Conceived as a space for studies, a series of investigations into the interstices, the hollows, the remains, the margins, the additions, the annotations, the footnotes, Institute of Rest(s) slips/sleeps into the field of expanded choreography as an artistic practice.

Institute Rest(s) intends to interrogate and complicate notions of rest as they are practised – re-imagined, romanticised, allowed or disavowed – in ‘the age of performance’. It wants to articulate notions of rest(s) alongside a choreographic practice of study, where ‘rest’ figures both as a mode of inquiry and a methodological stance, more than as an object of study. Moved by the need to find conditions for living on better terms than we’re offered, Institute of Rest(s)is a research project that tries to rest in the forces that have already been practised through archiving them, that thinks of bodily practices of dancing, reading, translating together, as laboratories in which a study of personal and collective ethics is (mis)understood sensually.

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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?

Poetry without Poets #1 – Restop #1

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Recently, Alix started a cycle of collective studies around notions of Rest(s): Institute of Rest(s). This project is funded by La Manufacture, Haute école des arts de la scène – HES-SO in Lausanne and supported by Tanzquartier Wien , La Grange Center /Arts et Sciences / UNIL Lausanne, Xing Bologna, Le Far Nyon, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Volkskundemuseum Vienna, Wiener Festwochen and ImpulsTanz Vienna. Alix is also the recipient of the Arbeitstipendium from the city of Vienna for the year 2023.

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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 Texeira, Yvane Chapuis.