Research
What is LAB-MT?
A dancer dances, a musician plays music, an actor acts, a teacher teaches. However different the words, the artist or teaching artist acts, ‘plays’. He/she/they use different techniques, inspirations, angles to do so.
What they do have in common are elements such as time, space, context and, body. Their own body, and that of the other. Bodily Artistic Consciousness explored between 2019 and 2024 whether and if so, how students at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp (KCA) are aware of their bodies. As an instrument, as inspiration, as one of the driving forces for playing, learning, and creating.
Awareness
Every human being has a body. You learn to move with this ‘by doing’ (Adoplh, 2008). Through special attention – you make yourself aware of this – and training, you can transform this movement into a specific form, such as ballet. You start dancing, playing the violin, communicating non-verbally… for the performing artist (music, dance, drama) and the teaching artist, the body is an important instrument (Mauss, 1973).
Artistic training rightly pays attention to its development. From teaching motor skills to focusing on appropriate posture to avoid injuries, for example.
The further in the training, the more another element is highlighted: the ‘artistic presence’. This presence ensures that the (teaching) artist, in addition to the technicality of the performance, can hold the attention of the audience/student on stage or in the classroom, to project his voice, to express his feelings, to enter into dialogue with conscious attention for the Other.
How do you develop this? How can students pay attention to this and become aware of it? How do you shift the focus from attention to awareness? The relationship between (selective) attention and perceptual awareness is intimate: when we pay attention to the body, we become aware of its various properties and possibilities (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2009).
When we remove this specific attention, does awareness of the bodily remain or fall away? Can an education in the arts, through training and practice, make students physically aware? Can it become a form of ’embodied’ consciousness that the student can use to enhance artistic and artistic-educational practice?
Physical Awareness
The study of a bodily awareness is, at RCA stimulated by, among others, the subject Physical Awareness (LB), taught by Magda Thielemans since 1987.
Attention development through movement training gradually grew into a qualitative ‘way’ mentioned by students and teachers through artistic and pedagogical experience, observation, sensing and knowledge acquisition.
After more than 30 years of teaching, Magda Thielemans and Jan Staes investigated the core of this ‘way’ of teaching within CORPoREAL. The research built on previous and simultaneous research within Schools of Arts/KCA on physical awareness and resilient artists, where the focus was strongly on injury prevention. The aim of this research was not to define what consciousness was in lessons, how it related to e.g. the psychological or philosophical approach to the concept or what the relationship between body and mind was. The time where a Cartesian separation of it seemed an interesting starting point from an epistemic point of view is far behind us (Damiaso, 1994).
The methodological framework of this study was shaped from a Mixed Method Intervention Study (Creswell & Clark, 2017). We first sought to ascertain how and whether students found and/or integrated RCA LB valuable in their own praxis. In the second phase, we sought to describe, analyze, record, and make sharable, in a practice-based manner, through a form of a ‘human library’, the practices used in LB classes. We focused explicitly on artistic praxis, deliberately choosing various performing arts disciplines in view of the uniqueness of Schools of Arts/KCA.
Structure and forms of guidance were checked off against other methods taught in group art education, at home and abroad (e.g. Alexander technique, Feldenkreis, Laban…) and linked to desktop research. Practical research led through observation and analysis to structures to frame the methods of Physical Awareness . The result of this research is presented in this website.
LAB: Physical Artistic Awareness
A performing artist’s expressive movement repertoire is a pivotal and core element within a creative complex. It is certainly also about building a sustainable, unique, versatile, expressive, inspiring, modular, and creative potential. The many adjectives point to the body’s generous connection with various aspects of artistry (Vanmaele, 2021).
The research conducted showed that from the LB classes taught by Magda Thielemans, students specifically mentioned that the physical also stimulated a more artistically conscious engagement within their own practice. The ability to use the body as a rich instrument gave impetus to improvisation and performance practice.
LB stimulated Physical Artistic Consciousness (LAB). What is the exact relationship between the conscious body and artistic performance was not the focus of this research project. Possibly therein lies fascinating follow-up research for colleagues.
Investigative dialogue: LAB-O
How can alumni of the college but also professionals in general develop lifelong and quasi-independent LAB? How can a learning community be formed and which learning space lends itself to it? How can the body as a transdisciplinary object connect different stages of education? (How) can different artistic domains within LAB reinforce each other? Characteristic of the questions that emerged during the research is the sharing of experiences, working together with colleagues and disciplines.
This form of constructivist learning also characterizes the evolution that Physical Artistic Awareness underwent and is still undergoing within RCA. A team of professionals, some with artistic, others with rather paramedical training, currently teach the ‘subject’ at RCA.
Bringing their ideas together gives a unique approach. This website aims to encourage this bringing together across institutions, courses, schools. We invite everyone to share their own material through the LAB-Os.
Magda Thielemans
Magda Thielemans (1964, Leuven-Belgium) started dancing at the Leuven Conservatoire at the age of 8. In 1984 she graduated from the Hoger Instituut voor Dans (present Dance Teachers Department of the Antwerp Royal Conservatoire, AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts / degree in Contemporary Dance and Education).
From 1987 on Magda has been developing physical awareness programmes for singers and actors at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (RCA). The Thielemans Physical Artistic Awareness Method (LAB MT) is implemented to help students familiarize themselves with their body and to train them in using it well, with the double aim of reaching their artistic goals and building healthy, long-lasting careers. LAB MT also focusses on the body’s spatial impact and its relation to co-players.
Her field of work expanded from 2000 to the IOA (International Opera Academy, Ghent) and the MuCH (Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, Waterloo) where she conducted workshops for many years. She regularely hosts workshops and masterclasses at home and abroad.
In 2008, Thielemans teamed up with physiotherapist Anne Schütt and associate professor Nathalie Roussel in a research project, developing an injury prevention training for musicians playing an instrument. From then on, physical prevention training is implemented within the curriculum of every music student at RCA.
As part of the CORPoREAL research-group, Magda Thielemans co-launched Resilient Artist,a research programme on mental pressure and coping strategies for artists (with the department of Applied Psychology of the AP University). From 2022 on, the mental prevention programme is included in the curriculum of every Bachelor 1 student at the RCA.
Thielemans is currently teaching and coordinating the physical awareness and movement training programme at the drama and music department of the Antwerp Royal Conservatoire. She is artistic coordinator of the educational dance programmes at the same institute.
She regularely hosts workshops and master classes at home and abroad and engages to build a learning network around the performing artist’s instrument.
Jan Staes
Jan Staes (1972) is a teaching artist. Until 2023 he was teaching at the Educational Master in Music and Performing Arts Royal Conservatory of Antwerp and a researcher in artistic research at CORPoREAL.
Since 2001 he has been active as a dramaturge with various companies in Flanders. In addition, he was coordinator of CANON, the Culture Cell of the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, for ten years and intendant culture, youth and education for the City of Antwerp from 2008 to 2015.
He is also coordinator of the Master Arts Education at Fontys Hogeschool voor de kunsten, Tilburg.
References
- Adolph, K. E. (2008) Learning to move. Current Directions in Psychological Science Volume: 17 issue: 3, page(s): 213-218
- Creswell, J. W. & Plano Clark, V. L. (2017) Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). Sage.
- Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.
- Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.
- Tsuchiya, N. & Koch, C. (2009). The Relationship Between Consciousness and Attention. In The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, page: 63. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
- Vanmaele, J. (2021). Critical reflections on Bodily Artistic Consciousness. CORPoREAL.