LAB – The Transparent Body
I explore through embodied practice how physicality is connected to image-making. Therefore, my creations and teaching content move between performative and visual art, from a need to approach the human figure from a different perspective: a difference of acting in or about physicality. This area of work stimulates each other and constantly seeks new forms and relationships. This culminates in a broad spectrum of outcomes or interventions within different media.
Across all disciplines, my practice is characterized by a sustained rethinking of how the human body is involved in the works. I explore intimacy as a practice of pursuing honest physicality within the arts. Intimate connections do not come about quickly and in numbers. Therefore, my artistry is based on a trust-building methodology of respectful and reciprocal encounters with the people I work with.
Why
For me, bodily awareness is the key underlying my own working method, that of the so-called Transparent Body. The Transparent body is my embodied understanding of a person’s most pure and porous physical presence. My priority as a teacher in higher art education, as a researcher in the arts and as a maker is always to create a working biotope in which I can guide those I work with to come to their most available bodily state of pure, sensory receptivity. This allows the performer to give pure attention to what is – being in the moment stripped of outside influences, and occupying space in the creation process/image in all its authenticity.
The practice of Bodily Awareness, combined with my embodied knowledge as an actor (I graduated as an actor from the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp in 2007), form the denominator within my artistic practice.
Skills
I think the effect of Bodily Awareness is difficult to generalise because it reveals different things about one’s own anatomical body, physicality and emotional being for everyone who participates in it. The ongoing process of becoming more physically aware starts and unfolds from the inside out. This means that the person’s personal inner world in the here and now determines the experience of the process. As a human being, you work from your personal inner world, thus connecting with the outer world. Through bodily awareness, certain aspects of physicality come together that for me formulate substantive conditions and properties of authentic embodiment:
First of all, the inner world exists in and from the artistic anatomy; the skeleto-muscular system, the inner space planes, the way skeleton and muscles connect (biotrensegrity and connective tissue), how to use your muscles and tonus correctly (eutonia), what role breathing plays in making space inside. These ingredients of artistic anatomy shape and lead to a concrete and all-encompassing body practice. After all, the body addresses a dynamic system in movement(s).
About Karel Tuytschaever
Karel Tuytschaever (°1985, Belgium) works as an actor, as a teacher in higher art education and as a researcher in the arts, as well as creating his own hybrid work. His fascination with physical presence within art plays a common key role in these four cornerstones of his artistic practice. For him, the cross-pollination that these four different approaches offer him in terms of physicality and embodiment is vital. Together, they form the unique heartbeat of his artistic development.
Karel obtained a master’s degree in acting from the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp in 2007, as one of the last classes under the guidance of Dora van der Groen. To date, he works as a freelance performer for theatre, film and television series. You can also hear him in voice-over work for TV, radio and museums.
Since 2008, he teaches in the Bachelor’s programmes Drama (Physical Awareness) and Contemporary Dance (Drama) at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp / AP Hogeschool He is a member of the dance training committee and the student mentoring team. He is regularly asked as a coach and gives workshops and master classes organised by theatre studio Nest, OPENDOEK, University of Antwerp, deDansPunt, Let’s Go Urban Academy, scenography course KASKA, Zuidpool, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, De Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten & Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.
RESEARCH Karel is a PhD researcher in the arts at the University of Antwerp, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. When the artist swallows his image (2022-2026) is an in-depth trajectory that delves into the rarely explored domain of embodied knowledge within the relationship between the maker and their created image of someone else. He explores the role the maker’s unique physicality plays in presenting someone else’s body in an image. Throughout his research, he seeks ways to achieve more reciprocal and sustainable relationships between different artistic disciplines, finds new intermedial forms, further develops his inclusive vision and explores its scope.
He is a member of the research group CORPoREAL at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, the research group Art & ecology at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and a member of ARIA (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts) and ViDi (Visual and Digital Cultures Research Centre), two research units at the University of Antwerp. He is also a member of the research council of the Antwerp Schools of Arts.
MAAKPRAKTIJK Platform BARRY was founded in 2015 out of the need to create an environment in which Karel’s personal hybrid own work can be developed, made and shared. He reconsiders how to approach embodiment in art, striving to create space for a more authentic and honest physicality in the works. From 2019, BARRY (BE) has a long-term collaboration with DansBrabant (NL), in which Karel is involved as one of the core creators.
Sharing YOUR expertise
With LAB-O we create a learning community that wants to reach beyond its own conservatory.
LAB-O wants to become a knowledge circle: everyone is invited to contribute within a certain framework