🩶 COMING IN OCTOBER 26 🩶 Resting Voices: a Library in Pieces – A polyphonic and choreographic reader of texts, scores, and recordings from Institute of Rest(s) organised as a series of listening sessions 🩶 coming up at Tanzquartier Wien fall 2026 🩶by Alix Eynaudi in collaboration with Paul Kotal (sound design, audio editorial design) & Izet Sheshivari (editor, booklet design). Funded by La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène and HES-SO Lausanne and supported by Tanzquartier Wien 🩶

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

What concepts and practices of rest can we mobilise, that do not simply relapse into the choreographies of neoliberal productivity?

What corpo-realities, what movement sensibilities, what discursive practices, what (hi)stories, what (meta)physics, what forms of assembly do we need to rehearse, to resist in the kineticist societies of control and self(ie)-performance we live in?

How to rehearse forms of disengagement from everything that, in our daily forms of living and relating, working and instituting, continues to reinstate cycles of violence, oppression, exhaustion?

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Institute of Rest(s): How to trouble productivity through dance and its spaces of communality

Research-based pedagogical and collective study platform funded by La Manufacture – Haute école des arts de la scène (HES-SO), Lausanne (CH) (2023–2025)

This large-scale research project interrogates the notions of rest, the remains, and modes of communal study within the context of contemporary choreographic practice. It frames rest not only as a conceptual object but as an investigative and methodological stance, prioritising indeterminacy, incompletion, and interruption over representational production and evaluative critique — with the aim of troubling productivity in an age of performance. The project articulates rest(s) alongside collective study and expanded choreography, combining sensuous situated knowledge from dance and performance studies, poetry, philosophy of language, and experimental writing.

Team

• Alix Eynaudi – choreographic artist, dancer, and researcher in performing arts (Principal Researcher)
• Paula Caspão – artist, writer, and researcher (Centre for Theatre Studies, University of Lisbon)
  Additional invited researchers and contributors: Cécile Tonizzo (visual artist and researcher), Catol Teixeira de Oliveira (choreographic artist), Geoffroy Solelhac (sleep research / CHUV Lausanne), Barbara Manzetti (choreographer / researcher), Anne Faucheret (art historian & professor), Anne Juren (choreographer / Feldenkrais practitioner), Nicole Suzuki (editor / Kunsthalle Wien), Clementine Burnley (poet / mediator), Emma Bigé (artist / writer / translator), Yves Mettler (visual artist), Shivangi Mariam Raj (theoretical writer), Jason Dodge (artist & publisher of fivehundredplaces), Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh (filmmaker), Andrea Ancira (editor & curator) and others.
• Auguste de Boursetty – choreographic artist (Assistant Researcher)

Institutional Partners & Support
funded by La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène (HES-SO Lausanne) supported by Tanzfabrik Berlin, Tanzquartier Wien, ImPulsTanz Vienna, Xing Bologna, Centro de Estudos de Teatro Lisbon, La Grange – Centre / Arts et Sciences (UNIL Lausanne), far° fabrique des arts vivants Nyon, Volkskundemuseum Wien, production support by boite de production – Verein für zeitgenössischen Tanz und zeitgenössische Installationen.

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Public Activities

Poetry Without Poets #1 – Choreo-somatics of Resting Dissidence
Date: March 2023
Location: Tanzquartier Wien
Participants: Paula Caspão, Cécile Tonizzo, Sabina Holzer, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Alix Eynaudi, Quim Pujol, Joachim Hamou, Ari Ban
Format: Collective reading-sleeping and writing session
Outcome: Giant notebook – a processual score for writing-napping

Poetry Without Poets #2 – Choreo-somatics of Resting Dissidence
Date: October 2023
Location: Forum Dança, Lisbon
Participants: Nina Pertsov, Joachim Hamou, Paula Caspão, Cécile Tonizzo, Jérôme Dupraz, Alix Eynaudi
Format: Collective reading-sleeping and writing session
Outcome: Giant notebook

Restshops
practical workshops exploring rest, poetic refusal, haunted scores, and choreolinguistic care.

(Im)Mobility Salons
public readings / collective study sessions

(Im)Mobility Salon #1: Institute of Rest(s) Meets Tanzfabrik
Date: March 2024
Location: Berlin
Participants: Paula Caspão, Emma Bigé, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Yves Mettler, Clementine Burnley
Format: Four-day collective public study salon

(Im)Mobility Salon #2: Institute of Rest(s) Meets La Grange / UNIL
Date: April 2024
In the shadow of: The Soft Brain of Existence by Collectif Foulles
Participants: Paula Caspão, Cécile Tonizzo, Barbara Manzetti, Les Médusales

(Im)Mobility Salon #3: Institute of Rest(s) Meets Volkskundemuseum Wien
Date: June 2024
Participants: Shivangi Mariam Raj / The Funambulist, Andrea Ancira / Tumbalacasa, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Jaba Devdariani / Civil Georgia, Jason Dodge / fivehundred places, Raimundas Malašauskas, Mette Edvardsen & Jeroen Peeters / Varamo Press, Nicole Suzuki, Paula Caspão

(Im)Mobility Salon #4: Institute of Rest(s) Meets Xing Bologna
Date: December 2024
Location: Raum Bologna, by invitation of Xing
Participants: Alix Eynaudi, Paul Kotal, Anne Faucheret, Zoe Francia Lamattina, Ida Malfatti, Cécile Tonizzo, Daniela Crocetti

Insomnia
A Dance to Under-Grow
Date: August 2024
Location: far° festival, Nyon
Guests: Cécile Tonizzo, Myriam Lefkowitz, Dr. Geoffroy Solelhac (CIRS – Sleep Research Center)

Nap-Conferences
reading-sleeping sessions and hallucinatory remediation. by Alix Eynaudi & Paula Caspão

HAUNTED NAP [left there / planted there]
Location: La Manufacture (Switzerland)
Date: April 29, 2025

HAUNTED NAP [left there / planted there]
Location: 16th International SAR Conference on Artistic Research, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Date: May 9, 2025

HAUNTED NAP [left there / planted there]
Location: Performance Studies International PSI #30, Federal University of Ceará, Fortaleza
Date: December 5, 2025

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Research Framing & Methodology
The project’s conceptual stance emphasises collective practices of resting, slowing, dwelling, and reading/writing together, situating rest as a choreographic study practice that challenges neoliberal productivity and dominant paradigms of performance. It builds on a research ecology that values collective choreographic inquiry, translation, and indeterminacy as ways of navigating and resisting pervasive performance cultures.

Selected Shared Outcomes – Contributions to collective salons, walk-throughs, translation groups, and public research encounters as part of the project’s shared pedagogical practice.
Collaborative article by Alix Eynaudi and Paula Caspão, “cela ne va pas sans dire” (Journal de la recherche, March 2025)

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This work is deeply indebted to Paula Caspão, Cécile Tonizzo, Sabina Holzer, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Quim Pujol, Joachim Hamou, Emma Bigé, Mark Lorimer, An Breugelmans, Paul Kotal, Jason Dodge, Lydia McGlinchey, Raimundas Malašauskas, Anne Faucheret, Anne Juren, Bruno Pocheron, Alice Chauchat, Mette Edvartsen, Litó Walkey, Clara Amaral, Valentina Desideri, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Olia Sosnovkaya, Serena Lee, Elizabeth Ward, Claire Lefèvre, Virginie Bobin, Agnès Quackels, Silvia Fanti, Jacopo Lanteri, Samuel Feldhandler, Mzamo Nondlwana, Goda Budvytytė, Ari Ban, Auguste De Boursetty, Catol Teixeira, Nina Pertsov, Jérôme Dupraz, Clementine Burnley, Yves Mettler, Yvane Chapuis, Simon Asencio.