Okay. Good evening, everyone,
and welcome to the 2023 Johannes Van
Tilburg Lecture in Dutch Studies. My name
is Laurie Kain Hart and I'm Director of
the Center for European and Russian Studies and
professor of anthropology and global studies.
As is our custom here at UCLA, I begin with
the recognition that we are here on the unceded
territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples who are
the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar, the
Los Angeles Basin and South Channel Islands. As
a land grant institution, we pay our respects to
Gabrielino/Tongva ancestors, elders and relatives
and relations past, present and emerging.
I'm delighted to welcome students and faculty
members of the Dutch community and friends of
Dutch Studies in L.A., consular representatives,
members of the Netherlands America Foundation
of Southern California, as well as deans and
the Vice Chancellor from UCLA, and all other
friends of the Center. It's wonderful to be back
here in person. Last year we were still on Zoom
with a wonderful lecture on the history and
present of the Moroccan-Dutch community with
professor Nadia Boras from Leiden University.
And now we're back together for real.
Sorry for the rain, but I'm glad you made it
here nonetheless. I want to thank the staff at
the Center, who are its heart and mind, and who
put so much energy and expertise into making this
evening's program happen, Executive Director
Liana Grancea and Program Director Lenka Unge.
Thanks also to the staff of the Faculty
Club for their skilled work and support.
And I'm especially grateful to Marike Splint,
associate professor in the Department of Theater
at UCLA and member of the Center's Faculty Board
of Directors, for the inspired work of selecting
our speaker for today's event and putting the idea
into action. Professor Splint has been and is an
invaluable advisor to the center. Major thanks
also to our co-sponsors, the UCLA Department of
Film and Television Studies, and especially
to Sean Metzger and Michelle Liu Carriger.
We at the Center are the fortunate beneficiaries
of diverse local and international efforts that
connect Southern California to the Netherlands
and Belgium. Dutch studies at UCLA is a vibrant
program engaged with the Low Countries through a
strong interdisciplinary global academic program.
The program was initiated in 1999 under
the direction and inspiration of the now
Professor Emeritus of History, Margaret Jacob,
here tonight with us. It expanded to include,
among other initiatives, the founding of
the Anton Van Dyck Chair for history and the
culture of Low Countries, and a faculty-student
exchange program with the University of Leuven.
The establishment in 2005 of tonight's Johannes
Van Tilburg lecture in Dutch Studies has become
an extraordinary opportunity annually for UCLA to
connect to the region. We owe this lecture to the
generosity of Johannes Van Tilburg, architect and
former Honorary Consul of the Netherlands in L.A.,
and Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archeologist and
Director of the Rock Art Archive at the UCLA
Cotsen Institute of Archeology. They not
only support this lecture, but also provide
support for UCLA students participating in
the Utrecht and Leuven exchange programs.
We're grateful for their support, but most of all
for their leadership and conceptualizing new forms
of exchange and scholarly cooperation between
UCLA and the Netherlands. So I'd now like
to welcome Anna Spain Bradley, Vice Chancellor
for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and professor
of international law, for a welcome on behalf of
UCLA. Thank you, Vice Chancellor, for joining us.
Good evening, everyone. Good evening.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Hart. You
can look around this room and see that it is full.
And on a night where there is even a chance of
rain for people from Los Angeles to come out, it's
a significant signal. So I am so pleased to be
here tonight and to recognize the many colleagues,
students, friends, special guests, including the
Van Tilburg family, our dignitaries and honorees
from a variety of consul generals and consulates
here in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. And
just to say that one of the things that makes a
university and a community thrive, and one of the
things that we are deeply committed to here
at UCLA is our values. Our values of inclusive
excellence in all that we do, in our mission as a
public land grant university that educates, serves
and strives to make positive impact, not just
in Los Angeles, but globally around the world.
Promoting these values of inclusion and
dignity are so vital in the world today
to bond peoples and nations, to promote
peace and to honor our shared humanity.
Tonight's 2023 Johannes Van Tilburg Lecture
in Dutch Studies speaks to that cause. And as
we listen and learn tonight from our brilliant
colleague and Van Tilburg lecturer this evening,
Professor Bleeker, may we keep the shared mission
close to our hearts. Our experience this evening
and the important contributions of UCLA in Dutch
Studies program are made possible through the
generosity of many, including the Van Tilburg
family. And we thank you. On behalf of UCLA,
welcome to all. And here's to a spectacular
evening. Thank you so much. I'd like now to
welcome interim dean of the Social Sciences and
professor of urban planning and Chicano studies,
Abel Valenzuela, along with Assistant Vice
Provost Alfred Herrera, who's also here with us,
and Associate Vice Provost Charles Alexander, who
could not be here, he has been part of a tripartite
collaborate collaboration among UCLA,
Bloemfontein University in South Africa and
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam that was established
in 2014 to promote diversity and equity in higher
education institutions across the globe. So
we're really happy to welcome Dean Valenzuela.
When professor Hart asked me to come and
give welcoming comments, I was delighted.
She knows and she mentioned some of my own
work in Holland with colleagues here at UCLA,
mostly revolving around EDI efforts,
but also the Free University. And so it's
a big, big pleasure for me. So on behalf of
UCLA and the Division of Social Sciences,
I welcome all of you to the 2023 Johannes Van
Tilburg Lecture in Dutch Studies. The Division
of Social Sciences at UCLA is uniquely positioned
in the diverse global city here of Los Angeles.
And especially today with the weather, apologies
for all of the front news that this blizzard warning,
only the second time, I think, in a hundred
years, but maybe a short way to make some of us
feel more at home. But Los Angeles, it resides
in a diverse global city here, and it comprises
the social sciences, top-notch academic programs
and research centers that collect and recreate
new knowledge and cutting-edge research.
Los Angeles is literally the gateway to the rest
of the planet, many of us believe. By engaging
the challenges that we face here in Los Angeles,
we really do believe that we can help
change the world for the better. Indeed,
for the social sciences, we use the motto: Engaging
Los Angeles, changing the world. So I'd like
to extend a special welcome to Deputy Consul
General Vincent Storimans, and apologies
for mispronunciations, from San Francisco, as well
as the Honorary Consul Henk Hanselaar from San Diego.
I'd also like to take this moment to honor the
work of Jan and Jo Anne Tilburg, whose
generous gift makes this annual lecture possible.
And it really does highlight cross-disciplinary
moments within the field of theater and between
the theater and, of course, other fields at UCLA.
To that end, I also thank our special guest and
speaker, professor Maaike Bleeker from Utrecht
University for being here today. UCLA, I think, is
a special place and so is the Netherlands, and of
course the Dutch people. In my many, many visits to
the Netherlands, I've always felt welcomed. I've
been treated generously and with great warmth and
always full of engagement in the work that I do.
It is my expectation that tonight's event will be
a thoughtful and reciprocal way for our campus and
some of our programs to reengage our connections
and shared fates in the performing arts. Welcome.
Thank you so much, Dean Valenzuela. Now,
please join me in welcoming Mr. Jan Van Tilburg.
Jo Anne, Bill Becker, Sandra Timmermans,
Marieka Kline, Willem Kline, the guy
with the big hair, and Matt Kline.
Besides our family, all of us are always involved in
supporting most of the things we do, I'd like to
make a special mention of two people, Peg
Jacob, who started this program, I believe,
all these years. And then sitting next to Peg is
Wiljan van den Akker, who especially came
from the Netherlands, from Utrecht University
to join us here. He was the first speaker in the
Van Tilburg Lecture. So welcome. Welcome, friends.
I am looking forward to Maaike's speech. Thank you.
Finally, before our main event, I would like
to welcome to the podium Mr. Alexander Swart,
member of the Netherlands American Foundation,
SoCal Board of Directors. Mr. Swart.
How wonderful it is to get together with
all of you at this very special event.
And on a personal note, I have to mention
that my son and my twin daughters graduated
from UCLA. So it's always very nice
to return to this beautiful campus.
I'm Alex Swart, I am here representing the
Southern California branch of the Netherlands
America Foundation. Our organization, founded in
the Netherlands and the United States in the areas
of business, the arts and, of course, education.
Educational exchange is really exemplified by
the Johannes Van Tilburg lecture here at UCLA,
where distinguished scholars from Dutch and
Belgian universities present highlights of
their primary research and their original
thinking at this public-facing event.
And Jan and Joanne's commitment to
education is really made tangible
through their generous support of the Dutch
studies program here at UCLA. And NAF SoCal
is merely trying to follow their example
with this modest contribution. Thank you.
I thank Mr. Swart, for his generous donation,
and NAF, towards innovation in Dutch studies
at UCLA. As you all know, times are
tough in public education these days,
and it's contributions like these that make
it possible for us to sustain and innovate
programing. Thank you so much, Mr. Swart
and the Netherlands American Foundation.
Now, it is time to turn to the main event of the
afternoon, our talk. A heads up for the sequence
of events tonight. We'll have about an hour for
the talk and 15 minutes or so for a Q&A. Do feel
free to save your questions and ask them during
the Q&A. We look forward to audience discussion.
Then, if I can ask you to stay in your
seats for a few minutes after this,
we have a short special event
before we begin our reception.
And now I turn the podium over to Sean Metzger,
Head of Performance Studies and Associate Dean,
UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television,
to introduce our speaker Maaike Bleeker,
professor of theater and performance studies
at Utrecht University. Welcome, Sean.
Good evening and thanks everyone for coming out
tonight. I have the privilege of introducing
tonight's invited lecturer. Before I do that,
I just want to acknowledge the importance of
events highlighting Dutch culture, because, after
all, the Dutch arguably created the conditions
for the way we live now. By this I mean the
first transnational corporation that operated
as a sovereign entity was, as many of you know,
the United East India Company founded in 1602.
Globalization is, in very complicated ways,
one outcome of Dutch entrepreneurship.
I just leave it at that. In this vein, the
maintenance of Dutch-American dialogs is
critical as we think through the era of advanced
capitalism that structures our everyday lives.
In this vein, it is a genuine pleasure to
welcome professor Maaike Bleeker to UCLA.
Actually, professor Bleeker's relation to
UCLA faculty extends back several decades.
First, she came to work with our own distinguished
professor of world arts and cultures and dance,
the fabulous Susan Foster, sitting here, who was then
teaching at another institution and whose class I
also happened to be in at the time. Subsequently,
professor Bleeker attained teaching positions
in Rotterdam and in Amsterdam, where she met my
colleague, the ingenious theater director Marike
Splint, who was then undergraduate student. We have
again Marike to thank for suggesting professor
Bleeker to the selection committee for this year's
lecture. You're in for a treat because professor
Bleeker is one of the most expansive intellectuals
I have ever had the opportunity to meet.
Who else can discuss early modern
anatomy and artificial intelligence,
dance and but also as human perception
theater making on stage in a given locale,
but also theater theatrical performance
dispersed across vast digital networks?
I thought by way of introduction, I might cite
professor Bleeker as opposed to listing her
numerous achievements, which are readily available
on any search engine, if you care to look.
So here are some of my favorite quotations.
In "Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating
Theater, Bleeker writes: "When the body was
opened, it was alien territory into which the
scientist journeyed. This sense of the body as
alien to the sensibility that inhabited it,
provided the material for the construction of
the natural philosopher as the heroic explorer."
In our era, this provides the grounds for
the ways in which we narrate medicine. Just
think of all the inevitably men's names we use to
describe diseases. In visuality in the theater, the
locus of looking, Bleeker writes of the distinct
historical manifestations of visual experience.
So here I always think of the bird's eye view
that we now take for granted, but was only
possible when we had technologies that could put
humans, and/or other devices, into the air.
And my last example is from "Transmission in
Motion: The Technologizing of Dance."
Bleeker writes, "A great number of more recent
technological developments, from finger gestures
on the iPhone to the physically moving control
of the Wii, to Microsoft's Gestural
Games interface Kinect allow for movement to
become increasingly part of modes of interaction
between bodies and technologies." Professor Bleeker
illustrates time and time again how much humans,
technologies and their relations depend
on different kinds of performance.
So if you thought you were just
getting theater, you were wrong.
I could go on and on about professor Bleeker's
intellectual contributions to multiple fields,
but I only have 5 minutes. So I wanted to
leave us with one last anecdote. She served as
president of Performance Studies
International, the largest organization of its
kind in the world, for studying performance
as an object and an analytic study.
With her help, I succeeded her in that role. But
really all I did was execute all the things that
professor Bleeker created. And here are some
of them. An online lexicon of key terms and
performance in multiple languages, a new open
access digital journal, which was at that time
very novel, by the way, a mentoring program for
graduate students, engineers, faculty that was
international in scope called FAB, also known as
the Future Advisory Board, to a conference called
Fluid States Performances of Unknowing that
took place over a dozen locations around the
world over the course of a year. Professor Bleeker
has been a steadfast colleague, mentor and friend,
and I'm sure by the end of this evening, you
will appreciate her keen mind as much as I do.
Please join me in welcoming
professor Maaike Bleeker.
Thank you so much for this lovely introduction.
I feel I can only disappoint after that.
It's a real pleasure and a great honor to
be here. And I would like, first of all,
to thank Mr. and Mrs. Van Tilburg for making
possible this wonderful lecture series and
for this amazing opportunity to speak
here. Thank you so much. Also,
thank you to the board of the Dutch studies
program for inviting me to share some of my work
here, and the many people that were involved
in making all this possible and organizing
and making it such a pleasure to be here.
A big thanks also to Sean, and to Marike, and
other colleagues from the Theater and Performance
Department. It's a real treat to be here with you.
Now, what I want to share with you are some
reflections about interdisciplinary collaborations
between the theater and very different fields
of expertise, like robotics and astronomy. And
I will start with a description of several such
collaborations that I am or have been part of.
When I tell people about these collaborations,
I often get the question how does a professor
of theater ends up collaborating with
roboticists and astronomers and the like?
And does that mean that I changed my profession?
No, I haven't, and I have no intention of doing
so. But these questions were very helpful in
making me think about what is happening here.
And thinking about that makes me realize that for
me, these collaborations are more generally the
possibility of this kind of collaborations follows
organically from the developments in the theater
that were part of the context in which I grew up
as a theater professional and a theater scholar.
Developments that made it possible to conceive of
making theater as a practice of collaborative and
embodied thinking through material, a collective
investigation and figuring out of things.
And this relationships between developments within
the theater and collaborations between the theater
and other fields of expertise is what I want to
talk about. So I'll start with a description of
some of these collaborations between theater and
very different fields, and then move on to a brief
introduction of developments within the theater
and some examples that bring these together.
Just before I left Amsterdam to travel
to L.A. earlier this week, I spent an
afternoon with the Research and Development
Department of the Hotel School in the Hague,
and we talked about a new project in which
we will use expertise from the performing
arts to develop the behavior of robotic
assistants in the hospitality sector.
This collaboration is part of a larger project
that we are currently setting up between theater
studies at Utrecht University, the Technical Universities
of Delft and Twente, and Social AI at a
Free University of Amsterdam, a number of theater
companies and individual theater makers. Together
with partners from industry and from hospitality,
education and care, we will be looking for
new ways of developing behavior of robotic
assistance and modes of interacting with them.
Robot developers are facing questions and problems
that in some ways are remarkably similar to those
of theater makers. Questions like: How do social
robots address their human co-performers?
How do they afford interaction with
them? What scripts do they follow?
How do we choreograph their movements
through space? How to design their appearances?
In dramaturgy with devices, we look at how
theater and robotics may mutually inform
each other. How theater can contribute to new
approaches to design and development of robots,
and vice versa, how collaborations between theater
and robotics may inform new creative uses of
robots and other smart technologies within the
theater. Now the term dramaturgy is a term from
the theater and a term that historically referred
to the structure of plays and performances.
More recently, this term has come to be used to
refer to a wide array of tools, terms and insights
used in creating, analyzing and reflecting
about performances, and has come to stand for
a field of expertise of which these tools and
terms and insights are the expression.
Dramaturgical expertise plays an important
role in creating performances, in making
them work, in setting up relationships with
audiences, keeping them engaged, and also in
understanding relationships between performances
and the context in which they are meaningful.
The Dramaturgy of Devices project will
investigate how dramaturgical tools,
terms and insights may inform a new set
of tools, terms and insights for devices.
Now, in this new collaboration that we are
currently setting up, we build on experience
from our current project, Acting Like a Robot.
And this is a project between Theater Studies
at Utrecht University, and Robotics at the
Free University of Amsterdam, Puppet and
Object Theater Company, Urike Quade
Company and the Utrecht School for the Arts.
Now, both puppet theater and robotics
work with inanimate performers.
Performers that need to be brought to life and
invested with some kind of life of their own.
And in the Acting Like a Robot project, we look
at how expertise from puppet theater may inform
the development of creative and innovative
approaches to development of robot behavior,
may inform ways of bringing about such sense
of aliveness. And we also look at how robots
can be used to take new steps in the development
of puppet and object theater. So one thing we are
currently investigating, for example, is how
to use industrial robot arms as puppeteers.
Here you see an image of that project, and this
is an image from a project that we created for
the big outdoor exhibition Floriade that
was held last summer in the Netherlands.
So this is another image that gives an impression
of the size of this robot puppeteer and
the puppets that it manages. And also, well,
this is being constructed, but it's a huge
thing that can then start to move with this
puppet, with this robot arms moving it.
Last week, just before my meeting with the Hotel
School about dramaturgy for devices project,
I was at Museum Boerhaave in Leiden
to discuss another collaboration with them. The
Boerhaave Museum is the Dutch National Museum
for Science and Medicine, and their collection
includes the important historical instruments and
artifacts such as the microscopes of Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek, the first pendulum clock
of Christiaan Huygens and a replica of Leiden
University's anatomical theater built in 1594.
The Boerhaave Museum has an amazing collection
that offers visitors the possibility to get a
sense of such important scientific inventions and
discoveries during many centuries of scientific
work. And I was there to talk to the curator
about certain challenges that the
museum is facing when it comes to more
contemporary scientific developments,
like the discovery of gravitational waves,
the Higgs particle or biomedical research
about genes and about viruses, very recently.
The objects of such research are often quite
far removed from human experience. Being far too
big or far too small to be perceived by humans.
Research requires large-scale and incredibly
complex technology that operates in ways that are
often also inaccessible to humans and may involve
extensive networks of interconnected machines.
Now, how to include such research
in the collection of the museum?
How to show it and make it accessible or,
as curator in one of our conversations
put it, how to collect a black hole? Now, of
course, he's not expecting to include an actual
black hole in the collection, but rather he's
facing the question what to collect and how to
share what with visitors in order to make these
kind of scientific discoveries accessible as well?
With regard to the history of anatomy, they
can work with this magnificent model of the
actual historical anatomy theater to engage
visitors in getting a sense of that moment
of history and what it entailed. And observing the
tiny and fragile microscopes of van Leeuwenhoek
close by, raises a sense of wonder about these
instruments and how these, for the first time,
provided access to a microscopic world. But how to
similarly engage audiences with today's scientific
instruments and discoveries that
cannot be displayed in a similar manner?
Faced with these questions, Bart contacted me and
my theater studies group at Utrecht University,
and they asked us to think along with them.
Theater has a history of expertise with bringing
about worlds, situations and events that cannot
be shown in their entirety and in detail. A
history of expertise with engaging audiences
in imagining these other worlds, taking them
along and developing an understanding of what
they cannot directly perceive. How might this
expertise inform approaches to curating science?
One of the reasons that Bart contacted
me was a previous collaboration
between theater studies in Utrecht and Antwerp,
and the Historical Observatory in Strasbourg,
a specialists in the history of science
from several other European universities,
and also with the theater artist Eric Joris. And
the aim of this project was to develop better
understanding of historical practices
of sharing knowledge about astronomy,
and how to share this knowledge with a wide
audience. How did they do that historically
in various types of planetariums, by means of
magic lantern demonstrations, by means of orreries,
these models of solar systems? So we wanted to
see how we might use improved understanding of
such historical practices to develop
together with artists and together with
experts in contemporary astronomy, a
And one of our questions therefore was: What
would a 21st century planetarium be like?
Now, this is Erik Joris and CREW is the name of
his company, his theater company. And Erik
has a lot of expertise with experimenting with
new technologies and with using the theater as a
kind of laboratory to explore possibilities. One
technology he often works with is so-called
head-mounted displays. And this is an image
of somebody wearing one. And the other person
behind is an assistant who assists in using this
technology. And the image also gives an impression
of how Erik's ways of working with technology involves
a lot of tinkering, just using high tech, but in a
way that is a bit improvizational, like here with
the laptop on a back, a backpack and this kind
of connecting things together and making it work.
So we could say that Erik improvises with high tech.
And here you see a similar set up, similar
technological setup. But then as it was part
of our research project, now it is worn by
one of the research leaders of this spectacular
astronomy project. This is Charlotte Bigg and
she's a historian of science working in Paris.
And the two others are Erik's assistants. And this
happens in Erik's studio. So we are in a studio.
Well, at the same time, Charlotte is somehow
also in the solar system, or to be more precise,
in a virtual model of the solar system. And this
model allows her to discover this logic of the
planets circling around each other from the
inside, so to say. And by moving through it,
she can develop a kind of an embodied
understanding of this logic from being
inside, from looking around, from moving
around, instead of being this distant observer.
And the image on the screen, on the back of
her backpack, and the laptop in her backpack,
gives a little bit of an impression
of what she's seeing. But of course,
she's seeing it like as if she's inside of
it and not just as an image in front of her.
Here's another image of this same setup.
But now with a big screen showing what
the person wearing the head-mounted display is
also seeing and with this person who is the avatar
that we can also see on the screen, this person
has this suit on with motion capture markers so
that whatever she's doing will translate also into
the movements of this is avatar. And this was one
of the ways, in which users of the technology
were kind of guided around in the solar
system, so to say. This is another image of the set
up from a bit more of a distance. And here you can
see again somebody using it, which is actually me,
and then the avatar moving, a kind of a planet
there hanging on a string, and an audience. And
this is also how we, one of the ways in which we
experimented also with this technology,
this is a kind of composite image, but
we had a setup in which we could do lectures
with an audience and at the same time having
people one-by-one having this experience of
the immersive planetarium. And this way also
they're combining various types of information.
And since when you were in the installation, you
can't hear what happens outside, so you won't be
bothered by the lectures. Well, at the same time,
the people watching the lectures could also see
you going through that installation. And that is
also very typical of Erik's work with immersive
technologies. It doesn't just want to create a
kind of a seamless other worlds, but it wants
you to also observe how that works, how the
technology works, how the technology evokes worlds
for you. And therefore, he wants you to combine
these different perspectives from the inside and
from the outside. That happens often in his work.
But it's also very interesting about this
planetarium that he created with us is that
it can show the solar system according
to historical ways of understanding it.
So actually, we can visit the solar
system with the Earth at the center
and the planets moving around to Earth. So in this
way, the planetarium also helps to understand
the kind of the historical development of how
we come to an understanding of outer space and
draws attention to the relationship between that
understanding and the kind of technology that was
available to reach out to outer space and how
it's actually, the combination of humans and
technologies that produces ways of understanding,
that produces knowledge of the universe.
And this project produced a whole set of outcomes,
very different outcomes. First, there was the
collaboration between astronomy and the history
of science with theater practice and with theater
performance studies, how that contributed
to new insights in historical practices
of knowledge transmission in astronomy. So new
perspective from the theater and from theater and
performance studies help to better understand
how these historical practices of science
communication, one could say, how they worked
and how they mediated ways of understanding.
Second, these insights from historical
and contemporary astronomy in their turn,
inspired new ways of using technology for this
of staging and installation art for new ways of
communicating science, and for explorations of
new creative and artistic possibilities. Because
for Erik, this project was the beginning of a
series of works about the impact of science on
imagination, and this included several works, in which
he explored, for example, the relationship between
Shakespeare's plays and the transition towards the
modern scientific worldview. So here's one image
of what he created. It was titled Hands on Hamlet,
and it is a VR installation with life actors. This
is another image of this same work, and this is
a related work titled Hamlet's Playground. That
was an online performance in which the audience
actively participated. You see here many
Zoom images actually of audience members.
Now, a third outcome of the collaborations
between performance studies, theater practice,
astronomy and the history of science
within this spectacular astronomy project
was that these collaborations led to new insights
and more research about relations between
researchers and their instruments in historical
as well as in contemporary scientific practice
and research into how knowledge comes about as
a result of these interactions between humans
and technologies. Insights that are much in
line with what philosopher of science Karen
Barad describes as post-human performativity
and the ontoepistemological role of instruments.
So what we can see is that the different partners
involved in this project, from astronomy,
from history of science, from theater
performance studies, from theater practice,
each contributed to this project from
the perspective of their own expertise,
and that somehow this project set the stage
for encounters between these different experts.
And also that they all benefited from the
project, but not necessarily in the same way
Each of them took away outcomes that were relevant
from the perspective of their own expertise. And
I consider this an example of what the title of my
presentation describes as reciprocal illumination.
And this is a term from Roger Kneebone and his
work on experts and expertise. Kneebone is a
professor of surgical education at the Imperial
College in London, and he's also professor of
anatomy at the Royal Academy for the Arts. And in
this book, he develops a theory of what it means
to be an expert. He looks at experts from very
different fields, from surgeons to pilots, jazz
musicians, engravers, many more. And he looks at
what it is that makes someone an expert. What can
we learn from experts about what it is to
achieve the level of mastery that they have?
What can experts learn from one another? And
also what can they learn from experts in other
fields than their own? And in this context, he
introduces this idea of reciprocal illumination.
This describes a situation in which interactions
between experts from different fields bring about
new insights, not because one expert teaches
the other something they didn't know yet,
but because the encounter inspires new insights
and triggers new ways of understanding,
brings about such new ways of understanding in
the encounter, and organizing such encounters
is an important part of Kneebone's research.
Now I find this notion of reciprocal illumination
most useful for understanding the kind
of collaborations that I described before
between theater and astronomy, and the history
of science, and between theater and robotics.
For these collaborations are not about one expert
filling in gaps in knowledge of another, like in
the more common idea of interdisciplinarity
as a kind of jigsaw puzzle where experts hold
different parts of the puzzle and bring it all
together, and then we get a complete picture,
for such interdisciplinary collaborations
certainly can be helpful. For example, when
working on complex problems that require insights
from different fields. Kneebone's idea of
reciprocal illumination also points to something
else, something that is not about adding up the
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but about how encounters
between experts bring about something new,
how to bring about new insights and new practices
that contribute to answering questions and solving
problems while also enriching the
expertise of those involved. Encounters,
therefore, are not only relevant for solving
the puzzle at hand, but also for the expert to
further develop themselves in their own practice
and to develop new insights beyond the project.
Now, being an expert, Kneebone observes,
informs how one thinks and how one sees things.
Being an expert is not merely a matter of having
obtained a particular body of knowledge that can
then be applied, but being an expert is
embodied in one's ways of engaging with
what one encounters. It's embodied in one's
capacity to move beyond merely applying what
one already knows. And Kneebone describes this
as a combination of science, craft and art.
Science is in the knowledge, in the analytical
capacities and the eye for precise detail that
bringing an expert requires. Craft is in
the skills and the abilities to do things
with and from this knowledge. And art is in the
capacity to bring knowledge and skills together
in ways that are inventive and
relevant within specific situations.
Now, the importance of this combination
of knowledge, skills and creative know-how
as perspective from where to develop
new ideas can also be seen in an example
that we studied in the context of
our robot and theater research.
This example is a well-known example.
It's Boston Dynamics' video, Do You Love Me?
And the discussion triggered by this video.
Also the discussion, very importantly.
The video that you may have seen shows several of
Boston Dynamics signature robots dancing. It was
heavily criticized from the field of dance for how
it applies dance movements to robots and how
it does this to show off the technical prowess
of the company in a way that is entertaining.
The result, as Jessica Rajko rightfully observes,
is not robot dance. It's not even really about
dance. It's about capitalizing on popular
depictions of dance and exploiting them to
sell Boston Dynamics robots to a broad audience
by means, and here I quote Rajko, "a cliché grab-bag
of dance moves like the Running Man, The Twist, a bourré here, a développé there, and a few
other things that make robots look
like they're dancing to entertain you."
In an interview about the making of this video,
Aaron Saunders, the Vice President of Engineering
of Boston Dynamics, confirms that indeed, the
video was meant as an entertaining advertisement
for the company. However, when a little later he
reflects on what a collaboration with the dancers
and the choreographer brought him,
he appears to have little to do with dance
and that the robots are made to perform
with creating a nice video. He explains that
what actually interests him,
is the dancers' and the choreographers'
embodied understanding of motion. The skills and
knowledge embodied in dancing and what might we
learn from the creative expertise
for new approaches to robot movement.
Thus the video capitalizes on imposing
human dance-like movement on robotic bodies.
To sell the company, what is relevant and
useful to him as a robot developer, is how
the expertise from dancers and choreographers
may bring about new insights in how dance may
illuminate robot developers. And I don't
know whether Boston Dynamics CEO Saunders
was interested in setting up situations,
in which such illumination is reciprocal,
that is, situations in which collaboration
is relevant for dance as well. I don't know.
But that is what we are interested in our
collaborations with roboticist dancers
and puppeteers in our current project and our
upcoming Dramaturgy for Devices project.
Now one thing that I have learned from
the Acting Like a Robot project, from the
Spectacular Astronomy project, and from radical
interdisciplinary collaborations is that making
such illumination go both ways places specific
demands on how one collaborates, how collaborative
processes are organized, how everyone contributes
to them, and how everyone can take away different
things from them. And it seems to me that part of
the expertise that theater has to offer and
that makes theater such an interesting
ecology for this kind of interdisciplinary
collaborations is precisely about that. About how
to organize collaborative development processes,
about how to organize them in such a way that
illumination can happen and go both ways.
Making theater almost always involves
bringing together a diversity of experts
for joint explorations of materials, for practices
of making, to which all contribute from their
respective expertise. Yet theater is also an
example of how this does not necessarily result in
a situation of illumination for all. Conventional
approaches to Western dramatic theater, for
example, are organized in ways that do not
leave much space for such illumination. As to
contributions of a wide diversity of experts in
for example acting, movement, design, sound and
others serve to support what is supposedly already
given in the play or in the vision of the director.
So these are top-down creative processes with
little space for inspiration and co-creation.
Yet such traditional modes of staging plays are
not the only model for creation
and collaboration in the theater.
And in this respect, the history and development
of Dutch theater is interesting for how it has
supported the development of alternative
approaches to collaboration and collective
co-creation, that have made it the most interesting
ecology for the kind of radical interdisciplinary
collaborations with partners from outside the
theater that I started my presentation with.
And in this context, Kneebone's idea of reciprocal
illumination offers a useful perspective on the
modes of creating of these makers, and what they
aim to achieve with their modes of working.
Therefore, I want to have a brief look at several
aspects of the history of Dutch theater and the
modes of working that developed in this context to
show how these not only resulted in new kinds of
performances, but also important understanding of
making theater. New modes of understanding making
theater, new modes of collaborative thinking
through and with materials in the theater.
Now, a striking characteristic of the
history and tradition of Dutch theater
is that there's actually not much of a tradition.
For example, Dutch theater lacks a tradition
of important national playwrights. There are
some historical playwrights that are generally
acknowledged as important, like 17th century
Joost van den Vondel, or 20th century Herman Heijermans.
Yet their role in theater history and their role
in contemporary theater and contemporary theater
culture is nothing like that of Shakespeare,
Racine, Molière, Schiller, Lessing or Ibsen in
theater traditions in other countries around
the Netherlands. I mean, years can go by without
any play by Vondel or Heijermans to be staged.
Dutch theater culture not only lacks a
strong presence of canonical Dutch authors,
there is also much less emphasis on plays per se,
plays and their authors, and traditions around
them. Much less than in some other countries
around us. At the same time there is, and
certainly has been during the past decades,
a strong focus on experiment and innovation.
And what came first, let's focus on tradition
or more focus on innovation, is hard to say.
But one thing that can be observed is that the
experiment and innovation side of things got
a major impulse from the early seventies on,
starting with what has come to be known as the
so-called tomato action in 1969. And
the cultural policy that followed in the wake
of this action. Actually, [. . .] refers to a
series events that started with tomatoes being
thrown at the staging of The Tempest by a major
Dutch theater company in 1969. And since then,
actually, tomatoes come to stand for a much
wider generational revolt in Dutch theater,
much in line with the rebellious Zeitgeist
of the late 1960s, and in the early seventies.
The tomatoes thrown at The Tempest
might not have had much effect
had there not also been a forward-thinking
Minister of Culture who, kind of acknowledging
the arguments and pleas of the protesters,
laid the foundations for a system of state
support for the arts as a system of state support
that privileged innovation over tradition.
The Netherlands is, of course, not the only
country with the state system for support for
the arts, but what is quite specific about how
this system operated during the past decades,
is precisely this. It privileged experiment
and innovation over heritage and tradition.
Now, this lack of a strong focus on heritage and
tradition, that defined Dutch theater already for
much longer, in combination with this policy
system stimulate innovation and experiment
made the Netherlands an excellent breeding ground
for developments that also have affected theater
in other countries, but particularly strong in
the Netherlands. Namely, that what theater scholar
Hans-Thies Lehmann has described as the development
from dramatic to post-traumatic theater.
And he uses this term to describe developments in
which plays are no longer at the center of theater
culture, but that there is the development of a
much wider array of ways of creating performances
that do not start from plays, but other kinds of
materials that are radically interdisciplinary
very often. That bringing dance, visual arts
and music, new ways of telling stories,
new ways of using text, if texts at all,
and really processional creative processes.
Interesting in this context are observations
by Flemish dramaturg Marianne van Kerkhoven.
Marianna van Kerkhoven was prominently present in
the Dutch and Flemish theater context of the 1980s
and 90s and early 2000 until she passed away
in 2013. And she was a resident dramaturg in a
very central experimental theater in Brussels,
where she worked with the likes of
[. . .] And she witnessed
these makers from close by and contributed to
their work. But she was also a prolific author and
editor in chief of the Theaterschrift series, a series
of publications in four languages published by a
network of five European avantgarde theaters.
And this issue, this shows one of the issues
the one on dramaturgy. And actually
these publications are now collector's items.
They made a really radical impact by then on
the theater scene. And in the introduction
to this particular issue, she observes that there
is a lot of really new types of theater being
produced in the countries that they're writing
about, that move away from dramatic theater,
and that this all causes also kind of move
away or disappearance of a standard model for
making theater. So she observes a relationship
between these types of performances and the way
they are created and how the disappearance of
particular type of performances also means
new approaches to making, and how this opens up
new ways of collaborating in and with the theater.
And she observes, importantly, that these
approaches are often process-based or
process-oriented, as she calls it, and how
in such approaches, theater is no longer,
first of all, a representation of a play or
of a fictional or real reality, but that
the form and content somehow come about in
the making of, in the creative process. And that
during the making, structures are figured out,
stories are developing, concepts come about.
And how all these processes do not so much work
towards an already projected outcome, but that
there are kind of experimentations,
explorations, investigations. And what the
performance will be, whatever it will be like,
will take shape during these experimentations.
And also the result is often not like a
very clearly structured, not necessarily
very clearly structured thing, but something
that triggers experiences that require active
involvement of audiences and triggers them to thinking
and reflecting about what they are encountering.
Now, for a publication that more
recently came out, actually very recently,
I talked to a great number of theater makers now
active in the Dutch context as well as outside
the Netherlands. And I talked about their creative
processes. And it was quite striking that although
there are many differences between their works
and between their ways of working, the general
characteristics identified by Marianne van Kerkhoven
in the early 1990s come back time and again.
They understand their work in terms of process and
research. They see creation as a way of thinking
through matter and thinking through practices, and
it's something they do together with others and as
a way to actively engage the audiences.
Now, one maker I talked to is Dries Verhoeven.
And we talked about his work Phobiarama.
Dries Verhoeven started making theater in
the early 2000s. He's now a prominent
presence in Dutch theater culture
and starting point for his works are usually
situations that set the stage for audiences
to see and experience things. And from there
ideas develop about what might happen in that
situation. So that's quite the opposite from
first having a play and then design what is
situation will look like. So he starts from the
opposite side and starts from that situation.
In the case of his creation of Phobiarama, the
situation that provided the starting point was the
haunted house, and the idea of the haunted house,
and to use that to engage with cultures of fear.
How politicians and others capitalize on fear. So
to use the haunted house as a model for inciting
fear, but also to trigger reflection about the
operations of, mechanisms of inciting fear.
And to do so, he started from actually
building a haunted house-like construction.
His aim was not to copy an actual
haunted house, but to use
its logic, and to start working
from that logic and see what
could be done with that. And this is what
his haunted house looked like. So this is
a temporary construction
that can be placed in a
park, or a square, or somewhere else in public
space. And this is an image from the inside.
So you can see that he left out the spiderwebs,
and the skulls, and the other decorations that
are usually part of such haunted houses. And
instead he created this clean environment
because he wanted to work with projection,
not so much literal projections on the walls,
but fear as a matter of projection. How fear
results from how we project things on the
world and on people, and how these projections are
triggered. So he wanted to start with a kind of an
empty space. But what he did take from the haunted
house was the structure, in which the audience
drives around in these little cars. And the setup
of the haunted house is constructed in such a way
that you quickly lost your sense of direction. The
car circulates the same trajectory time and again,
yet it is impossible to get an overview of
the totality of the space. Cars follow a
kind of a winding path, and sometimes views open
to other spaces that you cannot access, in other
places, pillars block the view to other
spaces. Sometimes you can see the car in front,
but at other moments you can't. And like it is
the case with these haunted houses,
visitors have no control over speed or direction,
let alone what happens around them. So entering
means handling over control and being driven
around for 45 minutes until one exits again.
Now, the title Phobiarama may serve as an
indication of how this haunted house approaches
fears as phobia, as anxiety disorders that are not
justified by or in proportion to actual threats.
Phobiarama is about making experiential how
ways of looking are haunted by politics of fear.
And one way in which this is happening is
by means of a soundscape, of political speeches
in which threats and fear are recurring
motif. At some point the lights go down,
shadows appear, and things seem to
appear from the shadows. So first,
this big bear, reminiscence of
childhood fears and childhood tales.
And over time the soundscape intensifies and the
bears turn into these creepy clowns. And whereas
the bears are slow, these clowns are fast. They
suddenly appear and disappear. And a little later,
then the performers start taking off the
clown mask and costumes to reveal a big man.
Big, muscled man. And they get to
their ways in sweatpants and sneakers,
many of them with tattoos, some of them wearing
necklaces and heavy watches, impressive men
that look like they could be bouncers in
nightclubs, free fighters or criminals.
So this final transformation brings the question
of the politics of fear closer to the life world
of the spectators. These men are not fictional
characters, but real people that are part of
the real world. We don't know them. We don't
know anything about them. Yet, how we see them
is far from being candid and uninhibited. What
do we actually see? Where do our predictions
begin? This is what the performance confronts
us with. The performance ends with a poetic
moment of release. Lights go off. In the
dark, one of the men sings a song. And even
if one does not understand the words, the
melody and the sound of his voice bring a
sense of calmness and serenity. After the song
has ended, they open the doors in the outer wall
and daylight and sounds from the world outside come
in and the audience can move back to reality.
Phobiarama does not tell the story, but
it takes the audience along experiences
to confront, to trigger thoughts that invite
reflection. Creating this performance was about
figuring out how to make this happen, and it was
not a matter of a pre-written plan, but involved
a lot of experimentation, a lot of figuring
out while doing, and interaction with materials.
Such process-oriented ways of making fun,
van Kerkhoven observes, are based on the conviction
that the world and life do not offer up their
meaning just like that. Perhaps they do not have
meaning, and we have to make meaning. And in this
context, making theater can no longer be a matter
of bringing out the structure of the world as
it already is in a play, but becomes a quest for
professional or possible arrangements that can
question and reflect on the world. And making theater
is arranging these materials into compositions.
Creating compositions becomes an act of making
sense, of investigating the world, of the subject
that the performance is about, of the materials one
works with, and of the ideas and intuitions
that drive creation. Creation becomes research.
A recent example of how in such
creation the research becomes the work
is my second example of contemporary theater.
And that is Julian Hetzel's There Will Be Light.
Hetzel was born in Germany and received
his training as theater maker from the
Amsterdam program DasArts. And his work
There Will be Light was described by the
makers as a project about the precarious
economy of hope. Dries Verhoeven was
dealing with cultures of fear, Hetzel
shifts attention to economies of hope.
And working out how to address this topic,
the makers came up with a rather radical idea.
Namely, to organize a contest in which participants
compete for a year-long basic income of
in which the winner really took away the basic
year income. It was an open competition
that started with a call for participants.
Participants were invited for an
interview in a kind of a glass box.
And it's this kind of glass where you can look
into the box, but you can't look out. And they
were interviewed there. An image of a gallery
spaces with audiences around, and performers also.
The woman sitting against the
pillars is one of the performers.
And after ten full days of interviewing, ten
participants, one from each day of interviewing,
were selected for the finale that consisted partly
of a prepared performative element, and partly
of a real, live on the spot competition. A bit
like a game show, again in that box, predominantly.
But this creation was not merely a game. It was
also an investigation about value, about values,
about what and whose values count when deciding
about the future, about what to invest in,
about who gets a chance. It was an exploration
of alternative ways of making such decisions,
because here it was not CEOs or policy makers
making the decision about what to invest in, but
homeless people. The interviewers in the jury of
the finale consisted of homeless people who, from
their perspective and expertise, made a decision
about who deserved the basic income and why.
Furthermore, the project was an investigation
of what receiving such an income does.
The winners, there have been three rounds
so far, report on what it did to them. They
give their feedback, what the project
does and what can be learned from it.
And the project includes their expertise and
that of the jury members into the project
and acknowledges them as valuable experts
with regard to what the research is about.
Furthermore, preparing this project also involved
many other experts. Experts in law, and finances,
in alternative economies, and in administration.
Experts that brought in the necessary practical
information about what is legally possible
about risks and possibilities, as well as
about reflection, about broader historical and
theoretical and philosophical perspectives on what
was going on. They all contributed from
their respective or specific expertise,
and they also gained from the project. That's also
what we got back from them. For them contributing
to the project brought new insights and new
perspectives on their own field of expertise
from a very different perspective than they
were used to. So what we see here again is
this illumination that goes both ways and
for which the theater sets the stage.
The theater sets the stage for these
encounters between radically different experts,
and the encounter produces insights and continues
to produce these insights, as the reflections of
the former winners keep coming in, and future
iterations of the project are being prepared.
So this is a radical and in many ways
very sensitive project that requires a lot of
very careful preparations, a lot of very careful
thinking through in collaboration with many
people. It's also a very exciting project for how
it experiments with new ways of producing insights
about important questions. And also to how it
raises the question how to capture these insights,
how to make them available and accessible
beyond the project. In a project like this,
the performance is no longer the sole outcome,
and perhaps not even the most important one.
And this is also the case in my final example.
And this is the work of another theater maker,
who uses the stage for bringing about illumination.
Illumination for many people involved
and making this even more the core of
her practice. This is Lotte van den Berg in
her ongoing project Building Conversation.
In this project, she uses the theater to engage
groups of people in dialog about specific
topics. And she has developed a whole set of
creative strategies to engage people in dialog.
And through these dialogs, participants develop
insights about the topic of the conversation.
They bring in their respective expertise and
gain from the encounter with the insights
of others. So it's not about coming to a shared
conclusion, but about this mutual illumination.
And this project is now entering its 11th year.
A book has just been published about the first
ten years. It's a highly successful project. So Dries
Verhoeven, Julian Hetzel, and Lotte van den Berg
are only three examples of a very diverse field of
makers. But I hope that these three have given you
a first impression of how these developments
in Dutch theater during the past decades have
resulted in radically new forms that are quite far
removed from representations of fictional worlds.
And also how these developments have opened the
possibility for understanding theater as a context
of research, and context of experimentation, a
context of exchange of expertise, a context for
crossing over with other fields of expertise. Now
to conclude, I want to go back to the beginning.
First to this image with which I started.
So this is actually also an image from a
performance by Julian Hetzel. This is
his work All Inclusive, and I'm really
happy to have this image on the cover of my
new book that just appeared with Palgrave.
And this book reports on these interviews that I
was mentioning before, the interviews with makers.
And it traces their creative processes. It
shows how, in the practice these makers, making
has to be understood as thinking with and through
materials, and thinking through and with practices.
And as I pointed out at the beginning
of this lecture, it seems to me that the
developments within the theater have opened up
the possibilities for these organic crossings over
between research within the theater, and
research between the theater and other fields.
In such crossing over, like for example, the
projects that I mentioned between theater and
robotics, and between theater and astronomy,
it seems that the value of expertise from
the theater is relevant in two different ways.
Or maybe we could say at two different levels.
On the one hand, very specific expertise about,
for example, movement, animation or design that
can contribute to developing new insights in
other fields, like how in our robot project,
the expertise of dancers and choreographers and
puppeteers proved to be most relevant for robotics
before developing the behavior of robots. On
the other hand, there is the expertise with
regard to creative process, with making space
for collective thinking through materials,
with setting the stage for illumination that
is mutual and goes both ways. And this is a
different kind of expertise that is embodied
in particular practices of collaboration and of
co-creation in the theater. This expertise,
I think, is most relevant for a much more
fundamental rethinking of development processes
in other fields, like for example, robotics.
And this will be one of the big challenges in
our new project Dramaturgy for Devices.
We're not there yet, but I hope to be able to tell
you about that in a couple of years. And for now,
I would like to end by showing a couple of
images from the robot theater collaboration that
I started with. This is what happened last
Friday. We're currently working with three big
robotic arms, the kind that are usually
used in industrial settings, for example
in car factories. And what we are experimenting
with is using the three of them together to
create the impression of one entity. So
what we want to work with is not actually
constructing one body with them, but having
them move and behave in ways that suggests
that they are parts of one body, as a result
of how they move relative to one another,
how the movements relate to one another. And for
this we work together with puppeteers and with
visual artists. And doing so is on the one
hand a very interesting artistic challenge,
but it appears to be also a challenge
that is very interesting for robotics.
And for a very different reason. The company
that creates these robotic arms, Kuka,
is very much interested in what we are doing
and how we are going to solve this challenge,
because this possibility of this way of behaving
and programing them is not part of how these
robots were designed. Making these robots move
together and to coordinate their movements
together is a very complicated technological
challenge, and that is why they want to know
how we are going to solve this. A second aspect
that's very interesting to them is that we try
to design the movement of these robots in a way
that is quite different from how they developed,
how they imagined that these robots
would be used and how they would be made to move.
And this actually brings in the second level
of expertise from theater and how this might
be relevant for other fields. Because what we are
trying to change is the process of developing and
programing movements and to develop that towards
a more open process, an open-ended process.
In the usual way of making robots move, and to make
these Kuka arms move, is to program poses. So
you choose a series of poses and then the robot
calculates how it gets from one to the next.
So movement is actually derived from a
succession of static poses and what we
try to do is more or less the opposite.
We want poses to emerge from movement.
It now sounds very simple, to
turn this around, but actually this is
technologically very complicated, but therefore
also very relevant and interesting to Kuka.
So hopefully this exploratory project,
you can see some more movements,
hopefully this will again result in
this kind of illuminations that work in
both directions, both for creating an artistic
expression, that also will actually tour next year,
and on the other hand that it will bring in these
insights for robotics that are very important for
our collaboration with Kuka Design
and Factory. We're not there yet,
but this is where we are now and this is
also where I will end here now. Thank you.