Pieter Ampe & Michael Schmid
AIR - The Collective Invisible

Breathing is both profoundly personal and inherently social. In this workshop, participants explore how the simple act of inhaling and exhaling can foster connection, individuality, and collective presence. Through shared breathing exercises, performers will investigate how air moves through the body – and between bodies – to support focus, expressivity, and embodied communication.

Can we breathe together without losing our own rhythm? How do we synchronize without forcing uniformity? Is breathing a silent form of dialogue? By shifting attention to this unconscious vital function, we’ll explore breath as a carrier of emotion, tension, and presence – something we not only do, but also sense in others.

Using principles from synchronization exercises, somatics, and performance training, participants will experiment with non-verbal resonance, tactile activation, and spatial awareness. They will examine how touch, proximity, and timing influence our respiration, and how breath shapes our gestures, voice, and timing on stage. They also step into the grey zone between conscious and unconscious breathing – a space where awareness emerges through seizing to interfere.

Modern life often disrupts our natural rhythms, pulling us into shallow, rushed patterns of breath. This workshop invites participants to slow down, tune in, and share air consciously in a collective setting. Can breath help us reimagine what it means to belong? Can a group amplify the delicate intelligence of breathing?

In this workshop breath is not just explored as a tool for performance, but as a medium of sensing, connecting, and being together.