”På Plats” by Rebecca Hilton
På Plats is a choreography and design research residency situated in a Residential Elder Care Home in Stockholm, Sweden and a Palliative Care Centre in Melbourne, Australia. It is part of Space and Place in End-of-Life Care, an innovative health care research project exploring how a dying person, their loved ones, and the attending staff perceive, understand and experience the settings in which death and dying occur. På Plats and Space and Place in End-of-Life Care are part of DöBra, a transdisciplinary research program situated in the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics at the Karolinska Institute. DöBra is home to five transdisciplinary research projects, each of which is committed to generating and supporting positive achievable change processes in palliative and elder care environments.
Aim and research questions
På Plats is situated in environments where diverse communities of people are embodying, experiencing and performing essential, epic, continual and continuous choreographies of care.
1. What specific knowledges, concepts and methodologies might choreographic ideas and practices have to offer present and future elder and palliative care environments?
In these communities of care, many different kinds of bodies interact via the sense of touch (the faculty of perception through physical contact). They interact or act together through the experiential (involving or based on experience and observation), the somatic (relating to the body as distinct from the mind), the haptic (relating to the spatial perception and manipulation of objects) and the sensational (physical perceptions resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body). A care community is filled with every conceivable kind of touching and feeling often communicating complexities of experience without language, without needing to name them in order to transmit, receive or believe in them.
2. How to document something experienced via the felt senses? How to record and/or make a record of these experiences and understandings? How to render the experiential material? How to share ideas and experiences of felt communicativity as something manifesting beyond the scope of written or spoken language?
In the context of På Plats, an ethic is continually being made and remade in response to the vulnerabilities, needs and wishes of those particular people in that particular place at that particular moment, and in relation to the roles, responsibilities and subjective desires of each of the situated researchers.
3. How might the aesthetic ideas and practices of choreography contribute to the development of a shared ethos in elder and palliative care contexts? How to develop an ethical frame-work and practice that is informed by and inclusive of aesthesis – lived, felt experience, knowledge obtained through the senses? (Cazreaux, Clive. Art Philosophy Junction, aesthesis, definition 1.)
Research implementation and anticipated impact
På Plats is, in its most basic form, a commitment to producing, facilitating and documenting a range of experiences that embody, contain and frame the many choreographic ideas, practices, gestures and actions at work and at play in end-of-life settings. Information and understandings that may have the potential to contribute to the positive transformation of end-of-life settings for the people involved in working and visiting, living and dying in them.
Schedule
This research project began in 2018 and is ongoing.
