Are we here yet?
Attention! This workshop is taking place from August 10 - 12!

Meg Stuart will teach an intensive 2 day improvisation workshop.
She will discuss and guide participants through a selection of excercises she describes in her new book “Are we here yet?” (Ed. Jeroen Peeters). The excercises have been emerged from  20 years  of explorations in the Studio and many of them are based on the repertory of Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods.


Meg Stuart
Meg Stuart (°1965, New Orleans) is a choreographer and dancer based in Berlin. In 1986 she received her BFA in dance at New York University and continued her training following classes in release technique and contact improvisation at Movement Research. In the 1980s Stuart worked as a dancer with Nina Martin, Lisa Kraus, Federico Restrepo and Marcus Stern, and from 1986 to 1992 she was a member of the Randy Warshaw Dance Company, where she was also assistant to the choreographer. On the invitation of the Klapstuk festival in Leuven (Belgium), she created her first evening-length piece "Disfigure Study", which launched her choreographic career in Europe and the USA. With Klapstuk continuing to support her work and after being fully embraced by the European performing arts community through projects such as SKITe 1992 in Paris, Stuart created her own company Damaged Goods in 1994 and made Brussels her artistic home. A recurrent feature in the work of Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods is the search for new forms of co-operation, presentation contexts and the ‘crossbreeding’ of theatre, architecture and visual art. In the mid-1990s Stuart collaborated with visual artists, such as Bruce Mau, Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill and Ann Hamilton for her "Insert Skin" series. In close collaboration with director Stefan Pucher and video artist Jorge León she developed the in situ project "Highway 101" (2000-01) in six different cities.

Through residencies in Schauspielhaus Zürich (2000-04) and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin (since 2005), Stuart became acquainted with the German theatre context, which led to collaborations with directors Stefan Pucher, Frank Castorf and Christoph Marthaler. In that context, Stuart has also explored large scale production, from "ALIBI" over "It’s not funny" to "Do Animals Cry". Yet special projects still tempt her. In the vein of the groundbreaking improvisation series "Crash Landing", initiated in 1996 with Christine De Smedt and David Hernandez, Stuart keeps engaging with various improvisation projects, including the series "Auf den Tisch!" (since 2005) and "Politics of Ecstasy" (2009) in collaboration with Jeremy Wade and Eike Wittrock. Her work was shown at Documenta X and for Manifesta7 in Bolzano she created the video installation "The only possible city".

Meg Stuart received the Mobil Pegasus Award at the Sommertheaterfestival in Hamburg (1994) for "No Longer Readymade"; the Culture Award of the Catholic University of Leuven (2000); the German theatre prize "Der Faust" (2006) for her choreography of "Replacement"; the French Prize of Criticism (2008) for "Blessed"; a special prize for "Maybe Forever" at the Bitef Festival in Belgrade (2008); a Bessie Award in New York (2008).