Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

ANNIE DORSEN SPOKAOKE

Annie Dorsen’s Spokaoke is a karaoke of famous political speeches—from Margaret Thatcher to Socrates, Harvey Milk to Jesus Christ. Participants sign up for a speech, which they perform for the audience in the style of their choosing. Unlike pop music karaoke, where the tunes tend to be more familiar than the lyrics, with Spokaoke the texts are invariably more famous than the performance. It’s therefore up to participants to make their delivery live up to the powerful words. Is there a way to see this kind of karaoke as educational—as a form of learning through doing? Could it constitute a rehearsal for public political speech?

Annie Dorsen works in a variety of fields, including theatre, film, dance, and, as of 2010, digital performance. Her most recent projects, A Piece of Work and Hello Hi There, are part of her continuing exploration of ‘algorithmic theatre.’ Those pieces, along with Magical, a collaboration with choreographer Anne Juren, continue to tour extensively in Europe and the US. She is the co-creator/director of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, for which she won numerous awards. Her next piece, Yesterday Tomorrow, will premiere at the Holland Festival in June 2015.