Expanding Artistic Practices comes to an end; Professor Nirav Christophe says goodbye to HKU

The professorship Expanding Artistic Practices covered multiple research projects that investigated how creators worked in non-artistic contexts, often in the social sectors and in co-creation with other professionals or experience experts. The research brought forth many valuable insights about what is needed within arts education to prepare students for this ‘hybrid artistry’.

One example is the project In In Search of Stories, a research partnership with AMC Amsterdam about how experiencing and creating art can be of value for terminally ill patients in finding meaning in life again.

Another concrete example is the project Voices for Safety, in which students of HKU Theatre, together with community theatre group STUT, healthcare workers and experience experts, explored the various perspectives in and around youth services.

And PRIKKEL invited artists, designers, students, doctors and scientists to investigate the sense of feeling overstimulated, by giving shape to this experience in a collaborative effort that was subsequently shared with an audience.

The language of creative making processes

The professorship was led by Nirav Christophe, who has already been at the helm of two earlier professorships. For Nirav, the finalisation of this one also coincides with his departure from HKU, and the start of his retirement. Christophe has been working at HKU since 1992, as co-founder of the first Bachelor in theatre writing in the Netherlands. Throughout the years, he specialised in creative making processes and developed a language that makes these processes transparent. In 2007 he published his book Het naakte schrijven (‘Naked Writing’).

Transdisciplinary cocreation and multivocality

Christophe brought two important concepts to HKU’s art education: Transdisciplinary cocreation and Multivocality. The first term refers to a way of working in which you as creator are operating in a context that is just as important as your personality. And where the outcome of a creation process is unknown at the start; the actual search for the exact form is central to the work process.

With multivocality, Christophe describes the many voices that lie within each (upcoming) creator, and alternately make themselves heard in a perpetual stream of thoughts. These conscious and unconscious inner voices can either delay or accelerate a creative process, or sabotage it. In his book Ten Thousand Idiots (2018) Christophe shows what this multivocality in the artistic process can look like.

Executive Board member Simon van Damme praised Christophe at the farewell ceremony for introducing both concepts. “The professorships where Nirav Christophe took charge, went through an evolution of the individual creative process, via the interdisciplinary, to a transdisciplinary view. This evolution from inside to outside also occurred at HKU. Our professorships develop new knowledge at the intersection between art and its application in the social domain. Creative making processes are at the core, making an impact on people and society. The HKU professorship Expanding Artistic Practices ended up at the national forefront of transdisciplinary cocreation and multivocality.”

'There’s an HKU Theatre before Nirav, and one after’

Words of praise for the departing professor also came from Caspar Nieuwenhuis, director of HKU Theatre: “Nirav gave HKU Theatre a distinctive profile over the past 35 years: by establishing the Writing programme, catalysing the interdisciplinary projects and the founding of the creative-technological Maplab. Moreover, dozens of teachers at HKU Theatre were able to conduct research within one of his professorships. This turned the academy into a centre of knowledge. There’s an HKU Theatre before Nirav, and one after.”

A blank sheet

Christophe concludes his career at HKU by publishing two books: In Een leeg vel; Laatste lessen in schrijven en schrijfpedagogie (‘A blank sheet; final lessons in writing and writing pedagogics’) he reflects upon his ‘untaught lesson’ and in Schrijvend onderzoeken, onderzoekend schrijven (‘Research-by-writing, writing-by-research’) he and three other lecturing researchers describe the various creative and performative writing strategies for the artistic research practices of writers, designers, theatre makers, composers, visual artists, game developers, as well as teachers and students in the arts.