Anders Carlsson

Anders is an actor, theatre director, musician, writer and doctoral student in Performance Practices at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. He has a background as founder and artistic leader of the Swedish theatre group Institutet (2006-16) and was appointed professor in acting at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki, Uniarts (2016-21).  

In his work with Institutet, Anders was involved in the development of post-dramatic experimentation in the Swedish context, as well as the establishment of networks of co-production and touring internationally. The aesthetical orientation of Institutet performances developed a symptomizing method to trouble established modes of audience participation and perception, to let the performance as event disrupt social continuums and to experiment with open-endedness to participatory dramaturgies. 

As acting professor, Anders initiated pedagogical and artistic experimentation which explored disciplinary expansions and interdisciplinary possibilities in which the acting expertise of dramatic theatre tradition was re-situated and re-configured. Today, Anders research practice involves collaboration with former student’s artistic work.

His main research focus is to explore acting as an institutional practice in terms of counter-conduct and performance making as counterculture in relation to given institutional conditions. His PhD-project thereby navigates the disciplinary expansion of acting from the stage to its wider frame of scenes in its embodied, relational, and performative dimensions.