Organised and moderated by: Ruth Benschop
Second meeting: April 7th, 2026, 15:00 – 17:00
Location: MERIAN art-science lab, University College Maastricht (UCM) Heksenstraat 8, Maastricht. Sign up by emailing: ruth.benschop@zuyd.nl
Don’t forget to sign up! Newcomers welcome.
The program line Oefenen Oefenen (pronounced as: [ˈufənə(n) ˈufənə(n)] asks questions about how in artistic (research) practices we rehearse, and what it means to learn to do so. Oefenen Oefenen is interested in a large variety of rehearsal practices such as the learning of lines, sketching or drafting, choir rehearsals, on-site run-throughs, etcetera, but also open try-outs, making-of documentaries or staged behind the scenes processes. To support and contextualize research into practices of practicing, exercising, probing, rehearsing etcetera, Ruth Benschop has started an offline reading group to which you are invited.
The second reading group will be on the 7th of April. Before each meeting, participants will prepare by reading one or two texts (that I will share beforehand, if possible) that engage with the (broadly conceived) topic of Oefenen Oefenen. These texts may for example include academic analyses of or philosophical reflections on the rehearsal as a genre, historical or sociological contextualisations of practices of practicing, fictional evocations or how-to manuals or guides. During the reading group meeting we will then discuss the texts we have all read. You are very welcome if you have an interest in the topic, either practically or theoretically. Everyone is welcome: artists and artistic researchers of all disciplines, teachers and students in the arts, students and scholars of the arts or of rehearsal practices and any interested others.
For this second meeting, please sign up no later than the 24th of March to ensure your place (max 10 participants) and to receive the texts for the meeting by sending an email to ruth.benschop@zuyd.nl. Also, for more information, reach out to me via email. Note that you can attend the meetings regularly or occasionally and that the session will proceed with a minimum of 2 participants. The meetings will be in Dutch or English, depending on participants’ preferred language and we will incorporate active translation practices depending on available expertise and requirement.
Ruth reflects on the first meeting here: ‘During the first reading group meeting, several teachers and researchers attended from different disciplinary backgrounds, including music, theatre, ethnography and fine arts, although most have interdisciplinary practices. We discussed two texts:
- Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens (2016). “Rehearsal without performance.” In: Lafer, I., Ruhm, C., & Buchmann, S. (Eds). Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theatre, Theory, and Politics. Sternberg Press, 138-50
- Augusto Corrieri (2016). An autobiography of hands: On training in sleight of hand magic. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 7(2), 283-296.
We discussed the pros and cons of finality as a logic for practicing. Can it be liberating to try to refrain from goal-oriented rehearsing or are deadlines such as concert dates necessary blessings, both for practioners and audiences? What does it take to observe and analyse one’s own practices of practicing and what makes such (auto-ethnographic) accounts persuasive and interesting? We noted that rehearsal also involves practicing receptivity and improvisation. And we spoke about how becoming practiced sometimes means not only having acquired skills, but also having acquired specific, embodied and sometimes difficult to change habits or regimes of practicing. The thing that stuck with me the most was a quote we talked about from Annie Dillard:
“But it gets harder… We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teen-aged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels – and I do – why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child?” (Dillard cited in Corrieri 2016, 286)
We talked about how the specificity of one’s body might configure what one may or may not practice easily. And we wondered what happens when such a body nonetheless might attempt to rehearse something impossible, like doing cartwheels.’
