performances...), that can be seen as both it's documentation and production. Following the Seance, these art pieces generally remain in the space, and can be visited as an exhibition.

Photo - © Anna Ádám, 2018.

​The Sacred Ritual

We focus on contemporary visual and performing art practices linked to ceremonies, shamanic rites, spiritual beliefs, healing, the life cycle, political power, social cohesion, and personal identity. We explore how rituals embody and activate myths through dramatic and choreographic transformative devices, and how contemporary artists appropriate and traverse traditional boundaries between performance art, ancient rites, shamanic action, transcendental experiences, and myths. We expand the range and breadth of the understanding of ritual, transcendence and immanence of the sacred, experience group creativity and feel the power of collective action.

​The Bad Taste

During the Seance, from a theoretical and practice-oriented perspective, we investigate the ideological, political and historical parameters of “taste” in popular culture, explore what is meant by designations such as canonical “high culture” and popular “low culture”, and who is empowered to make these distinctions. Through creating individual and group performances with highly charged imagery juggling, among others, the aesthetics of comics, advertisements, pornography, popular music, and video games, we explore how bad, vulgar, kitsch or valueless aesthetic can be used as an oppositional aesthetic challenging hegemonic class, gender, and racial hierarchies, normative behaviors and ideologies.

​Body, Identity, Society​

Through an interdisciplinary approach, we experiment and understand the social and cultural constructions of gender that shape the experiences of women and men in society. We try out different costumes that all modify the body, and put on some makeups, that all influence the character in particular ways. The central question of the Seance is to figure out how to handle these situations, how to put on and take off roles and habits, conventions and stereotypes. Questioning the original functions of the items and of the established codes of the fashionable body will also allow us to transgress normative discourses, challenge gender boundaries, systems of representation, and standards of beauty.

​Performing fashion

During this Seance, we meld designing for the performing arts with fashion, define the catwalk as a theatre stage, and make thematic collections as conceptual art. At the intersection of clothing as performance costume and as conceptual fashion, this theory and practice-oriented Seance focus on the performative, choreographic, and dramatic potential of fashion shows, together with the performative aspect of wearing clothes. We experiment with silhouettes, constructions, materials, objects, technology, and imagine choreographed and scenographed fashion-performances with or without linearity, and narrative strategies.