Grant to KUV projects

Earlier this year, two artistic development projects at RAMA received a grant from the central “KUV” pool under the Ministry of Culture. KUV stands for Artistic development, and the pool supports innovative projects and artistic innovation within higher artistic education.

Artistic displacement and alternative virtuosity

One project is entitled: “BETWEEN AND BEYOND – an investigation of displacement between art disciplines”. The project problematizes the concept of virtuosity and its traditional meaning as a fundamental quality within performing arts.

With this project, jazz drummer and lecturer Christian Windfeld and assistant professor in classical percussion Henrik Knarborg Larsen explore alternative forms of virtuosity that can create a transformative experience of e.g. scenic presence and sensitivity, rather than precision and technical excess.

The project is carried out as a collaboration between the two percussionists, a choreographer and a dancer, who together form a core group, where the main part of the experimental process takes place during retreats, e.g. with the participation of dancers from the Danish Performing Arts School.

In a previous KUV project, Knarborg Larsen explored the influence that body awareness in the Japanese martial art Ki-Aikido could have on a percussionist’s ability to expand his expressive repertoire.

Listener involvement

The second project is entitled: “Touch, Perception and Listener Participation in Contemporary Music and Sound Art”. The project is an extension of associate professor in composition Juliana Hodkinson’s creative work, where music is considered relational, with a need for open, partly collective and more democratic strategies for composition, interpretation, listening and context – and where site-specific aspects become decisive importance.

Through the practice-based development of new performance works, Hodkinson tests methods where physical touch creates space for a holistic, multimodal and body-engaged engagement in the form of resonance with a given type of instruments (here: piano), in an interaction between a pianist, a composer and an actor.

The KUV projects are an important part of the knowledge base on the artistic educations. The KUV pool provides the opportunity for teachers through artistic practice to explore, further develop and reflect on new ways of working and methods in their own artistic and art educational practice. Over the past ten years, there has been a continuous development within practice-based artistic research, and KUV has developed to be essential for the knowledge base of artistic education in Denmark.

The funds in the KUV pool are distributed by a KUV committee appointed by the Minister of Culture.