SCHULE@Im_flieger 2025 with Elizabeth Ward // Performativity and the openings, gaps, and crannies to be found through performance practices
17 March – 7 December 2025
Deadline: 1 October 2024
Photo: Elizabeth Ward
17 March – 7 December 2025
Deadline: 1 October 2024
OPEN CALL
Participation and residency in the temporary SCHULE@Im_flieger
Artistic direction/mentoring SCHULE@Im_flieger 2025: Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
Curation: Anita Kaya & Elizabeth Ward
Guests/experts: Alix Eynaudi (FR/AT), Biba Bell (US), Oisín Ó Manacháin/Oisín Monaghan (IE/AT), Yasemin Duru (DE/TR/AT)
Organisation/feedback: Verena Herterich
Direction/project development/artistic and methodological process supervision: Anita Kaya
SCHULE@Im_flieger 2025 is realized in cooperation with Reallabor Fassfabrik .
In 2025 Im_flieger offers the 4th edition of SCHULE@Im_flieger – a hybrid format that combines transgenerational and transdisciplinary knowledge transfer, artistic research, production and discourse. Under the artistic direction and mentoring of the Vienna-based choreographer, dancer, and teacher Elizabeth Ward, this edition will be dedicated to the topic “Artistic Research Through Slippery Time(s)”.
The aim of this part-time, year-long program is to facilitate a collective learning experience for a small group revolving around the shapeshifting, slippery states found in performative practices. Among others, these questions are aimed at accompanying the research processes:
In what way is performance making speculative fiction, worlding attempts through which we can access new or forgotten sensitivities? How can our understandings, confusions, deep knowings be accessed and opened up through performance practices? Which environments and frames do we choose to construct/invoke in live performance and how porous can they become? Can these insights lead up to new (s)p(l)aces, while staying present and active in the unknowns of our own slippery times to come?
Slippery Time(s) is artistic research on the connections, sediments, ruptures of time, transformations, and fleeting and elusive moments accessed through the heightened state of performance. Performative practices, expanded choreographies, and scenographic thinking can afford experiences outside of the familiar. Extra awareness will be paid to the more-than-human companions, material and immaterial, that frame and accompany these occurrences asking, “How does our relationship to the more-than-human influence our works and our way of working?”
The aliveness of architectures, ideologies, cosmologies, and histories will accompany us in this research as we work between the Im_flieger SPACE (1050 Vienna) and Reallabor Fassfabrik, a former barrel factory on the periphery of Vienna in the 23rd district. The two localities invite participants to experiment with how their research is influenced and read in different settings.
Slippery Time(s) invites participants to bring their interests to the group while having a collective bent towards the ecological, where humans are not separate but, of the glorious and messy world we live in. One in which a sense of political and environmental doom can overwhelm and yet, we keep in the cycle. Life energy meets the compost pile.
Elizabeth Ward will share her broad experience in choreography and dance, in practical and discursive research, and its implications on the personal and political level. The intention is to meet each other and the developing personal and collective practices with compassionate discernment while fortifying an inner awareness. Next to the intensive week research spaces within the core group, Elizabeth Ward will support the participants by mentoring each process one-to-one. The guest researchers Alix Eynaudi, Biba Bell, Oisín Monaghan and Yasemin Duru will share their specific approaches in workshops/labs. The participants will develop further, deepen and document their practices within a residency and share them with a wider public in December 2025.
More info here.
Who can apply?
Artists, as well as people from other professional fields with an interest in investigating a personal/specific topic, an openness to articulate their own research and a curiosity to think and exchange with others about performativity. Experience of studying dance and/or movement and/or embodiment are assumed. A group with five participants is aimed for.
Conditions
– Participation required on specified dates in the period March to December 2025 (see schedule)
– Working language is English
– Participation costs: 450 € (after acceptance)
– Participants will receive a fee of 1000 € for the residency and presentations
Submission documents
In English, max. 3 A4 pages, PDF format, max. 3 MB to schule25@imflieger.net:
– Short description of own practice and topics
– Letter of motivation: What interests you about the subject Artistic Research Through Slippery Time(s)? What do you hope to achieve?
– If available: links/documentation of previous work that is essential in the context
– CV
Deadline: 1 October 2024
Curation: Anita Kaya & Elizabeth Ward
Info/contact: schule25@imflieger.net
SCHULE@Im_flieger 2025 is realized in cooperation with Reallabor Fassfabrik.
PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE March – December 2025:
The school year consists of a series of four week-long meetings, one 4-day lab, and one weekend workshop (6 hours/day, 1 hour break included) together with a series of twelve bi-weekly Tuesday evening meetings. Within the core group there will be extra studio-time offered (residencies in summer and autumn 2025). The workshops are also open for external participants to join.
Mon 17 – Fri 21 March, 2025
CORE-GROUP WEEK – BEGINNINGS // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
The first week is a moment for the participants to get to know each other, sharing past practices and current interests. We will work between movement and writing, developing a collective method to document our time together and collective practices that we can bring forward through the spring.
Thu 15 – Sun 18 May, 2025
INTENSIVE LAB WEEK // Alix Eynaudi (FR/AT), Biba Bell (US), Oisín Ó Manacháin/Oisín Monaghan (IE/AT), Elizabeth Ward (US/AT) (lab with open workshops)
Within the lab the guest artists will share their specific approaches in workshops:
To slip/sleep into the field of expanded choreography as an unstable set of artistic practices // Alix Eynaudi
In this workshop, an extension of Alix’ research project Institute of Rest(s), a series of exercises is articulated around a library, exploring its interstices, hollows, remains, the margins, additions, annotations, the footnotes: a space to exercise rest in the arms of words and sentences and poems.
Epiphytes and (para)sites: an afternoon assembly // Biba Bell
Performance, walking tour, and listening practice, this event is an invitation to witness, map, and move through and amongst the phantom forest scene of a postindustrial space, proposing tree dancing as a practice of searching for former and future exoskeletons.
If they’d let me make each part of my body, I would have chosen the strength of trees. (Esthela Calderón)
Cymatic Body Research // Oisín Ó Manacháin/Oisín Monaghan
An exploration of sensorial movement through sounding fluid bodies.
Mon 23 – Fri 27 June 2025
CORE-GROUP WEEK – MIDWAY MEETING // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
At the midway point of the year the core group will return for our second intensive week together to reflect and exchange on the personal and collective process and work together before the summer break. The focus will be on sharing the development of the work so far, acknowledging which individual tendrils and directions have taken shape, and discussing starting points for individual research.
(summer break)
Mon 8 – Fri 12 September 2025
CORE-GROUP WEEK – RE-GATHERING // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
Regrouping after the summer break we will reconnect themes of interest amongst the group collectively and individually. For those who had residency periods during the summer, there will be time to share and reflect. Those with upcoming residencies will also have time to share their plans for what lies ahead.
Sat 11 – Sun 12 October 2025
FRAMING WEEKEND WORKSHOP
Perception and Seeing // Yasemin Duru (DE/TR/AT) & Elizabeth Ward (US/AT) (open workshop)
Yasemin Duru will guide us to explore new ways of seeing and perceiving space and light, with a focus on intentional use of materials and understanding the messages they convey.
Mon 1 – Sat 7 December 2025
CORE-GROUP WEEK – OPENING THE PROCESS TO THE PUBLIC // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
During our final week together as a group time will be spent focused on preparation for the public presentations. The proposal is to present a process of the research. Every format of presentation is welcome. We will also use the time to reflect on the time together and celebrate the completion of SCHULE@Im_flieger 2025.
BI-WEEKLY TUESDAY MEETINGS // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
Every 2nd Tuesday 18-21h: 1, 15 & 29 April, 13 & 27 May, 10 June, 16 & 30 September, 14 & 28 October, 11 & 25 November 2025. We ask for a minimum commitment of 75% to these days.
PERSONAL MENTORING // Elizabeth Ward (US/AT)
15 hours of one-to-one mentoring during the weeks of residency. Schedule to be agreed upon with the artists.
Alix Eynaudi (FR/AT) is a French choreographer & dancer living in Vienna whose work is situated within the field of expanded choreography. Her projects explore different formats of making work public, such as publications, salons of collective studies and performances. She has worked as a dancer and performer for a number of companies and projects (AT de Keersmaeker, J. Lacey, A. Juren, B. Charmatz, E. Ward) and develops her own work since 2005. Her most recent works are Noa & Snow, BRUNO and Institute of Rest(s). Basking in dance as a space of study Alix dances, works, writes, between craft and chaos in a joyful mess of sorts. She doesn’t work alone; any event, research, invitation is an alibi to spend time with accomplices, a mesh of friendships scintillating under skins, a stirring of a full-of-wonder support. www.alixeynaudi.com
Biba Bell (US) is a dancer, choreographer, and writer based in Detroit. Her choreographic work, often set in unconventional venues, focuses on domesticity, labor, and architecture. Her current project investigates dance and arts activism as it intersects forest protection and conservation, through the lens of what she theorizes as epiphytic choreographies. Bell’s work has been presented at the Kitchen, Movement Research, Roulette Intermedium, Jack NY, Centre Pompidou, Garage for Contemporary Culture, Jack Hanley Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Insel Hombroich, Matéria Gallery, Galerie Camille, amongst others. She has recently performed in several Detroit Opera productions directed by Yuval Sharon, and internationally has performed with Maria Hassabi and Walter Dundervill. She continues to be influenced by her work as a founding member of the performance collective Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011, 2021). Bell earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and is an Associate Professor of Dance at Wayne State University. Of her dancing the New York Times writes: “It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild.” www.bibabell.com
Elizabeth Ward (US/AT) is a dancer, choreographer and occasional Outside Eye. She is interested in how individual and collective dance histories are shaped by geography and the movements of people and ideas. Her earliest performing experiences were dancing children’s roles with the Atlanta Ballet. Later she studied Post-Modern Dance in Vermont which eventually led her to New York City where she danced for downtown choreographers such as Cathy Weis, Yvonne Meier, DD Dorvillier, Rebecca Brooks, Miguel Gutierrez, Biba Bell, and Heather Kravas. In NYC, her work was shown at Danspace, Movement Research at Judson Church, AUNTS, the Chocolate Factory, and the Kitchen. Since moving to Vienna she has danced for Anne Juren, Philipp Gehmacher, Veza Fernández, and Samuel Feldhandler. Her work has been shown in Austria through brut, WUK, TQW, Wiener Festwochen, ImPulsTanz, and steirischer herbst.
Oisín Monaghan (IE/AT) is a dance artist and visual performer/creator currently residing in Vienna. He began studying movement in NYC at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. Oisín has worked in collaboration with Xavier Le Roy, Maria Hassabi, Tere O’Connor, Christopher Williams, John-Mark Owen and Brendan Fernandes to name a few. Oisín has had the privilege to also work with fashion photographers Peter Lindbergh, Mario Testino, Terry Tsiolis, Ryan McGinley, Kenneth Willardt and John Rusnak. They have collaborated with other visual artists and presented work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Deitch Projects and The Chelsea Hotel, The Tilles Centre and various public spaces.
Yasemin Duru (DE/TR/AT) (they/them) is a multicultural multidisciplinary audio-visual artist based in Vienna since 2019. Yasemin’s intuitive and inquisitive approach to lighting, shadows, reflections and translating sound to atmosphere bring a myriad of different elements together in harmony and simplicity. www.yaseminduru.art