CHiPP is a centre of researchers and performers devoted to historical performance practices. It aims to bridge the gap between academic and artistic research and foster new avenues for both performance and scholarship. The avenues go two ways. We believe that practiced-based research can inform scholarship and offers new insight into historical knowledge and performance. As such, CHiPP is innovative internationally and it is the unique centre in Denmark to combine practice and research. Interdisciplinary, the Centre is devoted to various disciplines (theatre, music, dance, and history) and it reaches out to various cultural institutions. Its mission is to investigate historical practices such as gesture, declamation, vocal ornaments, stage design and costumes. Sources from the history of performances involves investigation in sources and materiality, approached from various analytical viewpoints. Using practice to inform knowledge, CHiPP advocates knowing by making and making in order to bring new knowledge. Its provides and foster the historical criticism of the academic researcher in a crucial cross-pollination with the practitioner's artistic knowledge. Our principal aim is to re-actualize historical performance practices through an enhanced historical awareness and analytical-dramaturgical approaches.

From the academic point of view, the aim of the centre is to reach a more concrete and complex understanding of the techniques and effects of historical performance practices. Furthermore, the centre aims to develop multifaceted strategies for reading the dramatic texts and the musical and choreographic scores of the past by taking their original contexts into account to a higher extent than has traditionally been the case. From the artistic point of view, the aim of the centre is to discover and explore forgotten performance practices as well as novel readings of historical texts and scores. This approach makes CHiPP truly innovative and differs from the Historically Informed Performance movement, which has traditionally focused on decontextualized reconstructions of the past ('museum theatre').

These collaborations between performance and scholarship are conducted as workshops, where artistic researchers, performing art students, and professional performers collaborate to create a new understanding of historical performance practices by experimentation and research. In addition to established classics, the centre will investigate forgotten and neglected works that are aesthetically complex and challenging quality, including works that have been marginalized by the hegemonic canon of theatre. This focus allows for productive exchange between academics and industry professionals and it establishes groundbreaking and new performing techniques informed by research. We regard the artistic knowledge of practitioners as an embodied form of aesthetic thinking, which may strengthen our understanding of the epistemological perspectives.

Institutional Partners and International Collaborations

• BnF
• Comédie-Française
• The Royal Danish Theatre
• The Royal Library
• The Stanislavsky Archives at the Moscow Art Theatre

• Paul Allain, Professor, Dean, School of Arts, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
• Lars Ole Bonde, Professor Emeritus in Music Therapy, Aalborg University
• Melania Bucciarelli, Professor in Music, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
• Mauro Calcagno, Associate Professor in Music, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Maria Delgado, Research Director, Central Royal School of Speech and Drama, London, UK
• Wendy Heller, Professor in Music, Princeton University, USA
• Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Higher Education & Research, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, UK
• Ida Krøgholt, PhD, Associate Professor in Dramaturgy, IKK, AU
• Thomas Rosendal Nielsen, Associate Professor in Dramaturgy, IKK, AU
• Patrice Pavis, Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
• Ellen Rosand, Professor Emeritus in Music, Yale University, USA
• Willmar Sauter, Professor Emeritus, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Álvaro Torrente, Professor in Music History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Meike Wagner, Professor in Theatre Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden
• David Wiles, Emeritus Professor of Drama University of Exeter, UK