Prompt: Movement Research was founded in 1978 as a self-described “laboratory” for investigating dance and movement. In its long history, the organization has prioritized giving space to artists for rehearsing, developing, and investigating—rather than presenting and producing—their work. The Movement Research Performance Journal can be seen as an outgrowth of this mission—extending the rehearsal studio into the space of the page. In its first issue, editor Richard Elovich describes the journal as “a new public space for the New York performance community…a slightly anarchic forum in which opposing ideas and aesthetics can be seriously developed and debated.” How do we understand this mission of staying in the zone of research today? How are artists (re)building pedagogy, and processes of learning, into their practice? What contemporary or historical alternative schools, and approaches to schooling, might be seen in constellation with the founding of Movement Research? How are students of dance and performance confronting the possibility and failure of an educational system predicated on both their enrichment and indebtedness?

JJ brings together articles by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston, translated into French for the first time, as well as texts, poems and drawings by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a dance critic, performer, writer, and feminist and lesbian activist. Her books include Marmalade Me (1971), Lesbian Nation (1973), Gullibles Travels (1974) and numerous articles in The Village Voice.

Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Translated from the English (American) by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).

Edited by Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester. A personal and intimate look behind the scenes of Meg Stuart's creative process over more than a decade. 

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, and her dance company Damaged Goods, based in Brussels, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. In 2010, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet?, which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart's career. In the follow-up book Let's not get used to this place, the choreographer looks back on more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by collaborators and other observers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book's title, gleaned from one of Stuart's recent video works, ties together these multifarious sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know. 
Let's not get used to this place gives a sense of the plentitude of motions, inspirations and personalities that energize Meg Stuart's creative cosmos. It offers a personal and intimate look behind the scenes of the creative process, and expands this to include the world around it. As a journey through her more recent career, an inspiring manual and a work of art in its own right, it has a wide appeal to an international base of artists, students and peers, and to anyone who is interested in performance.

Contributions by Jean-Marc Adolphe, Preethi Athreya, Mariana Tengner Barros, Sandra Blatterer, Esther Boldt, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Varinia Canto Vila, Descha Daemgen, Jorge De Hoyos, Igor Dobricic, Brendan Dougherty, Doris Dziersk, Tim Etchells, Moriah Evans, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jule Flierl, Alain Franco, Davis Freeman, Ami Garmon, Philipp Gehmacher, Jared Gradinger, Ezra Green, Claudia Hill, Maija Hirvanen, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Astrid Kaminski, Kiraṇ Kumār, Göksu Kunak, André Lepecki & Eleonora Fabiano, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Marc Lohr, Matthias Mohr, Anne-Françoise Moyson, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Jeroen Peeters, Alejandro Penagos, Léa Poiré, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Ana Rocha, Tian Rotteveel, Hahn Rowe, Isabela Fernandes Santana, Maria F. Scaroni, Bernd M. Scherer, Kerstin Schroth, Gerald Siegmund, Charlotte Simon, Mieko Suzuki, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Poorna Swami, Meg Stuart, Margarita Tsomou, Kristof Van Boven, Elke Van Campenhout, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jeroen Versteele, Doug Weiss, Stefanie Wenner, Jozef Wouters, John Zwaenepoel.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

The Haitian Chronicles is a graphic and brutal history of the Haitian Revolution told across three plays. It is the final work by the influential and groundbreaking playwright Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) and the first play of his to be published in several decades. Though much of his earlier work has been short one-act satires, The Haitian Chronicles takes place across three long plays: The Rise of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Fall of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the one-man drama, Dessalines.

The Haitian Chronicles is an example of Ward's political commitment to satirizing, dramatizing, and revealing the structures of white supremacy throughout the history of this so-called civilization. His first play, Star of Liberty, written at 19 years of age, was based the life of Nat Turner and the slave revolt he led. With The Haitian Chronicles, Ward returns to armed Black rebellion, taking as its subject matter the first and only slave revolt to successfully establish a free state. It is a self-consciously ambitious work of astounding narrative and theatrical scope, featuring over 80 speaking roles and logistically demanding production design. The narrative onslaught chronicling the disgusting brutality of colonial French society and the bloody force it took to overthrow it overwhelms the reader and challenges one to question the structures on which society is built and the violence it continues to perpetuate.

Ward was one of the central, driving forces of the Black Theater movement in the United States. After moving to New York in 1948, he became immersed in the radical political scene in Harlem, writing for The Daily Worker, and studying as an actor. He served as understudy to Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, and began a long friendship with fellow actor Robert Hooks. In 1966, Hooks helped produce Ward’s double bill Happy Ending / Day of Absence. Following the success of these plays, Ward was asked to write an editorial for the New York Times in 1966. His article, titled "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", surveyed the ubiquitous, stifling racism of the American theatre and was widely circulated, earning Ward further recognition for his political and theatrical work. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Ward and Hooks, together with Gerald Krone, founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967. Writing and directing for the NEC over the next several decades, Ward worked with icons such as Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, Leslie Lee, Errol Hill, Charles Fuller, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka. He directed dozens of plays throughout his career including Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, The River Niger and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play. Ward continued to write until his death in 2021– The Haitian Chronicles is the result of over four decades of work, a superb series of plays by an inimitable writer and artist.

Boo-Hooray proudly placed the Douglas Turner Ward Archive at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in 2017. The Archive includes many working drafts of the numerous plays Ward directed and wrote, manuscript materials, and correspondence with other icons of the Black Arts.

The Haitian Chronicles was a winner of the AIGA 50 Books & 50 Cover Award for the work of book designer Martha Ormiston.

A Book Knot Book is a 208 pages long performance, the first from the research and publishing initiative Body Text. In this study of language in action systems of meaning-making crash, sparkle and swoon. In a playful voice over A Book Knot Book self-reflects on the materialities and choreographies of publishing, reading and writing. With guest stars in fragments; Monique Wittig, Yvonne Rainer, Cristina Rivera Garza, Amiri Baraka, Will Rawls, David Abram, Thich Nhat Hanh and more. 

Edited and designed by Sara Kaaman. Published with the support of Stockholm University of the Arts.

What Can Theatre Do invites artists and thinkers to explore the potential of the performing arts, the political role of theatre and its ability to imagine alternative realities and future scenarios, ranging from essays to artistic interventions.

At a time when the relation between art and society is under permanent scrutiny, the utterance What can theatre do serves as an open invitation for artists and thinkers alike to reimagine the potential agency of the performing arts. The formulation of this sentence is both ambitious and ambiguous since the affirmative or interrogatory status remains undefined. The intonation of the sentence can provide both a sense of hope and belonging or a nihilist sensation of powerlessness. It could provide a resource for research development and analytic inquiries, but could also serve as a suggestion to trigger political action.

From fictional interviews to recipes, social-media exchanges to dramaturgical texts, theoretical essays to artistic interventions, the contributions gathered here are a diverse and multifaceted collection of dialogues. These interventions are singular and unique but share concerns and desires about the politicality of theatre as a realm where possible alternative realities can be enacted and potential future scenarios can be collectively rehearsed.

What Can Theatre Do tries to explore the idea of a book as a complex performative apparatus that can generate a space within which art and theory, and therefore also strategies of reality-making and of fiction-making, can entangle and affect one another, creating possibilities for the emergence of the not yet imagined.

Contributions by Lotte van den Berg, Carolina Bianchi, Silvia Bottiroli, Ilenia Caleo, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Piersandra Di Matteo, Valeria Graziano, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Samara Hersch, Asa Horvitz, Mala Kline, Low Kee Hong, Tom Oliver Jacobson, Miguel A. Melgares, Juan Miranda, Ogutu Muraya, Mazlum Nergiz, Andrej Nosov, nyamnyam (Ariadna Rodríguez and Iñaki Alvarez), Giulia Palladini, Venuri Perera, Livia Andrea Piazza, Amanda Piña, Annalisa Sacchi, Mariana Senne, Agat Sharma, Lara Staal, Elioa Steffen, Rolando Vázquez, Elioa Steffen, Suvani Suri, Pankaj Tiwari, Ingrid Vranken.

Sense is a box of simple actions to try whenever you like. The Sense box contains three separate proposals - each one is unique and to be experienced independently from the others. The three parts are: a scent that confuses the wearer about their species, a ritual that turns the heart into a spray of lights, and a card game to start unexpected interactions among unknown hands. Sense is a subtle collection of sensory stimulants that are designed to open and rearrange perception of everyday events. Discover this box in your own time, and share with whoever you like. Take elements of it on your travels and try them with as many people as you can - the more friends and strangers do it, the more intriguing it can be.

Kate McIntosh creates work in a variety of different media, such as performance, theater, video and installation. Both humor and the link with science and experimentation are elements that frequently pop up in Kate’s work. Her practice is guided by her ongoing fascination with with misusing objects, and creating playful relations between spectators.

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

Subversion does not belong to anyone. It can come from artists who outwit the state or from intelligence agencies who infiltrate the art scene on behalf of the state. But what happens when the two sides meet? After the old state security archives in many Eastern European countries were opened, it became possible for this interaction to be studied in detail.

Drawing on scientific essays and artistic contributions, the book shows how the secret police monitored happenings, performance art, and action art and looks at the debates they had about the new art form; it also demonstrates not only how the police documented artistic actions in detail using forensic techniques but also how they manipulated them and sought to thwart them with counter-actions. In addition to this, the book also reveals how artists dealt with the possibility that they were being observed by the secret police and how they now work with the material stored in the archives maintained by the intelligence services.

Gathering together interviews, essays, rare archival material and translations, The Tempest Society revisits and resuscitates the forgotten heritage of a politicised theatre group – ‘Al Assifa’ – that was born out of the struggles of the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA), Palestine, anti-colonialism, and workers’ and immigrant labour rights. Contributors explore the legacy of the group – placing this history in the context of the European economic crisis and its effect on Greece, contemporary migration and the conditions of immigrant workers and refugees. Conversations with the artist, and participants and collaborators in her film, consider the potential for politicised art to move between the street and the factory in cultural production today.

Following The Tempest Society (2017), the original video installation commissioned for documenta 14, which took Athens as a site to reflect on radical equality, democracy and theatre as a civic space, the book brings to light the specific history, the archive, and the ongoing resonance of the agit-prop theatre group ‘Al-Assifa’ in the context of urgent economic, political and humanitarian upheaval.

With contributions from Abdellali Hajjat, Hendrik Folkerts, Pothiti Hantzaroula, and interviews with Philippe Tancelin, surviving member of Al Assifa, Bouchra Khalili, Omar Berrada, and Alexandre Kauffmann, and Isavella Alopoudi, Elias Kiama Tzogonas, and Giannis Sotiriou, the performers in The Tempest Society.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at MFA, Boston, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sessession, Vienna. In 2018 she has been shortlisted for both the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize. She currently lives in Berlin.

Adam Pendleton’s Notes on Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer stems from the transcript of the script prepared by Pendleton for Yvonne Rainer to read during their day spent filming at the Ridgeway Diner in Chelsea. The text mixes citations from Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and excerpts from Rainer’s own published works; the film ends with the gospel song ‘I Am Saved’ by the Silver Harpes over the footage of Rainer’s now canonical Trio A, 1978. Pendleton's chapbook plays on the duality of meaning in the word ‘movement’, exploring the synchrony of art and politics, and shared potentials of language and the non-verbal.

Devoted to Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), this monograph appears with an exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, which brings together around 100 works from over fifteen years of production (1968–1985). The exhibition explores how the artist never ceased to reinvent herself through political and vibrant contemporary work, developing an original, ephemeral sculptural language, at times performative in act and informed by her research into primitive myths and rock art. It reveals her relationship to the visible and invisible, her way of rendering the unspeakable intelligible through traces of the body and its relation to nature.

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

After Laughter Comes Tears, in its exhibition and book forms, brings together artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative. This publication follows the structure of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, with a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, which each sample excerpts from the range of theory, fiction and poetry that inspired and substantiate the themes of the exhibition. Widening the spectrum of the traditional catalogue, each artist was given a "carte blanche"—an invitation to contribute to the book on their own terms.

This performative book was conceived as a story; a story of the pains, joys, anxieties and doubts of the 2020s. It takes as a starting point, the feelings of stasis and anger that define the present stage of late capitalism, framed by the anxieties of a generation facing a climate crisis, welfare states trampled and failed by neoliberal policies and the rise of xenophobia around the globe, partly fueled by fake news spreading on- and offline. It is an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists expressing the lurid shapes of the crises that surround us and form a (never exhaustive) part of our contemporary reality.

They are Cem A., Panteha Abareshi, Monira Al Qadiri, Kate Cooper, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jesse Darling, Stine Deja, Omer Fast, Anna Franceschini, Guan Xiao, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lukáš Hofmann, Christian Jankowski, Chris Korda, Ndayé Kouagou, Ghislaine Leung, Isaac Lythgoe, Taus Makhacheva, Diego Marcon, Jacopo Miliani, Marie Munk, Chalisée Naamani, Agnieszka Polska, PRICE, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Mika Rottenberg, Julika Rudelius, Dorian Sari, Sin Wai Kin, Shinuk Suh, Martine Syms, Mungo Thomson, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Artur Żmijewski.

Edited by Clarisse Fahrtmann, Clementine Proby, Joel Valabrega.
Foreword by Bettina Steinbrügge.

Contributions by Kate Cooper, Lukas Hofmann, David McDermott, Markus Pilgram, Agnieszka Polska, Clémentine Proby, Sin Wai Kin, Bettina Steinbrügge, Geraldine Tedder, Joel Valabrega, Lauren Wetmore.

An exploration of the performativity of the law within Egypt's spectral legal reality.

The publication dissects material collected for Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk's film On Trials, a work-in-progress that uses modes of documentary and fiction making. In it, they reflect on sites where legal proceedings take place. And listen to all manner of actors from within the realm of the law including, lawyers, a TV camera operator who frequents courtrooms, a former inmate, on whose body the legal specter has left unutterable marks, and tailors who specialize in uniforms.

Born to an Egyptian father and a Polish mother, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-based artist and filmmaker, and member of the Mosireen collective. She likes to work with people and their histories, texts, archives, images, scripts and drawings. She is interested in how stories create stories, and how they leave the space of one reality and enter another, intertwining the boundaries of both. Rooted in performance and theatre, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social function that generates tension between participants and audiences.

Filmmaker, writer and freelance journalist Philip Rizk was born in Germany, raised in Egypt and is based in Cairo. His practice has moved beyond the documentary mode that directly engages with realities of historical moments, allowing the documented image to be infiltrated by imaginary worlds. Rizk is part of the video collective Mosireen.

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

p 5-7 Almost on my way to you
p 8-10 Presque en route vers toi
Laía Argüelles Folch

p 12-13 Exercise in translation of Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Brief essay on the letter) by Laía Argüelles Folch
p 14-15 Exercice de traduction de Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Bref essai sur la lettre) de Laía Argüelles Folch
Quim Pujol, Paula Caspão, Simon Asencio, Pascal Poyet, Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré, Victoria Pérez Royo & Laía Argüelles Folch

p 16-17 Like a dinosaur upon awakening
p 18-19 Comme un dinosaure au réveil
Pascal Poyet

p 20-23 Is she a translator?
p 24-27 Est-elle traductrice?
Olivia Fairweather

p 28-29 New edition revised by my author
p 30-31 Nouvelle édition revue par mon auteur
Léa Poiré

p 32 Notes from a translation in progress
p 33 Notes d'une traduction en cours
Kate Briggs

p 34-37 Mothers & tongues
p 38-41 Langues (maternelles)
Mette Edvardsen

p 42-43 Collective reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
p 44-45 Lecture collective de Finnegans Wake de James Joyce
Dora García and readers, et les lecteur·rices

p 46-49 Notes for a talk that did not happen
p 50-53 Notes pour une conférence qui n'a pas eu lieu
Olivia Fairweather

p 54-65 Meticulous comparison of two books with their versions rewritten from memory, excerpts from a work document
Comparaison méticuleuse de deux livres avec leurs versions réécrites de mémoire, extraits d'un document de travail
Julián Pacomio & Ángela Millano

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people. Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’.

Part I : What is people’s gathering to democracy?

Part II : The new politicality of performance: the time of gathering, (re)creative labour and the domestic

Part III : Radiation Patterns of Performance

Contributors: Isabell Lorey, Bojana Cvejic, Bojana Kunst, Stina Nyberg, Ana Vujanovic, Giulia Palladini , Livia Andrea Piazza, Valeria Graziano, Florian Malzacher, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Silvia Bottiroli

What happens when artists play with the codes of the visual and performing arts? Which negotiations take place when you leave your own medium to explore another? As it turns out, those who are considered innovative on the one hand, are often labeled amateur on the other. In twenty-five conversations with leading artists, curators, dramaturgs and production workers Katleen van Langedonck explores which choices are made when creating a contemporary performance, taking into account all layers of the creative process. In doing so, she draws on her practical experience as a coordinator and curator of Performatik, the Brussels biennial of contemporary performance.

Conversations with: Alexis Blake - Ariane Loze - Boris Charmatz - Charles Aubin- Daniel Blanga-Gubbay- Eva Wittocx - Germaine Kruip - Grace Schwindt - Helena Kritis - Ilse Van Essche - Jenny Schlenzka - Jimmy Robert - Joanna Zielinska - Kristof Van Baarle - Laure Prouvost - Lore Boon - Louise O’Kelly - Luc Schaltin - Maria Hassabi - Martina Hochmuth - Orla Barry - Sara Jansen - Steven Vandervelden - Ula Sickle - Ulla Von Brandenburg

What if, when a performance is described as “nothing short of magical,” it is not just a metaphor? Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva wrote a book together exploring the techniques involved in creating and curating contemporary performances through practical magic.

Like feminist magic, performance magic is not inherited or exclusive, but learned and inclusive. Anyone can practice it.

This is a book of recipes and spills, based on lived experience, observations and bewilderments of both writers.

Concept and writing by Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva Design: POMO Publisher: Friends of Physical Contemporary Art, in the frame of Performing Portals project Editing: Leah Whitman-Salkin Funded by Art Promotion Centre Finland