Performance Lab

Performance Lab

Experience art through your body
The Performance Lab combines art history, performance, and embodied experience. It works with performance, dance and movement principles, and reenactment to explore new ways of understanding and experiencing art. It is an investigation into how movement and sensory experience can transform the way we perceive art. Since 2017, the ongoing project Body of Art has invited participants to actively engage in dialogue with artworks, artists, and their own bodies.

The Performance Lab offers modules at higher professional and academic levels for art students, as well as workshops for a broader audience of art lovers and anyone wishing to deepen their performance skills.

Every Body Has a Body of Art

Art History and Performative Reenactment
This is an exploration of how reenactment can provide insight into art history and allow for a personal interpretation of art in any form. Theory and practice alternate dynamically. History, artists, and their visions and working methods are combined with reenactment and accessible Eastern and Western dance and movement exercises.

Participants step into a painting, adopt poses, feel, move, and improvise. In doing so, they activate their own “body of art,” discovering their expressiveness, physical vocabulary, and personal interpretation of art, which then re-enters into dialogue with the artworks.

Fluxus Performs!

This module covers the foundational skills of performance and the history of performance art, with a special focus on the Fluxus period. Within this context, students create their own performances and reflect on how the knowledge gained can be integrated into their own practice.

The foundational skills include working with the body, in space, and in time. Targeted exercises emphasize these three elements. Theory on the history of performance art is directly connected to practice. The reenactment card game Perform! by H. Egger and D. Isaia is used to support this. Through reenactment, the game introduces various artists and their working methods. The playful structure allows participants to experience performance art without pressure, encourages improvisation, and, as players respond to each other’s actions, fosters natural reflection on performative acts.

This provides a theoretical foundation for the performance process, clarifying the steps before students develop their own performances.

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Workshop: Art & Movement – A Physical Dialogue with Art

In this workshop, we move together among artworks, responding to forms, lines, materials, and architecture. Participants are invited not only to look but also to feel and move. We explore how proximity and embodied experience can transform the way we perceive art.

Through subtle movements, short accessible dance moments, and simple physical invitations, the space becomes part of our composition, and the artworks become partners in a shared, unique experience.

During the workshop, you will explore: How artworks gain new meaning when the body actively participates. How moving together can create an enriched sensory experience. How your way of seeing is enhanced when your whole body is engaged, not just your eyes.

This workshop is accessible to everyone, regardless of experience in dance or performance. The goal is to explore, play, and experience together how movement and the body can transform the art experience.