ULYSSES Collaboratory projects provide new perspectives on creative collaboration, testing new methodologies and forms of cooperation tightly linked to specific contexts and audiences. and reflecting on shared responsibility and collective processes.

The Time of Music 2022 Composed Theater Collaboratory led by composer Mark Applebaum invites participants to work as polyartists in a performative space of intersecting artistic disciplines, and to create a large-scale work together. Composers, improvisers, performers, and composer-performers — as well as artists working in any media (dancers and choreographers, actors, visual artists, film makers, performance artists, spoken word poets, etc.) — are welcome. A focus of the course will be the creation of small “composed theater” works involving physical gesture and choreographed events for performing musicians.

Today’s artist practitioners often maintain a hybrid identity with roles in both the creation and interpretation of artistic content. For those participants identifying principally as content creators, they are invited to make small works in collaboration with individual instrumentalists from the IEMA Ensemble through preliminary online meetings in advance of the course, and then in rehearsal in Finland. Those identifying more as interpreters are invited to prepare small composed theater works in advance of the course and present them in a masterclass setting. Others may elect to participate in the course without prior preparation.

All participants are involved in the collaborative composition of a culminating concert-length work to be presented at the conclusion of the course. This event, taking place 11 July 2002,  combines all of the aforementioned content modules along with a video notebook the class will make of on-site films of composed theater performances throughout Viitasaari in idiosyncratic, “beautifully quotidien” locations (for example, in a forest, on a lake, in a gas station, in a supermarket, near train tracks, on a factory loading dock, in a parking garage, at a pizza restaurant, etc.).

The course is limited to ten (enthusiastic, open-minded, community-oriented, curious, experimentally-tolerant, and creative) students. The age limit for the course is 32 years (born after 1.7.1990). The course is taught in English and includes participation in the course, open lessons and workshops, and free entrance to all of the festival concerts.