BALTIC DRAMA FORUM

International Conference

Liminal Practices in Contemporary Academia: Between Artistic Research and Research in the Arts

November 5.-7. in Riga

 

PROGRAMME

NOVEMBER 5  in Organ Hall, Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music

10.00 OPENING

10.15.-11.15. KEYNOTE 1 

JELENA NOVAK (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

Becoming Elastic: Curating Knowledge in the Garden of Academia and Beyond

(Moderator: Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča)

 

11.15.-11.30 Cofee break

11.30 – 12.50  SESSION 1  LIMINALITIES: KNOWLEDGE THROUGH PRACTICE

                                                (Moderator: Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča)

11.30 – 11.50 Ineta Kivle — Silent Liminality: From the ‘Not Yet’ to Performance

11.50 – 12.10 Ramunė Balevičiūtė — What Does Artistic Research Do? Practice, Knowledge, and Academic Recognition

12.10 – 12.30 Heli Reimann — Investigating Improvisation through Artistic Research

12.30 – 12.50 Kerttu Piliste — Intuition and Creativity in Academic Research and Theatre Practice: A Double Perspective

12.50  - 14.00 LUNCH BREAK

 

14.00  KEYNOTE 2

DIĀNA ZANDBERGA

Challenges of the Choreomusical Performance: The relationships between music and dance at the performance of one artist

(Moderator: Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča)

 

15.00 Coffee break

15.20 – 17.00 SESSION 2  METHODS AND PERSPECTIVES BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PERFORMANCE  (Moderator Ramune Balevičiute)

15.20 – 15.40 Helen Kannus — An Encounter with the Unknown: Performers’ Perspectives on Interactive Theatre in Every Brilliant Thing

15.40 – 16.00 Vēsma Lēvalde — Staging Political Memory: Reviewing The President through Practice-as-Research and Research-Creation

16.00 – 16.20  Edgars Raginskis — The Censor Within: A Composer-Researcher’s Negotiations in the Music Theatre Work Alfas

16.20 – 16.40 Roberto Fausti — Clustering as a Method of Artistic Research: Algorithmic Abstraction and the Reconfiguration of Sonic Material

 

NOVEMBER 6 in Karamazovi hall, Theatre House Zirgu Pasts

 

10.00 – 11.20 SESSION 3 RESEARCH AND PERFORMING ARTS: EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE (Moderator Zane Radzobe)

10.00 – 10.20 Lyu Wen — Walking, Standing, Sitting, and Lying as Research: Embodied Knowledge and the Hybrid Researcher...

10.20 – 10.40 Angelo Romagnoli — The Three Spaces of the Actor: A Metaframework for Spatial Knowledge in Performance

10.40. – 11.00 Javier Cárcel Hidalgo-Saavedra — The Golden Cage: Artistic Identity, Sedimentation and Practices of Interference

11.00 – 11.20  Yeaeun (Jena) Jang — Contemporary Art of Healing: Body-Based Self-Healing in Live Art and Audiovisual

11.20 – 11. 30 Coffee break

 

11.30 – 12.30  KEYNOTE 3

PIERSANDRA DI MATTEO

Viscous Traffic: Art, Theory, and Sweaty Concepts Under Institutional Demands

(Moderator Zane Radzobe)

 

12.30 – 13.30 LUNCH BREAK

 

13.30 – 14.50 SESSION 4 BEYOND ACADEMIC CONVENTIONS: DIALOGUES, PRACTICES AND NARRATIVES OF RESEARCH (Moderator Jurgita Staniškyte)

13.30 – 13.50 Heili Einasto — What Happens to Research Knowledge When a Study Is Written as a Dialogue, a Narrative, or a Mystery?

13.50 -14.10 Monika Klimaitė-Daunienė — Artistic research: practicing the practice

14.10 – 14.30 Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča & Zane Radzobe — Challenges of Art criticism polyphonic mindset. Public dialogue of two critics and scholars

 

14.30 – 15.00 Coffee break

15.00 – 17.00 DISCUSSION “NO TIME FOR DRAMA”

 

NOVEMBER 7 in Karamazovi hall, Theatre House Zirgu Pasts

10.00 – 11.30  RESEARCH IN ARTS: LIMINAL APPROACHES (Moderator Lauma Mellēna-Bartkeviča)

10.00 – 10.20 Giuseppe Christian DiStefano: When Historical Phonology Speaks: Performing Dante through Historically Informed Florentine Pronunciation

10.20 – 10.50 Lauma Inovska — Won’t Agree to an Interview? Create a Conversation

10.50 – 11.10  Karmen Juhkam — What Do We Mean When We Talk About Composite Bodies?

11.10 – 11.30 Liping Jiang (Hannah) — Embodied Translation: Care, Reflexivity and Situated Bodies in

 

11.30 – 12.00  Coffee break

 

12.00 – 13.30  DISCUSSION Mapping Artistic Research in Latvia: Understandings and Practices

Moderators: Katrīna Dūka, Evarts Melnalksnis;

Participants:

Artist-researcher prof. Dr. Sc. soc. Rasa Šmite | new media art;

Artist-researcher Rute Marta Jansone | performance and visual art;

Artist-researcher Ģirts Estere Dubults | contemporary choreography, performance art

 

 

KEYNOTE 1

JELENA NOVAK (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
Becoming Elastic:  Curating Knowledge in the Garden of Academia and Beyond

Bethan Hughes's book Elastic Continuum (K Verlag, 2025) explores the flexible connections between people, plants, politics, and power through the material and symbolic transformations of dandelion, a plant that was forced to turn into something else: a substitute for rubber and a strategic resource. The book asks the question: "how far can a person, a plant, an idea, an image, a symbol, a state stretch before it irrevocably transforms into something new?". Inspired by the ‘elastic continuum’, I ask myself that same question, across the different worlds I move through.

The word academia originally designated a garden: a grove near Athens that Plato used as the setting for his lectures, named after the mythical hero Akademos. I understand knowledge as a space of cultivation, in which things are chosen, arranged, and encouraged to grow in relation to one another. As a musicologist, radio program editor, opera scholar, music critic, dramaturge, professor, and curator working in the field of contemporary opera, I became elastic. A vivid example of stretching the boundaries between different engagements is the exhibition Post-Opera (2019), which I curated in Rotterdam in 2019 with Kris Dittel. The exhibition, along with its various concert activations and performances, explored the changing relationship between the singing voice and body, but also between artistic and scientific research. The stretching of knowledge became concrete: research became spatial, dramaturgical, exhibitable.
New knowledge is born out of research. One of academia’s roles is to transmit it. On this occasion, however, I'm interested in a third, less-named academic labor that runs both through research and transmission: curating the knowledge itself by selecting and staging what has been produced so that it can be encountered and discussed. This talk asks what contemporary opera, and my own elastic position between academia, the media, and the artistic stage, can show us about that curatorial work, and how far ‘the garden of academia’ can stretch before it becomes something new.

Jelena Novak is a tenured researcher at the Center for Music Studies (CESEM), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. Her fields of interest include modern and contemporary music, recent opera, singing and new media, capitalist realism, voice studies, and feminine identities in music. Exploring these fields, she works as a researcher, lecturer, writer, music critic, editor, and curator focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. Her books include Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (2015) and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (co-edited with John Richardson, 2019). Currently, she is working on the book Opera in the Expanded Field and researching what it means and what it takes to sing beyond human, a topic she explores in her recent text "Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera: Songful Practice of Holograms, Robots, Machines, and Vocaloids" (Contemporary Opera in Flux ed. by Y.U. Everett, 2024).

 

KEYNOTE 2
DIĀNA ZANDBERGA 
(Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, Latvia)

Challenges of the Choreomusical Performance: The relationships between music and dance at the performance of one artist

The human body can create, perceive, and express music. Generally, the bodies of professional musicians and dancers have been trained in their respective fields since childhood (Mashino, Seye: 2020). This research is dedicated to multisensory integration of body movements in contemporary music specially written for the musician (pianist) who can dance and therefore express music in various ways. The research question is: What are the possible types of choreomusical relationships in the artistic praxis of one performer?
The research method includes the collaboration of performer with like-minded composers and choreographers to create choreomusical works as well as autoethnographic reflection afterward. This reveals and justifies the results of artistic research and innovative creative discoveries.
Choreomusical relationships range from synchronization and structural analogy to complementarity and contest (Hodgins: 1992, Cook: 1998, Jordan: 2000). Likewise, Inger Damsholt suggests that dance relates to music on a scale between the two extremes of music visualization and counterpoint (Damsholt: 1999), American choreographer Juliet McMains and composer Ben Thomas emphasize two types of choreomusical relationships – amplification and emergence (McMains, Thomas 2013). 
However, in the performances of one multidisciplinary artist, it is possible to define the intensity of the relationships between music and dance from the conversation to the fusion of these two artforms. The piano work “Lure of Light” (2025) by Latvian composer Indra Riše includes the choreographic cadenza of pianist by choreographer Baiba Kokina, where the rhythmic patterns are performed with point shoes. Thus, the dance amplifies or illustrates the idea presented in the music - one artform converses with the other, but none is dominant. 
On the contrary, the fusion of the choreomusical relationships creates a new, qualitatively different meaning that does not exist in either medium alone. For example, in the “Mountain Crystal” by Latvian composer Anitra Tumševica and choreographer Milana Komarova, the recording of electronics is mixed with live piano and dance performance. The idea is based on an interaction and canon between the spiritual and physical world: ideal and imperfection and is inspired by except from the Bible - having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, clear as crystal (Revelation 21:11).  
Also the “Angelbone” (2026) by composer Linda Leimane and choreographer Raimonds Martinovs reveals the fusion of music and dance. The composer says: "Under every wing, there is structure. Under every grace, resistance. “Angelbone” is the imagined anatomy of the invisible: the tension beneath flight, the silent architecture of care, the strength that makes softness possible. At its heart, this piece is a quiet offering to those who protect without being seen, and to the bones that carry us when we forget how to fly”.

 

Diāna Zandberga is a pianist specialising in Artistic Research. Currently she works as a Vice-Rector for Scientific and Creative Work, Head of Doctoral School and associated professor of Piano Department of the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. Having obtained a master’s degree in piano performance at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, she completed her PhD in Musicology. Diāna has studied with legendary pianist Lazar Berman, and improved her performance with Alicia de Larrocha.  Since 1996 Diāna Zandberga has won acclaim for a succession of recitals in European countries, Brazil and the USA. Zandberga has premiered piano works by dozens of different composers, recorded eight piano music albums and published a scientific monograph about the history of the Piano Department of the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. https://dianazanberga.com
 

KEYNOTE 3
PIERSANDRA DI MATTEO
(PerLA | Performance Epistemologies Research Lab Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy)

Viscous Traffic: Art, Theory, and Sweaty Concepts Under Institutional Demands

Theory and practice are not separate orders but situated, materially implicated modes of thought, each answerable to the conditions of its production. Their relation is one of viscous porosity: not a relation secured by pre-established protocols, but a material entanglement in which permeability is never frictionless—what passes between practices meets resistance, leaves residues, and reconfigures the premises of the interaction. Sara Ahmed’s “sweaty concepts” register this pressure: the labour of staying with situations that resist available descriptions until thought is forced to transform its frameworks. Within an ecology of practices, no practice is self-contained or given in advance of the milieu generated through intra-actions among bodies, materials, techniques, and institutional apparatuses.
What happens, then, when artistic practice is required to declare its methods and account for the knowledge it produces? This demand may sharpen a practice, rendering its operations perceptible and transmissible. Yet it may also compel the work to make claims it cannot sustain, turning theory into an apparatus of self-authorisation and the artist-researcher into a norm of flexibility, legibility, and productivity. Drawing on her long-term dramaturgical work with Romeo Castellucci and her experience across international curatorial and academic contexts, Piersandra Di Matteo asks how this viscous traffic redistributes what performing arts, theory, and research can perceive, formulate, and produce.

Piersandra Di Matteo is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator in the field of the performing arts. She is currently Curator-at-Large for FAULT. Field for Artistic Unmastery and Living Transmission at LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, and a member of PerLA | Performance Epistemologies Research Lab at Università Iuav di Venezia, where she taught for several years. Her research focuses on the politics of voice and listening, Deaf epistemologies, contemporary dramaturgy, and curatorial and institutional practices, with particular attention to forms of knowledge transmission and collective life. In 2026, she is an Associate Research Scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University in New York; in 2017, a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since 2008, she has been a close theoretical collaborator of Romeo Castellucci, working as a dramaturg on his theatre and opera productions at major international institutions. She has lectured and led seminars at universities and research centres worldwide, including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, School of Creative Media in Hong Kong, Shanghai Theatre Academy, LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, DAS Theatre and SNDO in Amsterdam, UQAM in Montréal, and MITsp in São Paulo. She was Artistic Director of Short Theatre (2021–2024) and Atlas of Transitions Biennale (2017–2020). Since 2024, she has curated residency projects for the Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

    
 

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