Performing Arts

Sense is a box of simple actions to try whenever you like. The Sense box contains three separate proposals - each one is unique and to be experienced independently from the others. The three parts are: a scent that confuses the wearer about their species, a ritual that turns the heart into a spray of lights, and a card game to start unexpected interactions among unknown hands. Sense is a subtle collection of sensory stimulants that are designed to open and rearrange perception of everyday events. Discover this box in your own time, and share with whoever you like. Take elements of it on your travels and try them with as many people as you can - the more friends and strangers do it, the more intriguing it can be.

Kate McIntosh creates work in a variety of different media, such as performance, theater, video and installation. Both humor and the link with science and experimentation are elements that frequently pop up in Kate’s work. Her practice is guided by her ongoing fascination with with misusing objects, and creating playful relations between spectators.

to enter the forest is an invitation to suspend the acquired systems of knowledge, to look for other ways of “world making.” The book includes a revised and extended version of to err together with the unpublished correspondances.

to err gathers walking exercises and notes, created as instruments for choreographic composition, but practicable by anyone, to put one’s perspective about self and what is other to self, as well as the relations between things, even beyond the human, into question.

correspondances is an ensemble of writing exercises through which to investigate the system of consciousness around verbal language, asking ourselves what words mean from a slightly shifted perspective.

The publication is coproduced by a.pass, nadine, Buda Art Centre, Indisciplinarte, Flanders State of the Art.

lucia palladino is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher in the fields of performance, choreography, and dance. Her practices consist in the elaboration of forms of resistance to notions of identity and ownership naturalized by history and by culture, that define our knowledge and expectations and that need to be undone in order to make space for meeting.

The books included in the series ‘Choreography as Conditioning’ are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

‘… Through Practices’ is written by artist researchers who have been involved in a three-day public symposium with the same title, explo­ring ecologies of attention, awareness, senses of participation, and agen­cies of practice. It presents resonances and sedimentations of indi­vidual, shared, and collective practices, mirroring different forms of participating and responding—diverse in/capacities, im/possi­bilities, and dis/interests as they appear in and through experience.

he books included in the series ‘Choreography as Conditioning’ are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The fourth book, ‘Choreography as Self-Conditioning’, presents a ‘written exhibition’. It consists of re-scripted scores originally develop­ed for the architectural space and the live audience of ‘House of Ear’, an immersive and intro-active sound parcours conceived and curated by David Helbich and Joris Blanckaert. These scores are DIY versions of the original works that invite readers to re-activate and engage with the thinking processes they stem from.

Writing from the body, from nervous impulses, sensations and gestures, but also from our being carried by matter, language and history, Sabina Holzer explores how writing may become ‘a way of singing and slip over into liminal, latent meanings and potentials.’ How to stay close to the body of the word? To perceive some of the multiplicity of our reality and ways of being, she incorporates somatic practices, ecology and new materialism, fables and science fiction in her writing. Allow me to dream a body with you gathers poetic essays and stories that delve into the fine grain of our corporeal entanglements and embeddedness. ‘Would an encounter between you and me be possible without all this?’

Sabina Holzer works in the field of expanded choreography. Her performances, interventions and texts explore the ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies with particular attention to movement and matter. She engages in practices of collaboration, philosophy, ecology, science fiction and poetry.

Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

Mycoscores / Choreospores is a set of artistic scores for exploring the connections between fungal and human ways of being, particularly through movement and dance. The scores propose starting points for dancing, weaving together social connections, composing and exploring performativity.

The publication consists of 31 cards, each presenting a single score, a booklet with a text entitled Fungi Feel, the introduction, instructions, a glossary and additional short text entries accompanying the scores.


Scores, writing and concept by Maija Hirvanen
Graphic design: Arja Karhumaa
Publisher: Friends of Physical Contemporary Art, in the frame of Performing Portals project. In collaboration with DAS Research/DAS Publishing, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Published Jan. 2024

Gathering together interviews, essays, rare archival material and translations, The Tempest Society revisits and resuscitates the forgotten heritage of a politicised theatre group – ‘Al Assifa’ – that was born out of the struggles of the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA), Palestine, anti-colonialism, and workers’ and immigrant labour rights. Contributors explore the legacy of the group – placing this history in the context of the European economic crisis and its effect on Greece, contemporary migration and the conditions of immigrant workers and refugees. Conversations with the artist, and participants and collaborators in her film, consider the potential for politicised art to move between the street and the factory in cultural production today.

Following The Tempest Society (2017), the original video installation commissioned for documenta 14, which took Athens as a site to reflect on radical equality, democracy and theatre as a civic space, the book brings to light the specific history, the archive, and the ongoing resonance of the agit-prop theatre group ‘Al-Assifa’ in the context of urgent economic, political and humanitarian upheaval.

With contributions from Abdellali Hajjat, Hendrik Folkerts, Pothiti Hantzaroula, and interviews with Philippe Tancelin, surviving member of Al Assifa, Bouchra Khalili, Omar Berrada, and Alexandre Kauffmann, and Isavella Alopoudi, Elias Kiama Tzogonas, and Giannis Sotiriou, the performers in The Tempest Society.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at MFA, Boston, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sessession, Vienna. In 2018 she has been shortlisted for both the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize. She currently lives in Berlin.

Adam Pendleton’s Notes on Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer stems from the transcript of the script prepared by Pendleton for Yvonne Rainer to read during their day spent filming at the Ridgeway Diner in Chelsea. The text mixes citations from Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and excerpts from Rainer’s own published works; the film ends with the gospel song ‘I Am Saved’ by the Silver Harpes over the footage of Rainer’s now canonical Trio A, 1978. Pendleton's chapbook plays on the duality of meaning in the word ‘movement’, exploring the synchrony of art and politics, and shared potentials of language and the non-verbal.

An exploration of the performativity of the law within Egypt's spectral legal reality.

The publication dissects material collected for Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk's film On Trials, a work-in-progress that uses modes of documentary and fiction making. In it, they reflect on sites where legal proceedings take place. And listen to all manner of actors from within the realm of the law including, lawyers, a TV camera operator who frequents courtrooms, a former inmate, on whose body the legal specter has left unutterable marks, and tailors who specialize in uniforms.

Born to an Egyptian father and a Polish mother, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-based artist and filmmaker, and member of the Mosireen collective. She likes to work with people and their histories, texts, archives, images, scripts and drawings. She is interested in how stories create stories, and how they leave the space of one reality and enter another, intertwining the boundaries of both. Rooted in performance and theatre, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social function that generates tension between participants and audiences.

Filmmaker, writer and freelance journalist Philip Rizk was born in Germany, raised in Egypt and is based in Cairo. His practice has moved beyond the documentary mode that directly engages with realities of historical moments, allowing the documented image to be infiltrated by imaginary worlds. Rizk is part of the video collective Mosireen.

Conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on the choreographic and curatorial practices of about fifteen international choreographers, performers, dramaturges and curators.

In the context of the numerous ethical-political challenges of the global present, actors from the dance and choreography scene both in Berlin and internationally talk about forms of knowledge production beyond the prevailing conception found in Western modernity. They counter the mind-body separation and the notion of a universality of knowledge with multiplicities of knowledge production that emerge with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.

What potential do embodied practices offer for emancipatory movements? How can community be created through these practices, and what responsibilities does this entail? What role does the body play in the preservation and transmission of knowledge?

In this publication, edited by the choreographers and curators Martha Hincapié Charry, Sandhya Daemgen, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and Matthias Mohr; Lukas Avendaño, Wagner Carvalho, Sandhya Daemgen, Ismail Fayed, Alex Hennig, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand, Martha Hincapié Charry, Isabel Lewis, Matthias Mohr, Prince Ofori, Mother "Leo" Saint Laurent, Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Thiago Granato and July Weber conduct conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on their respective choreographic and curatorial practices.

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

p 5-7 Almost on my way to you
p 8-10 Presque en route vers toi
Laía Argüelles Folch

p 12-13 Exercise in translation of Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Brief essay on the letter) by Laía Argüelles Folch
p 14-15 Exercice de traduction de Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Bref essai sur la lettre) de Laía Argüelles Folch
Quim Pujol, Paula Caspão, Simon Asencio, Pascal Poyet, Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré, Victoria Pérez Royo & Laía Argüelles Folch

p 16-17 Like a dinosaur upon awakening
p 18-19 Comme un dinosaure au réveil
Pascal Poyet

p 20-23 Is she a translator?
p 24-27 Est-elle traductrice?
Olivia Fairweather

p 28-29 New edition revised by my author
p 30-31 Nouvelle édition revue par mon auteur
Léa Poiré

p 32 Notes from a translation in progress
p 33 Notes d'une traduction en cours
Kate Briggs

p 34-37 Mothers & tongues
p 38-41 Langues (maternelles)
Mette Edvardsen

p 42-43 Collective reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
p 44-45 Lecture collective de Finnegans Wake de James Joyce
Dora García and readers, et les lecteur·rices

p 46-49 Notes for a talk that did not happen
p 50-53 Notes pour une conférence qui n'a pas eu lieu
Olivia Fairweather

p 54-65 Meticulous comparison of two books with their versions rewritten from memory, excerpts from a work document
Comparaison méticuleuse de deux livres avec leurs versions réécrites de mémoire, extraits d'un document de travail
Julián Pacomio & Ángela Millano

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people. Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’.

Part I : What is people’s gathering to democracy?

Part II : The new politicality of performance: the time of gathering, (re)creative labour and the domestic

Part III : Radiation Patterns of Performance

Contributors: Isabell Lorey, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, Stina Nyberg, Ana Vujanovic, Giulia Palladini, Livia Andrea Piazza, Valeria Graziano, Florian Malzacher, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Silvia Bottiroli

What happens when artists play with the codes of the visual and performing arts? Which negotiations take place when you leave your own medium to explore another? As it turns out, those who are considered innovative on the one hand, are often labeled amateur on the other. In twenty-five conversations with leading artists, curators, dramaturgs and production workers Katleen van Langedonck explores which choices are made when creating a contemporary performance, taking into account all layers of the creative process. In doing so, she draws on her practical experience as a coordinator and curator of Performatik, the Brussels biennial of contemporary performance.

Conversations with: Alexis Blake - Ariane Loze - Boris Charmatz - Charles Aubin- Daniel Blanga-Gubbay- Eva Wittocx - Germaine Kruip - Grace Schwindt - Helena Kritis - Ilse Van Essche - Jenny Schlenzka - Jimmy Robert - Joanna Zielinska - Kristof Van Baarle - Laure Prouvost - Lore Boon - Louise O’Kelly - Luc Schaltin - Maria Hassabi - Martina Hochmuth - Orla Barry - Sara Jansen - Steven Vandervelden - Ula Sickle - Ulla Von Brandenburg

What if, when a performance is described as “nothing short of magical,” it is not just a metaphor? Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva wrote a book together exploring the techniques involved in creating and curating contemporary performances through practical magic.

Like feminist magic, performance magic is not inherited or exclusive, but learned and inclusive. Anyone can practice it.

This is a book of recipes and spills, based on lived experience, observations and bewilderments of both writers.

Concept and writing by Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva Design: POMO Publisher: Friends of Physical Contemporary Art, in the frame of Performing Portals project Editing: Leah Whitman-Salkin Funded by Art Promotion Centre Finland

This book traces the legacy of Zona, Eastern Europe performance art festival that took place in Timișoara, Romania, between 1993 and 2002, years which were marked by a transition from communism to a new society built on different principles.

Bringing together artists from the former "Eastern Bloc," Zona became a space of encounters, a platform for theoretical discussions and postmodern art experiments, which displayed a remarkable diversity of artistic languages. The fall of the Berlin Wall, as Nicolas Bourriaud noted in his book "The Radicant", was the first decisive step towards globalization and the generalization of postmodern thought.

In the early 1990s, adopting subversive strategies helped artists overcome critical moments in totalitarian societies, which had been consolidated for decades in Eastern Europe. They combined techniques of expression such as pastiche, quotes, historical images, popular culture, or subcultures with personal mythologies. What resulted was often a critical mixture with an explosive effect. Body art became an appropriate language for critically analyzing stereotypes about the nation, religion, gender, or social prejudices and taboos. Body art facilitated the transfer of ideas and a dialogue with the audience, or it helped launch questions about identity politics. The concerns and intentions of the festival's protagonists were built around political, social, and artistic topics that were debated between the East and the West.

Essays by Ileana Pintilie, László Beke, Vladimir Bulat, Robert Fleck, Alexandra Titu, Berislav Valušek; artists' texts by Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejenaru, Ștefan Bertalan, Geta Brătescu, Oskar Dawicki, Ion Grigorescu, H.arta Group, Karen Kipphoff, Liliana Mericioiu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sorin Vreme.

A take away cup and a cloud is an essay written alongside the dance performance Seems to be by Denise Lim and Stina Ehn. It plays with a variety of containers–the list form being one. By mixing a personal with a historical gaze it traces the trajectory of mundane commodities and  the replacement of material with imaterial objects brought about to the everyday by technical progress. 

Traces of Dance brings together scores, drawings, sketches, notes, graphics and paintings, which contributes to define a textuality of movement between writing and image.

The drawings and notations of choreographers rarely come before the public eye; and yet they are far more than simple memory aids. Several types of speech and writing have been called upon to lead the viewer's perception through the traces that the dancing body lays down. While these texts are not all concerned with the specific practices of dance, they all deal with the most profound contribution that a knowledge of the moving body brings to our culture, to our lives.

With Georges Appaix, Dominique Bagouet, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Régine Chopinot, Merce Cunningham, Philippe Decouflé, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Roxane Huilmand, Isaac, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rudolf Laban, Daniel Larrieu, Jean-Marc Matos, Dana Reitz, Hervé Robbe, Kellon Tomlinson, Mary Wigman, André Lorin, Vaslav Nijinski, Louis-Guillaume Pécour, Pierre Rameau, Bob Wilson.

Texts by Daniel Dobbels, Jean-Noel Laurenti, Laurence Louppe, Valérie Preston-Dunlop, René Thom, Paul Virilio.

Writing and design of a publication documenting the script Gossiping is Not (Just) Bitching. The design deliberately uses different typefaces to formally identify the multiple voices woven in the performance.

21 × 14.85 cm, 16 p, laser printed

In the Mirror of Care Work was initiated by Inga Gerner Nielsen and Ar Utke Acs, two Danish artists whose work spans immersive performance, dance, choreography, curation and sociology. At two events in 2021 and 2022 that hosted dialogues between nurses and interactive performers, Nielsen and Acs began collecting stories and responses to conversational exercises, the latter of which revolved around questions such as – What can performance artists learn from nurses? How does the interactive performer's engagement with the audience correlate with the nurse's work with a patient? What skills, techniques, and strategies might these two fields share?

The exchange of knowledge from these two gatherings formed the basis of an ongoing dialogic project, as well as the content of this publication, which has been supplemented with seven essays by nurses, educators, performance theorists and performers. The book includes a series of drawings commissioned from artist Marit Benthe Norheim, graphics by TABLOID Press co-director Nat Marcus, and photographs of a performance installation staged by Nielsen and Acs in the Department of Nursing Education at University College of Northern Denmark – Hjørring.

Edited by Inga Gerner Nielsen and Ar Utke Acs, editorial assistance from Nat Marcus.

With essays by Elvira Crois, Majula Drammeh, Vienne Chan, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Tyra Wigg, Rikke Steen Mapstone and Ar Utke Acs.

Hello readers,

In the essay "Conflict Embodiment. Notes from dancing on both sides of Atlantic" you are holding in your hands, I delve into the research project I am busy with, which departs from the dancing experience in processes of migration.

Frictioning different dance traditions understood as "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" from the souths and norths, these lines inquire about the potential of translation in dances and what mother tongues could be in dancing/performing. By trying to embrace the complexity of the untranslatable, I aim to unfold Conflicted Embodiment as a research device from the question: How does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?

You are warmly welcome to move desacatadamente with me.

cate