Open Doors: Tracing the Unseen – an encounter
- Dance & performance
- Free entry
2 ore
20.02.2026
Friday
14:00
Info
At the end of the workshop that Ivana Müller will hold at the Dance and Performance Academy Laboratories, we invite you to an informal meeting, an opportunity to share some of the questions and materials developed during the Masterclass. On this occasion, Ivana Müller will also talk about her broader work and practice.
About the workshop that Ivana Müller will hold between February 16 and 20: “The performing arts, and dance in particular, like life itself, are ephemeral. The continuous appearance and disappearance of movements, gestures, breaths, glances… contribute to the ‘immaterial’ or ‘dematerialised’ quality of this art form, otherwise deeply rooted in the sensory and physical presence. The experience of a performance is always unique and cannot be repeated. It is there, then it disappears, and those who witnessed it can ultimately tell the story of it. This specific quality conditions its fragility and gives it great strength.
With a particular interest in processes in which a thought, a gesture, a body appears and disappears (especially in the context of a performing arts show) and in the way this experience acts on collective and personal memory, we will explore the relationship between the body and imagination/the imaginary. We will observe the processes through which certain “states” of the body and mind influence the imagination and create narratives and stories. We will also observe the role of the spectator in these processes.
Biography
Through her choreographic and theatrical work as well as her performances, installations, texts and videos, Ivana Müller explores poetics of language, rethinks the notion of body, movement, voices and their forms of representations, revisits the place of imagination and the imaginary, and questions the idea of participation.
In her experimental, radical and formally innovative work, she often explores the idea of social choreography, staging communities or groups reflecting on the relationship with surroundings and environments they live in. The notion of collective and collaboration is equally important in the way Ivana Müller sees the artistic practice itself, often working in collaboration with artists, theorists, writers, gardeners… applying the principles of dialogue, conversation, and other forms of collective writing in the creation of the work.
The relationship to voice and language has been another fundamental interest in I.M’s work. Taking the formal aspects of language, its syntax and its rules, as choreographic principles she developed various works questioning the notion of convention and different ways of embodying it.
Although she creates in a variety of media, theater is the primary frame in which she develops and presents her work. Over the past 20 years she created a great number of works witch have been produced and presented in festivals and theaters in Europe, United States, Brazil and Asia. Her work is also shown in the context of visual arts, including in visual arts contexts such as the 2015 Venice Biennale (official exhibition, Central Pavilion), Garage Museum Of Contemporary Art Moscow, Hayward Gallery/Southbank Center London, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, National Museum of Singapore, Zachęta – National Gallery, Warsaw, Centro Cultural Kirchner Buenos Aires, Lafayette Anticipations Paris etc.
As part of her work, Ivana Müller organizes artistic and discursive encounters as well as collaborative practices. She also teaches frequently, notably at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, the University Paris 8, the University of the Arts in Zürich, SODA- HZT – University of the Arts Berlin, P.A.R.T.S. Brussels, Exerce, ICI-CCN in Montpellier, DAS Theater -Amsterdam etc.
Ivana Müller was born in Zagreb and grew up in Croatia and Amsterdam. She lives in Paris and works internationally.
ivanamuller.com
The Academy of Dance and Performance Laboratories is a program organized by the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB), now in its third edition. The current edition takes the form of laboratories, through a consistent program of practices that focus on the body, the production of knowledge, and contemporary creation. The Dance and Performance Academy Laboratories aim to intensively train artists who can generate and realize their own ideas and understandings of dance as an art form and propose new artistic contributions and perspectives. The Academy thus offers the opportunity to explore techniques, methods, and directions of creation related to relevant artistic themes or acute issues of the contemporary world.
The Academy of Dance and Performance Labs is a cultural programme co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The programme does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary.
Main media partner
Radio Guerilla
Media partners
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