Artistic Research Through Slippery Time(s)
Performativity and the openings, gaps, and crannies to be found through performance practices
17 March – 7 December 2025
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?”
Slippery Time(s) is also an attempt to be busy with the kaleidoscopic possibilities of time and space in performance-making. Time is not merely the clock running in time-based art but also possibilities of moments outside the logic of linearity. The aliveness of architectures, ideologies, cosmologies, and histories will accompany us in this research as we work between Im_flieger SPACE and Reallabor Fassfabrik. These two architectures have had long stories with other purposes. The dance studio theater of Im_flieger, centrally located in Vienna, was a stable back when horsepower was animal not fossil fuel. The artist-meets-scientific-research center Reallabor Fassfabrik, in the periphery of Vienna, was a barrel factory.
There is a long history of performance taking place in repurposed industrial or pre-industrial spaces. Alongside that there is the familiar pattern of art and culture moving from centers of cities to the periphery as gentrification progresses. We will think about stagecraft and scenography as the framing of performance and what happens when this leaves the theater setting. By working together in two localities participants will experiment with the surroundings of sharing their research, while collectively asking, “Are we unwittingly performing on other stages i.e. urban development?”
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.
If composting is “a controlled process of deposing organic matter in the presence of oxygen to create a soil amendment” (Composting Utopia: Experimental infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City. 2023 Guy Schaffer) – how do we compost our own understandings? What decays, what becomes ground, what augments that ground?
Slippery time,
here and there,
a non-verbal realm,
How do we bring movement qualities into words,
access states through language,
and sometimes, often fail
Slippery time slides into the Slippery Elm, a tree native to North America commonly used as herbal medicine for sore throats or when we’ve lost our voice. Elms are common across the world, especially here in Europe, and have many medicinal uses. Elm is said to help when overwhelmed with work, allowing one to regain confidence in one’s abilities.
Perhaps we all need a bit of Elm energy,
especially in performance making,
especially in performance making in the 21st century.
The study and inclination towards performativity and all it can afford will be the root of our research. Time will therefore equally be spent in the doing and in observing. The intention is to meet each other and the developing practices with compassionate discernment, while developing an inner eye that can hold a multiplicity of layers.
Personal as well as collective artistic research material will be generated. The specific approach will contain questions such as: What is to be found in the performative act? How much of the performing experience can we name and how much lives outside of language and logic? What becomes of all the material that appears and disappears, to be altered or taken on new shapes through the creative process?
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.
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.
www.fassfabrik.at
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.
Literature
A Field Guide to getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit (2005)
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primative Accumulation, Silvia Federici (2004)
Composing while dancing: an improviser’s companion, Melinda Buckwalter (2010)
Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, Guy Schaffer (2023)
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour (2018)
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Adrienne Maree Brown (2017)
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon (1997)
Hospicing Moderninty: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021)
On Freedom: Four Songs of Car and Constraint, Maggie Nelson (2021)
Plant-thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Michael Marder (2013)
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant (1980)
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Jacques Rancière (1987)
Time and the Dancing Image, Deborah Jowitt (1988)
Toward a Trans individual Self: A study in social dramaturgy, Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić (2022) Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane (2019)
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.
Flóra Boros (HU/AT) is a performer and choreographer based in Vienna. Currently she works on collaborations as well as on solo projects. Her works have been shown at Muffathalle, Theater Akzent and Schwere Reiter. In 2021 she completed her studies in contemporary dance at the Music and Arts University of Vienna. She received a scholarship for Music and Performing Arts from the Austrian Ministry of Culture (2022) and a scholarship for her thesis about game theory from the Cultural Department of Vienna (2021).
Kenneth Constance Loe (SG/AT) (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, currently based in Vienna, Austria. They are a co-founder of Monzoom.xyz, an online platform for emergent art practices and alternative education co-organised with Weixin Quek Chong. His practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects. Their poetry manuscript sun-dried air was a finalist of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, and their poetry has recently been published in the anthology New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022).
Luiza Furtado (BR/AT) was born in Florianopolis, Brasil in 1999. She lived in Rio de Janeiro where she received her Industrial Design BA from PUC in 2021. Furtado moved to Austria for her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research on dance weaves painting, sculpture and audiovisual media together.
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.
Paula Hernandez (ES/AT) ‘ work utilises a variety of media such as film, sculpture, interventions, actions, drawing, and performance, all nurtured by a poetic backbone. All the manifestations arise from a curiosity and questioning of how to bring enchantment to the world, deviating from systematic colonial oppressions rooted in narratives of “modernity”, “efficiency” and concerns on globalisation and transportation.
Valentino Skarwan (AT/GT) was born in Vienna and grew up in Guatemala. Skarwan studied painting and animated film at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he graduated in 2024 with a degree in Transmedia Art under Jakob Lena Knebl.
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