Alexandre Achour
Embodied Dialogue: Live Action Role Playing
Intensive Workshop, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays/Sundays, 2./3.5. and 16./17.5.2026, each 10-17 h, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 310

Registration on Moodle starts on 9.4.2026:https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3044
Enrollment Key: role

This course explores how Live Action Role-Playing Games (LARP) and choreographic practices can be used to reimagine how we relate, communicate, and navigate difference. It invites students to experiment with embodied and fictional frameworks as tools for rehearsing unfamiliar - or even altered - modes of interaction.

Students will engage with two LARPs:
• «Dance with me» explores the notion of support and co-creative play, through the fiction of a dance rehearsal and performance.
• «Family dinner» engages with conflict and the concept of Spaces of Acceptable Risk (SOAR), through the fiction of a family gathering.

Building on these experiences, students will collaboratively design their own LARP as a way to imagine and practice alternative approaches to communication and relational dynamics. In line with the Studium Generale’s 2025–2026 theme Zukünftigkeit / Futurity, this course treats the space of human interaction as a site of imaginative design. Through play, fiction, and embodied practice, students will be invited to reflect on normative relational structures and actively shape other narratives of being together.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: Active participation in all course sessions and LARPs. Engagement in group reflection and feedback sessions following each LARP. Full commitment to the final collaborative project to co-create a LARP. No prior performance or LARP experience required — only openness to embodied and collaborative learning processes.

Prerequisites for Participation: No prior knowledge of LARP, dance, or performance is required. The only prerequisites are curiosity and willingness to engage with the body and with others. All physical activities are adaptable to different needs and comfort levels.

Alexandre Achour is a choreographer, performer, and pedagogue. He has taught choreography at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), and currently teaches dance history at the Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen Ottersberg, focusing on non-European artists and artists with disabilities.  He holds an MA in Choreography (HZT Berlin), a BA in Contemporary Dance (London Contemporary Dance School), and a BA in Biology (Université Claude Bernard Lyon). In his artistic practice, he experiments with the weaving of worlds and the poetics of togetherness, interdependence, and relationality. In his on-going project Choreographic Games he explores the intersection between choreography and LARP.