Acting Otherwise

Acting Otherwise is a doctoral research project investigating acting as a practice of situated ethical judgment under conditions of institutional pressure. The project traces a shift in contemporary acting practice: a movement from technē , the mastery of technique, toward phronesis, the embodied capacity to discern and act well when no protocol can decide in advance. It argues that this shift cannot be adequately thought without a third term: the erotic, after Audre Lorde, as a measure of aliveness operating in artistic life whether or not it is named.

Situated within Nordic artistic research, the project responds to an institutional landscape shaped by New Public Management, two converging traditions of procedural ethics (research compliance and post-#MeToo safeguarding), and the broader transformation of rehearsal and pedagogy into spaces of articulated governance. Against this backdrop, the project asks how acting can remain alive and ethically attentive: through embodied discernment, relational sensitivity, and a willingness to stay with what cannot be resolved in advance.

The dissertation is organised as a woven dramaturgy of five essays and four refractions. The essays stay close to specific situations: rehearsal moments, pedagogical encounters, performance fragments. The refractions move transversally across the dissertation's terrain, developing the erotic as a research dimension, articulating phronetic acting as pedagogy, performing a love letter as research method, and staging a reversed consent that turns the research frame back on itself.

Key collaborations include the Helsinki-based ensemble 4 Floors of Whores (Emilia Jansson, Astrid Stenberg, Herman Nyby, Riku-Pekka Kellokoski), the performance group Glitcher (Emelie Zilliacus, Martin Paul, Josefine Fri, Oscar Fagerudd), the director Johannes Maria Schmit, and the practice of Brave Love developed with Rika Johnander. The project develops the actor-maker as a figure exercising a grammar of minimal interference and proposes resources for practitioners working inside heteronomous institutional conditions: the love letter as method, reversed consent as speculative form, counter-perversion as tactic.

The research aligns with Esa Kirkkopelto's formulation of artistic research as institutional practice: research that does not only take place in institutions but conducts research on them, taking institutions as its object.

PUBLIC DEFENSE:

25 September 2026 at 10.00 am
Talteatern, Konstnärliga, Fågelsången 1