my roles: Performer, workshop leader, parts of the immersive stage design for #4.
SISTERS ACADEMY
Poetic and sensual knowledge production
Sisters Academy is an immersive interactive performance at the intersection of performance art, research, activism, and pedagogy. A school in a potential future society where the sensual and poetic way of knowing and being is at the center of attention and action.
The method is immersive in the sense that a complete place is transformed into an unusual threshold space that activates the senses and allows us to think and feel radically different from everyday life. All who enter the school are perceived as teachers, students, or visitors to Sisters Academy, and all interactions take place in these roles. Both teachers (performers) and learners (visitors) leave their everyday persona to explore their “poetic self” (the Poetic Self) – not a fiction, not a character, but your inherent poetic potential that you may not express in everyday life. This serves as a tool to explore how we can evoke and activate the senses and emotions to deepen the learning experience. Examples of Poetic Self names of teachers: The Sister, The Fluid Narrator, Lover, The Here and Now, The Mechanic, Mongrel, or… Touched.
Concept and overall direction:
Gry Worre Hallberg (The Sister)/ Sisters Hope (DK)
www.sistersacademy.dk
Two major formats have been explored so far in different variations:
Format 1
Temporary takeovers of actual schools, duration up to 14 days. Academy #4 in Reykjavik was a one-week version of a takeover. We transformed the school into an impressive landscape of lighting, sound and set design, and conducted one-on-one sessions with students and small groups of students. I developed two starting points for my interactions with the students: First, the installation of a third option at the toilet facilities, and second, a portable interaction tool made of damaged dolls from the work materials fund of the work teacher. All performers developed contributions in cooperation with teachers of the school, which were woven into the daily classes. In addition to these staged interactions, there were designed impromptu encounters that were possible at any time and in any location within the school.
Video documentation Sisters Academy #6
Photos: I diana lindhardt / Sisters Academy Staff
Format 2
One-month boarding schools in art institutions that are transformed into an immersive stage, including all floors and rooms of the building – such as Academy #6 in Copenhagen. Interested people of all ages can enroll there as students to explore new forms of poetic and sensory learning with the teachers and Sister (founder & director of the Academy). Requirements for students to intensify the immersive boarding experience include: a minimum of 24 hours (including overnight), wearing only black and white clothing, or completely removing or taping over the brand names & logos of all toiletries and personal items students bring with them. This format includes temporary research labs by guest teachers and artists, unusual meals, and evening concerts. My contribution to Academy #6 was to lead one-hour classes as a guest artist over the course of a week with exercises in consciousness stretching and speaking from an intersubjective we-space.
