Institutet för Scenkonst : an analysis of its past and present practice (1971-2013)

Abstract

This thesis maps and assesses the practice of collective improvisation as performance in the work of Swedish theatre practitioner Ingemar Lindh and the company he founded in 1971, the Institutet för Scenkonst (Institute for Scenic Art). I view Lindh’s work on collective improvisation as marking a significant shift in twentieth-century laboratory theatre: it resists fixed dramaturgical structures like choreography and directorial montage, and opts instead for continuous change in performance. I strengthen this analysis by juxtaposing the Institutet’s practice within a wider context of improvised performance: the Judson Dance Theatre in New York and Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theatre in Germany. Effectively, I draw out the hypothesis that the Institutet’s core contribution (i.e. the practice of collective improvisation based on mental precision), involves a rigorous study of change in performance, based on the everyday life dynamic that things mutate despite efforts to fix them. This work on inevitable change has been largely facilitated by the Institutet’s practice of Tai Chi Chuan. As such, I address it as akin to mindfulness meditation approaches, where, in order to study change within and outside of oneself, one applies mind training and its simultaneous embodiment via the mastery of energy control. I construct my argument in the light of martial arts and mindfulness meditation practices that treat the subject of inevitable change, as well as via theatre theorists on embodied mind in permanent transformation.