Marie-Andrée Robitaille is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in contemporary dance and circus performance. She is currently a doctoral candidate in performative and mediated practices with a specialization in choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) in Sweden. At SKH, she was the head of the bachelor program in circus (2009–2018), where she conducted a series of artistic research projects that developed feminist strategies and alternative modes of composition. Her doctoral project Circus as a Practice of Hope looks at parallels between virtuosity and vulnerability, human activities and environment, modes of perception and points of views, movement and presence, and response-abilities.
Report during the symposium:
CIRCLE AS A METHODOLOGY / AN ETHICAL QUEST
In her doctoral artistic project Circus as a Practice of Hope, Marie-Andrée Robitaille proposes ‘Circle as a methodology’ as an effort to counter a linear world vision. Can engaging worlds through circularity, literally andmetaphorically, revive a system of values based on a plurality of points of view, non-duality and relationalontology? Robitaille engages circularity from ‘nomadic ethical considerations’ (Braidotti, 2011), which resonate with the nomadic nature of the circus ring; moving from place to place, the ring always includes an opening for moving in and out, which allows circulation as a process of change. Through a body-reorienting practice, Robitaille investigates performing small shifts of dynamics, matters, spatialities and temporalities while observing the magnitude of differences that minute differences create. Marie-Andrée will share her research on circus as a mode of ‘fabulating the present’ and as a strategy to ‘re-circularise’ the world (Sioui, 1999).
Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Second Edition. Colombia University Press.
Sioui, Georges F. (1999). Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle. UBC Press.
International Committee to Save the Earth Through Speculative Fabulation
Dovilė Aleksaitė, Fee Altmann, Sanja Anđelković, Elisabeth Brun, Belén Cerezo, Suvam Das, Damian Domes, Raquel Felgueiras, Kausik Ghosh, Florian Goeschke, Vanessa Graf, Anouk Hoogendoorn, Kristin Johnsen, Paul R Jones, Dani Landau, Stacy Lo, Madhuja Mukherjee, Roksana Niewadzisz, Christine Reeh-Peters, Marie-André Robitaille, Gonzalo H. Rodriguez, Szilvia Ruszev, Sanja Särman, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Alisi Telengut, Bela Usabaev, Joshua Wagner, Lisa Walder, Dörte Weig