#performance #body

In this course you explore how the body’s innate knowledge emerges when unnecessary tension, habits, and imitation fall away. Through mindful movement and embodied awareness, you uncover presence, authenticity, and a new depth of expression.

Bodywork begins with reduction: not by adding, but by removing, we reveal what is already present. The body carries knowledge older than any method. When we let go of imitation, adaptation, and unnecessary effort, space opens for what is truly our own. Reduction is not a loss but a return to “enough” – to a presence that no longer strives, but simply is.

The boundary between body and environment becomes permeable when effort softens. Audiences can sense this openness: less expression creates more experience. “Only a body that knows what it is doing can do what it wants” (Feldenkrais, 1966) – a call for awareness rather than perfection.

The workshop combines elements of Asian and Western martial arts with structural and functional bodywork. Individual posture work, dialogical partner exercises, and collective group processes draw on Aikido, Systema, the Talmi Method®, and Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Anatomical and physiological principles and a committed physical presence take center stage  – especially where performers and spectators meet directly.

This opens a potential beyond perfected techniques of representation: a continuous reinvention of human behaviors and forms of expression that reconsiders interpersonal interaction. The practice space also expands  – parts of the workshop may be held outdoors.

In this practice, “enough” becomes an artistic principle: enough tension to breathe, enough form to appear, enough awareness to touch. A form of art that no longer lives from representation, but from relationship  – from simple, immediate being.

With Slava Kushkov (movement scientist, choreographer, and movement director)

More information: https://summer-university.udk-berlin.de/?id=649