OPEN CALL: 2026
This is a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in performance art and collaboration for ten days, implementing your performance practice under the guidance of six artists from the Anam Cara Collective.
Applications are now accepted on a rolling basis until March 30, 2026 (but spaces are limited and filling quickly).
The team will be live on Instagram to introduce the project and answer your questions on Tuesday, February 3, 2026, at 7:00 pm (CEST).
Photograph: Hima Batavia by Lorenza Cini, 2025
As part of the Venice International Performance Art Week Educational Learning Programme, we present the eighth in a series of practical workshops on performance art in Venice:
CONSTELLATIONS OF CRITICAL BODIES II
10-day Intensive Joint Summer Class on the Practice of Performance Art
With VestAndPage, Andrigo & Aliprandi, Sara Simeoni and Joseph Morgan Schofield
June 24 to July 3, 2026
C32 performing art work space, Forte Marghera, Venice, Italy
With a final public presentation on Thursday, July 2, 2026
⚡️ For this workshop, we seek up to 15 international performance artists, radical actors, movers, sound artists, and poets interested in performance practices centred on the body.
⚡️ This includes individuals of all experience levels and abilities who wish to deepen and challenge their performance practices further and collaborate with other international artists.
⚡️ You will work under the co-mentorship of experienced facilitators, employing comprehensive methodologies to develop your performance language or research.
⚡️ We aim to give you the time, space, and tools to refine your practice, draw inspiration from collaborations, and forge new connections.
The intensive summer class takes place on campus at C32, a performing arts workspace in the heart of Forte Marghera historic park, which overlooks the western bank of the Venice lagoon. The final workshop will be publicly shared on Thursday, July 2. Its documentation will be included in the Venice International Performance Art Week archive. The collaborative laboratory process focuses on methods and techniques derived from artistic practices that emphasise bodies, spaces, and the art of encounters:
⚡️ VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes) nomadically create ephemeral and immaterial works through performance art, film and communities that embody philosophical, ecological, and queer feminist thought. To conjure otherwise, they engage with the ritualistic, liminal aspects of performance art and collective imaginings, adopting a poetic, political, embodied, and phenomenological approach to vulnerability and risk as intrinsic qualities of human existence. They share their methodology as lecturers and mentors in performance practice and artistic research at universities and communities worldwide, focusing on personal and speculative narratives, site-responsive practice, and more-than-human collaboration.
⚡️ Andrigo & Aliprandi (Marianna Andrigo and Aldo Aliprandi) combine dance, performance art, sound motion, philosophy, video, installations, and site-specific performances, often characterised by complete verticality and the resulting shiver it induces. Their poetics centre on detail, silence, and the entropic dynamics evoked by emotions and perception. They share experiences through tangible, physical practices in which the body navigates various conditions to confront and challenge non-ordinary situations while expanding individual potential in listening and absorbing the external.
⚡️ Sara Simeoni is a dancer, choreographer, performer, and certified Danceability teacher. As a long-standing member of the Carolyn Carlson Company, she has toured the world alongside renowned choreographers and artists. She has taught at dance academies internationally. The principles of weight, gravity, fall, and recovery energise the body and perception, fostering fluidity and presence, endurance and awareness, attention to detail, and movement accuracy, to let thought and emotion converge: performance emerges intuitively, imaginatively, and viscerally.
⚡️ Joseph Morgan Schofield is a curator, artist and creative producer. At the heart of these entangled practices is an understanding of performance art as a potent, contemporary modality of ritual. He draws on queer, ecological and esoteric thought to engage with the lost, the unseen, the forgotten. He understands his performances and film works as thin places, as ceremony, as a way of practicing sensitivity, of reorienting attention and touching the more raw edges of experience. As a curator, he activates spaces for collective encounter through Future Ritual, cultivating intergenerational exchange and artist-led research, experimentation and creation. Joseph lives in London (UK) but most often works in dialogue with the wet, windy Pennine moors and Cumbrian fells of the English North West.
Tuition fee: 800.-€
Optional additions (subject to limited availability): Shared rooms in the on-site hostel of Forte Marghera +20.-€/night
Arrival: June 23, Departure: July 4
We offer two grants of a 50% reduction in tuition fees to persons from countries with limited access to funding support. Please consider and describe your situation in the relevant field in the application form.
Workshop language is English.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until March 30, 2026, through this written form or as a video.
In your application, you provide extensive information about your artistic background and current urgency, and you show a solid commitment to the immersive, collaborative 10-day artistic process.
The VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment. The workshop venue is only partially accessible. Don't hesitate to contact us with any questions about how we can accommodate your needs: verena@vest-and-page.de.
The ART WEEK | SUMMER CLASSES are presented by Studio Contemporaneo, EntrAxis e.V. and Live Arts Cultures.
> ON CRITICAL BODIES by VestAndPage
This is for those who trust in change.
It is for the overstretched global bodies searching for a home or on pilgrimage.
For those to whom the surreal is familiar, those who dance on the limits hand in hand.
For those who go to spaces of hidden beauty and scan into the flesh of dream matter —
visionary poets, artists and people pushed by an urgency.
For those who reconcile with the mystery to let things coexist.
For those who listen, who seek to express, not to impress.
For those who take risks in the name of seeking new images.
For those who journey through visible and invisible places,
real and imaginary places.
A nomadism aiming to empower one's art and openness,
leaving subtle traces, structuring temporary autonomous zones.
Taking action because each one of us has important stories to tell,
moving through generative inquiry and collective imaginings.
And again, "Remember all, forget all."
