CARPA8 combines colloquium and laboratory, by bringing together two processual activities and keeping them in motion: dramaturgy and artistic research. The event, dynamic in form and content, aims to combine embodied artistic practice with timely conceptualisation and theorisation to enquire what happens to artistic research when it takes a dramaturgical twist. We will assemble artists and practitioners from the performing arts field with innovators, researchers and theorists to explore, experiment and discuss how expanded notions of dramaturgy and artistic research cross-fertilise each other and expand into other fields.

Dramaturgy and artistic research are fields that evolve through critical processual activities that question how ideas, words, materials, humans, plants, animals, actions, interactions, activities, data and performances materialise. They both disrupt the taken for granted, linger in liminalities, embrace not knowing and ambivalence. They both oscillate at the edge of experiments where repeated actions and techniques continually expand upon the known and unknown. They both extend what dramaturgy and artistic research are and do. Simultaneously they create new settings, situations, and places in which they occur, both within and beyond the performing arts and academia, and address key issues of broader social, cultural, economic, technological and environmental contexts.

Solvitur ambulando, solved by moving, asserted St Augustin to argue that practical demonstration can prove a theoretical problem. There are many levels on which our complementary fields, dramaturgy and artistic research, can relate to this dictum. One of them is the engagement of action and movement as a way of furthering various knowledges. Motion activates shape, place and space and informs our thinking. It invigorates our perception, awareness, action and ways of knowing.

In CARPA8 we consider movement a gestus, a gesture as social comment and commitment that aims at eliminating borders and limitations. Moving across thresholds allows us to diversify the paths we trod. This inspires us to ask: how can dramaturgical thinking and artistic research actively engage in a motion that contributes meaningfully to timely art practices that address the burning issues of our societies? With CARPA8 we are interested in expanded and process-oriented concepts of dramaturgy and artistic research.