Students of If I Can't Dance's course Appropriation and Dedication at the Dutch Art Institute/MFA ArtEZ are spending the week at the New Theater in Berlin with their tutor Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and If I Can't Dance associate curator Susan Gibb, for an extensive workshop developing material around Jean Genet's play The Balcony (1957).

Genet's play is the point of departure for a presentation that will be shown in Arnhem in June. Participating students are Aarti Sunder, Bryony Gillard, Coco Duivenvoorde, Celia Shomal, Bonbon Juan, Constanza Puente, Jan Adriaanse, Kaste Seskeviciute, Maria Barlasov, Monique Hendriksen and Laila Torres Mendieta.

In the weeklong development of their presentation, the students will meet with artists living and working in Berlin who engage in a variety of performance mediums. This will include sessions on scriptwriting with Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff (New Theater) and Pablo Larios (Freize d/e); sound with artist Hannah Weinburger, Carsten Jost (Dial Records) and music scholar Bianca Hauser; movement with performers Susan Ploetz and Adam Linder; and a meeting with artist Yorgos Sapountzis. The group will also attend exhibitions and performances happening in Berlin during the week, including a visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof.

The workshop is hosted at New Theater, an artist-run performance space that produces plays and performances by and with artists. It was founded by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff in 2013 and is based in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

The past months the group has been introduced to different methodologies of performance practice in workshops led by If I Can't Dance's Commissioned Artists Sara van der Heide, Snejanka Mihaylova, Emily Roysdon and Gerry Bibby.