Learning Objective
Spark imagination, strengthen storytelling skills, explore and communicate impact, deepen artistic thinking, start or deepen multidisciplinary collaboration and/or creation, reflect on artistic practice and its possible role within society, improve presentation, and writing skills.

Course Content
What is the power of a compelling story? How do we apply a narrative to stimulate imagination, and what does it require? When do you feel the impact of something you hear or see in your body, when does it stay with you? When was the last time you were moved? How do you engage others?

As Waters Rise: Musical Storytelling aims to explore these questions together. This course is about finding a story, a story that draws our attention, a story that engages us. Do we always need words to tell a story? No, certainly not as a musician. But if you can't tell the story with words, you often can't do without them either. As a group, we collectively study how our everyday, artistic and musical languages interact, sharing our often embodied artistic knowledge through storytelling. We explore how theorizing is storytelling (Hermes & Kopitz, 2024 p.43) by discussing social, cultural, theoretical and philosophical lenses and our own positionality. Over the course of two semesters, students will develop projects that link this subject with their musical interests. Taking the unknown as a starting point: ‘How can you see an absence when you don’t know there is a presence?’ (Carpenter, 2016. Dramaturgies of Cultural Translation). You will receive both individual coaching and group work and are expected to engage in concrete exercises that will challenge and deepen your artistic thinking. 

With methods rooted in artistic research and cultural studies, we explore the interaction of art with societal challenges such as climate, migration, decolonisation, and new technologies. The Netherlands is a country of water. Through a long history of living with and fighting against it, the Dutch identity has become connected with water. Water is becoming more and more of a concern in society. So how do we relate as artists? Art and music have a long history of expressing and depicting nature and water. How would we represent water musically today? What does it excite in us, and when? As Waters Rise stands for literal waters rising but also for the pressure that is rising globally politically, socially and that is challenging for our communities. Depending on the topic of individual projects, matchmaking with students of the VR academy is possible for multidisciplinary projects. 

This course aligns with Kim Spierenburg’s Professional Doctorate and artistic research project As Waters Rise. 

Instruction
Individual coaching and group work on:

• the art of storytelling
• examples of compelling narratives
• musical storytelling
• analysis methods
• auto-ethnography
• the secret to a good title and synopsis
• examples of music depicting nature and water and socially engaged art
• multidisciplinary collaboration and/or creation

Materials and readings

• Michel van der Aa, The Book of Water
• Tan Dun, Paper Music
• Joke Hermes and Linda Kopitz, The Pocketbook of Audience Research
• Steve Reich, It's Gonna Rain
• Black Pencil, Schokland Project
• Stuart Hall, Minimal Selves
• Tony Adams et al., The Handbook of Auto-Ethnography
• Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape
• Chantal Mouffe, Artistic Activism and Agonistic Space
• Bill Viola, Ascension and the Raft

• …and many more