🩶 COMING 🩶 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 an extra grant from La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène and HES-SO Lausanne + 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

Principal Researcher, Initiator, Organiser — Research-based pedagogical and collective study platform
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.

Core 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 Rajécrivaine (theoretical writer), Jason Dodge (artist & editor), 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.

Public Outputs & Shared Activities (selected)

  • Institute of Rest(s) – (Im)mobility Salon #1 — with Tanzfabrik Berlin (Mar 2024)
  • Institute of Rest(s) – (Im)mobility Salon #2 — with La Grange (Apr 2024)
  • Institute of Rest(s) – (Im)mobility Salon #3 — Volkskundemuseum Wien (Jun 2024)
  • Restshop #6 – Institute of Rest(s) meets danceteller Elizabeth Ward, ImPulsTanz (Jul 2024)
  • Insomnia, une danse pour s’interrompre — far° Nyon (Aug 2024)
  • Institute of Rest(s) – (Im)mobility Salon #4 — Raum Bologna (Dec 2024)
  • Poetry without Poets #1 – Choreo-Somatics of Resting Dissidence — Tanzquartier Wien (Feb 2023)
  • Queer Gossip / Overhearing — Workshop, Open Level, Tanzquartier Wien (Feb 2023)

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.