Performance Lecture by Susanne Martin,  followed by a discussion with Vida Midgelow 

Susanne Martin completed her practice as research PhD at Middlesex University in 2016.

She performed the lecture Dancing Age(ing): Performing Ambiguity as part of the Researching (in/as) Motion research intensive (June 2018). The performance lecture emerges from Susanne’s doctoral work and is a variant on the performance works that formed part of her thesis. The thesis investigates how improvisation practice and performance making participate in a critical rethinking of age(ing) to advance the notion of an age critical dance practice. The performance lecture continues her exploration of ways to share her practice as research with different types of audience and in conference style settings.

In the discussion with Vida Midgelow that follows the performance, Susanne discusses her doctoral research process, her performance work and the ways in which practice as research has raised questions about the appropriatess of different modes of presentation, the need to make certain aspects of the research explicit, and the experience of sharing her choreographic research with audiences in fields such as ageing studies.

Topics that arise in the discussion include:

The Performance Lecture as a modality for sharing artistic research

Sharing artistic research in cross-disciplinary settings

Developing improvisation research in a post-doctoral context and within an engineering department

Keeping Dancing in and beyond the PhD

Strategies for working with theoretical ideas within the choreographic process

Biography:

Susanne Martin Berlin based artist, researcher, and teacher in the field of contemporary dance and performance. She completed practice as research PhD at Middlesex University in 2016 and works internationally as soloist and in collaborative settings. Her artistic practice and research focuses on improvisation, contact improvisation, narrations of the aging body, humor and irony in dance, artistic research methods, and improvisation-based approaches to learning, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. Her book Dancing Age(ing): Rethinking Age(ing) in and through Improvisation Practice and Performance has been published by transcript in 2017. Since 2018 she holds a postdoctoral research position at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL in Switzerland.

See more about Susanne’s doctoral work at:http://www.susannemartin.de/category/performing-ageing/