Body Mapping
Based on the relationship between the body and the space, the Body Mapping teaching concept seeks to offer an embodied and documentary approach to site-specific practice, or any type of place-based research. Through applying the principles of mapping, sensing and documenting, it proposes not only to enhance the attentiveness and responsiveness of the body, but also to uncover the multiple layers of a specific place (e.g., historical connotation, social meaning, cultural value and so forth). In doing so, a special emphasis is given on the narrative agency of a place, or the process through which stories, encounters, and discoveries emerge or are made. To do so, a variety of exercises are developed by combining certain embodied techniques (e.g., movement improvisation, Yoga), performative approaches (e.g., performance as research) with ethnographic procedures (e.g., participant-observation) and spatial theory. In short, in body mapping the narrative agency of a place serves as a source for developing a performative language, or an embodied expression.
Performance Documentation / Screen Performance
This research area focusses on exploring how embodied and place-based research can be documented, archived and disseminated. Here, questions such as: a) How to use documentation for generating a performance material, b) How to implement documentation in a research process and c) How to experiment with the tensions between the documentary and fictional, serve as a basis for developing a type of performance documentation practice in which the camera operates as a sort of “co-author”. While this suggests thinking more carefully about the camera work on site (e.g. positionality, accessibility, technicality), a key focus lies in using the editing process to (re)perform or (re)frame the “space of the image”. On the one hand, by generating a material – photographs, videos, sound recordings and so on - in close connection with a specific place (or topic) and on the other, by experimenting with how such a material can be translated into different media (e.g., video-essay, screen work, performed photography).
Performance Laboratory Work
A performance laboratory work proposes a type of “co-learning environment” in which the Lab participants – co-researchers, students, special guests – assume the role of “peers”. By assembling a variety of expertise and experiences which may be relevant for a place in question (or a specific topic), such learning environments aim to promote a cross disciplinary exchange in which the body emerges as an agential force. This not only in terms of enhancing one’s own sensory awareness towards other bodies, or one’s own feelings, sensations, impulses and so on, but also towards how we can listen and adapt to an environment. Therefore, a key emphasis lies on how a performance laboratory work can extend a studio practice (mostly carried out indoors) with an outside environment, for example, to public spaces, or any other alternative spaces. While this implies to situate the Lab participants in an existent socio-political and/or spatial context, such an approach aims to encourage them to “leave one’s own comfort zone” and thus, to open oneself for a (yet) unknown territory. In that way, every performance laboratory offers the chance of exploring modes of co-existence, co-creation, and co-learning, while deepening one’s own bodily and environmental awareness.
An experience explored in different stages crystallises a social action in time and space, and transforms subjectivities into concepts which shape the formation of a "body cartography". Individually we created and recognised the detours that constitute a "collective body": place of passage and compass; movement and non-movement; entrance and exit; intimacy and overexposure; shelter and insecurity; public and private; intention and risk; " told" reverie and liminal balance.
Can we define what we are doing here in a single word? My immediate answer would be NO! But if we thought about unleashing the words of a text? So then we would have to trespass the lines of a paper by unleashing our bodies as sort of letters in the space. And we did so, we created bonds, we connected word by word, we determined borders. For a moment there was neither body nor city! But there was simultaneity, there was a „Corporicidade“.