Artist in Residence - Academy of Dance and Theatre 2025

Climate Imaginaries: Artistic Research for Regenerative Futures with Land and Water

The Academy of Dance and Theatre (ATD) Artist in Residence (AIR) 2025 hosts two parallel artistic research studios investigating the question of the role of art and imagination in responding to climate crisis with a focus on imagining possible future worlds where we relate land and water in more regenerative, less extractive ways.

Building on the method established by the Climate Imaginaries research project, this AIR invites an artist-in-residence to play a leading role in each studio - but places the emphasis on transdisciplinary, collective research, where the artist-in-residence works together with students, teachers, communities, societal partners and researchers from other disciplines such as climate scientists.

The two artistic research studios are:

The Power of Water

The Power of Water led by Dorothy Blokland. This studio will explore how artists, philosophers, children’s museums and climate researchers can come together to empower participants - particularly young people - to creatively investigate the relationship between oceanic climate change and colonialism with a focus on the relationship between the Netherlands and Suriname. Informed by Ubuntu philosophy and Indigenous scholarship (Kimmerer 2013), the studio will offer workshops where ATD students will learn how to use spoken word and photography to imagine what the water in our local environment in Amsterdam can tell us about its pasts-presents and futures: including the transatlantic slave trade, sea level rise and the consequences of climate change. Students will learn how to use the arts to open a dialogue with kids about big world problems. Of particular relevance to students on the teachers programmes in Dance and Theatre, the studio will also offer methods for engaging children and young people in climate justice through the arts in ways that inspire hope rather than fear.

Singing a new land into being

Singing a new land into being led by Agat Sharma investigating a collective reimagining of land-body relations through collective dreaming, improvised singing, and creating poetic/speculative digital landscapes informed by the cotton crisis in India and the impact of extractive agrochemical farming. During workshops students will create a performance with song and digital landscapes based on a script provided by Sharma, using collective dreaming techniques and drawing practices as ways of imagining alternative landscapes. Working closely with IDlab, participants will also be taught to use digital tools to create the virtual landscapes that have been collectively imagined and perform the songs they have made as they walk through them. In order to further share his artistic research process, the artist will also offer reading groups during the studio and produce a publication.

Activities

Running between January-July 2025, both studios will conduct three main activities:

  • From January: artist-in-residence conducting a practice-based research trajectory at the ATD.
  • In April: practical workshops for ATD (+ AHK) students to learn the artistic research methods of the artist-in-residence and explore how they could use them in their own practice.
  • In June/early July: a final public sharing where the AIRs and participating students will share the outcomes of their studio with teachers, staff, researchers and a wider public.

Images: Agat Sharma, post-show talk Early Warning System (2024);  Dorothy Blokland, The Power of Water workshops @Villa Zapakara, Suriname and @VoxPop, Amsterdam 2024

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