Modernised Salon: Broadening Performers’ Perspectives on Public Presentation

This artistic research project focuses on developing a new type of presentation format, which centres around live chamber music and introduces different modes of interactivity among the audience and performer. For inspiration, we turn towards historical salon culture. Known for its non-hierarchical and interactive environment, our modernised salon embraces a playful environment that blurs the lines between performers and audience, mixes musical styles, displaces hierarchies, and blends other disciplines of knowledge with the presentation of music. Throughout the research project, we will be testing various strategies for designing the atmosphere of the event, experimenting with lecture-recital and open rehearsal formats, exploring the potentialities of the venues and discovering how these influence our design decisions as well as our artistic practice. The project is a practice-led artistic research, pursued through a combination of autoethnography, both individual and collaborative, and Tansy Spinks’s Actual, Active, Associative model, created for investigating sites for sonic artworks. As a result there will be new theories on performance, music-making, and audience participation, addressing the current knowledge gap on alternative performance formats. The theories will offer solutions to the questions: What kinds of potentialities exist for performers to modify the presentation of their own artistic practice when placed in a modernised Salon concert format, and how preparations for this type of performance influences their artistic decisions?; Which strategies and event components enable a performer to present their artistic process in an engaging and meaningful way?; Which components work best for designing a lively interactive salon environment?. We will conceptualise a prototype to provide a kind of blueprint for other performers' reproduction of similar formats in the future, thereby enriching the diversity of cultural events.

The project is conducted by Kristi Kapten, Theodore Parker, and Vittoria Ecclesia, and is funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture's fund for Artistic Research KUM-LU14.