The seminar proposes a practical exploration of cities as a physical space for living together using various locations in Berlin as its model. Through bodywork and imaginative practices, participants explore instructions to take back to their own cities and contexts and forward in their own creative work.

It specifically examines to which extent imaginative, choreographic and somatic practices generate new space that both resists the neoliberal tendencies of urban developments and enables new insights into the urban as a collective space for action.  In particular, it is about everyday practical action, about choreographic scores, instructions for action, visualisation and exploration. We will propose invitations that insist on the potential for transformation through our bodies, their movements and perceptions in and for urban space and thus on what is literally in our own hands.

We understand magic too as the directing of attention and imagination in order to effect change. As an interface between clear protocols of action and surprising developments, between what is visible and what is revealed, magic challenges our collective embodied perspectives and can enable new shared experiences. It takes imagination seriously and is at the same time an exercise in playfulness. Are these qualities still applicable to everyday urban activity, given the challenges to which the city, and almost all city dwellers, is and will be exposed in the future?

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