Teaching period: 8-12 December, 2025
Location: Malmo Art Academy, Sweden
Teacher(s): Liz Kinoshita
ECTS: 3
Number of available places for KUNO students: 2
Level: BA/MA
Application deadline: 30th October 2025
How to apply: Please send an e-mail with a short motivation to charlotta.osterberg@khm.lu.se. Also state your home school and level of study.
Course description
Drawing from twenty years of experience performing in multidisciplinary creations often in visual arts contexts, the purpose of this course is to offer tools for performative practices to arts students. We will focus on presence, grounded-ness, and the ability to pivot in instant compositional set ups, to surprise oneself through rigorous scores, structures or a ’cage’ to set oneself ’free’.
We will study principles from dance artists Deborah Hay, Tino Sehgal, Chrysa Parkinson, Jonathan Burrows, Meg Stuart, and ZOO/Thomas Hauert, as well as Liz Kinoshita’s own performative practice principles.
The course will start with physical engagement to get the heart pumping, blood flowing, and body ignited in a studio space. We will work on gradations of presence, experimenting with spectrums of intense muscle tone to visceral subtlety. We will play with different proximities and modes of receiving performance, such as differences between a large proscenium stage, a white cube, a film screen, etc, examining the roots and conditions of each of these scenarios.
We will investigate what history and habits we carry with us whether consciously practiced or not, and how we can deviate from these when we wish to, so that one’s performativity is not being presented by default nor accident but is rather deliberate and responsive. By reframing our attention, we will practice varied modes of being seen, of inhabiting and relating to space and time, to deliver our work to a visitor or audience member with clear intentions and understanding of what is being transmitted.
We will establish a safe lab for learning through proposing, through action, through repetition, and through generous formatted discussion of what reverberations our attempts create as we witness each other engaging with performance exercises. There will be room to examine specific contexts each participant may be working on, to workshop what optimal mechanisms could be used in one’s own art.
Learning outcomes:
On completion of the course the students shall be able to embody performative proposals with a knowledge of their inherent strengths and weaknesses and be equipped with tactics for nonetheless delivering a performance as they intend it to be received.
Students will be able to describe what they are aiming for in their performative practices, to clearly identify what they hope to project in their performance and why, to help them through creation, rehearsal, and collaboration.
The goal is for the students to gain confidence, tools, and understanding in relation to executing performance proposals in any setting.
Assessment:
The course consists of a five-day full-time in studio workshop where participation is obligatory. (Action and feedback should be reciprocal).
Examination:
Evaluation of the students will be based on live and filmed performances received in studio on the last day of the workshop.
Financial support by KUNO:
Travel support between countries: 330 € (except 660 € to/from Iceland)
Subsistence: 250 € per week (5-7 days), 100€ per second week.
General KUNO Eligibility Rules:
- only BA and MA full-degree students from the KUNO network schools can participate;
-exchange students from other institutions, which do not belong to the KUNO network, studying at one of the KUNO network schools, CANNOT participate;
- full-degree students from the KUNO network schools, currently on exchange at another institution, CANNOT participate (neither with nor without the KUNO grant).
In case of any questions please contact: Charlotta Österberg, charlotta.osterberg@khm.lu.se
