Jamil Schulze

MA Arts Pedagogy and Practice

2024

Jamil is an artist, theatre-maker, actor-movement trainer and co-founder of Nusantara Theatrics. He works across theatre, performance art, television and film collaborating with several locally renowned arts companies, such as Singapore Repertory Theatre, Pangdemonium, T:Works, Teater Ekamatra, The Finger Players and the Esplanade.

His performance practice stems from a background in Balinese masks, silat tua, butō dance, and the techniques of Chekhov and Grotowski. Alongside colleague and Nusantara Theatrics co-founder, he teaches a blend of mask work and silat tua they call 'Topengan Silat Tua'. Building upon this psychophysical approach to performer training, Jamil furthers his own mask practice at The Bali Conservatory.

Jamil’s research endeavours are particularly interested in practices of sensory attunement to the ‘atmosphere’ of a space and orienting the performer to human and other-than-human expressive presences within those spaces.

https://jamilsschulze.wixsite.com/my-site https://instagram.com/jamil.s.schulze

schulze.jamil@gmail.com

Thesis abstract

"One and Other": A polysensorial attunement to other-than-human presences within atmospheres

The theatre is a place of communion; ‘bodies’ sharing and alchemising registers of thought, feeling, symbols and sensations into meaning. Training the actor’s sensory awareness towards this end is ubiquitous amongst several acting systems, most notably ‘psychophysical’ methodologies. However, as it manifests in training, it takes a decidedly anthropocentric stance toward sociality and agency, reliant on human exceptionalism.

What might a practice look like in which an actor is decentralised from their own process, asking how they are already being ‘acted upon’ before even beginning to ‘act’? A practice in which the agency of other-than-human presences (objects, natural phenomena, architectural features, spatiotemporal relations, etc.) to affect and be affected by the actor are acknowledged.

This phenomenological practice-led study conceptualised a polysensory attunement practice oriented relationally towards other-than-human presences. Through a series of movement explorations, alongside six actors in a single-day workshop, it investigated what dimensions of sensory experiences participating actors reported. The polysensory acknowledges one’s sensorium as an entangled process of interoceptive, exteroceptive, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, associative and imaginative sensory domains.

Findings focused on how the possibility of responsivity to the other-than-human might alter, affect and influence the practitioners’ movements as expressed by the practitioners themselves. The study uncovered the possibility of framing the polysensory stimuli and responses as a ‘language’ with which ‘bodies’ (human and other-than) in a space, communicate with one another. This ‘language’ contextualised participants’ responses that may validate ‘intuition’ as a learning outcome of the actor’s training, and positioned the practice within the realm of contemplative pedagogies.

School of Creative
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Jamil Schulze

Work

Thesis abstract

Work experience