The performative arts class was established as a six-year project class by Isabel Lewis in 2021. Since her departure in 2025, the class has temporarily been led by Anna Zett, and from November 2025 until its planned end in September 2027, it will be continued with a new focus by choreographer Jule Flierl and media artist Anna Zett.
The performative arts class deals with temporal and spatial compositions that arise from the bodily perspectives of the experiential, the relational, the vocal, and the situational. Drawing from a range of methodologies from contemporary dance, experimental voice performance, scores for improvisation, to audio and video performance as well as participatory art and public conversation, this class aims at strengthening individual performative practices, educating critical eyes and ears, and finding one's artistic voice through performance.
In frequent workshop settings techniques such as somatic vocal and movement training, experimental choreography, consensual communication, and group analysis are used to generate experience-based knowledge and reflect upon it with mutual curiosity. Identity is developed as a space for imagination and performance history is viewed as a mirror of political and cultural shifts. Engaging with audiovisual performance opens up possibilities for activating one's own body as an artistic instrument and the space between us as a playing field of transformation.
New performative strategies for encountering a public are developed through closely examining contemporary conventions of perceiving one’s own and other bodies, and how these habits are subject to historic change. Various formats of presentation are tried out, experienced, discussed, and further developed in their relationship to time, attention, architecture, audience, affect and context. Asking what type of interpersonal relations an art work demands or allows, is a key question in this process, and it is being addressed as a sensitive topic, that a diverse group of witnesses helps the student to make conscious decisions about.
Centering around the voice as both material and symbolic medium, Jule Flierl and Anna Zett’s cooperative artistic research seeks to deepen and further contemporary performance discourse and practice. The class is itself regarded as a site for pedagogical experimentation in which all participants form a learning community that relies on each individual’s participation in the group process. A regular performance practice, led by Jule Flierl, Anna Zett, guests and students is encouraged to take place in the shared, mostly unfurnished studio.
Another key aspect of the class is the frequent showing of work-in-progress using scores for a supportive group feedback, for everyone to gain experience in witnessing, conceptualizing, composing, installing, communicating about and presenting performative works.