Material Crush: Object Body Relation

Course description

This course supports you in devising, composing, and performing work, with a strong focus on objects and materials as active collaborators. It culminates in an open performative event at the APL studio.

Through practice based movement exploration, the course investigates performative interactions that foreground the haptic and affective qualities of materials, emphasising the embodied experience of working with “real stuff.” Students explore how bodies, objects, sculptures, and materials co-exist and act upon one another, opening personal, relational, and metaphysical approaches to performance-making.

Drawing from choreographic and visual art practices, the course considers Bennett’s vital materialism, Barad’s agential realism, Object-Oriented Ontology considered critically through a queer feminist lens using physical and material experimentation. Objects are explored as autonomous, agentic, and co-constitutive partners in performance, emphasising their resistance, vitality, and performative presence.

Course Structure 

The course unfolds in the following stages to create a performance:

• Discovering the performative qualities of materials and objects
• Each student identifies and develops an object, material, or sculpture as their own performance collaborator.
• Guided choreographic and compositional movement explorations
• Collecting, composing, and structuring performative material
• Developing individual artistic decision-making through practice, with attention to composition, dramaturgy, performance formats, collective reflection and audience experience
• Informal conversations on opportunities for creating performance work in Vienna

Modality

Studio based practical sessions combining guided physical explorations, improvisation labs, short theoretical inputs, group reflection, and individual work.

Recommended Reading

• Material and Mind by Christopher Bardt (Chapter 7 The Transmitting Hand)
• Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennet (Chapter 1 The force of Things)
• Object—Event—Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s edited by Hanna B. Hölling
• Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad (Chapter 3: Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”)

Bio

Asher O’Gorman is an Irish artist working across choreographic and visual art practices as a performance maker, dramaturg, and lecturer. She holds a BA (Hons) in Choreography from Dartington College of Arts, a Diploma in Dance from SEAD – Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, and an MA in TransArts from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Since 2021, she has been actively engaged in teaching and mentoring within the Angewandte Performance Laboratory (APL). Her artistic work has been presented in institutional and independent contexts since 2009, including brut Wien, where her recent performance mind numbing filthy finger potholes: a glossary of the paradox of boredom premiered in 2024. In addition, she works independently as a dramaturg within the dance and performance field, collaborating with artists such as Veza Fernandez (TQW), Malika Fankha (brut Wien) and Lau Lukkarila (brut Wien) among others. She is the founder of HOOD for Artist Parents.

Regular attendance (75%)
Contribution to an open performance event
Submission of a short poetic reflection 

The course is part of the APL (Applied Performance Laboratory).

Further information here: https://apl.uni-ak.ac.at/