TOWARDS:2026 — cycle of intensive workshops

TOWARDS:2026 is a cycle of intensive workshops organised by Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts (Sweden) that includes physical praxis, evening lectures, video screenings, and live performances. It’s the metaphor of aiming at something – to expose and engage ourselves in physical investigations and conceptual challenges that can foster creativity and encourage discoveries. TOWARDS:2026 see pedagogy as a continuous intellectual provocation, an occasion for inspiration through paradoxes and awakenings and as a desire to overturn common sense and question what we have learned.

Over the years, TOWARDS: has welcomed an outstanding list of artists and choreographer, including Julyen Hamilton, German Jauregui Allu, Judith Sanchez Ruiz, Frey Faust, Laura Aris, David Zambrano, Francesco Scavetta, and Xavier le Roy & Scarlet Yu. This year TOWARDS: program starts with workshops led by two renowned voices of contemporary dance field: choreographer Meg Stuart (US/BE/DE) and dramaturg Guy Cools (CA/BE). The workshop cycle will continue in the Autumn with more workshops.

Meg Stuart | Workshop “Weather of Touch”

Weather of Touch is a shared practice where touch, movement, and attention shift like weather. The group becomes a collective body moving through temporary, imagined terrains—worlds that form, dissolve, and reorganize as we inhabit them.

Touch appears in many forms: physical contact and proximity, as well as rhythm, pressure, resonance, and subtle energetic exchange. Emotional states move through the space like weather systems—gathering, intensifying, dispersing, clearing—without being fixed into meaning.

The work moves through thresholds between closeness and distance, stillness and motion, form and formlessness. Group scores and sensorial exercises create conditions for responsiveness, collective alignment, and contrast. The range is wide: subtle to wild, playful and charged. Care is held through listening, pacing, and shared awareness, allowing sensitivity and intensity to coexist as conditions change.

This workshop invites professional improvisers to explore collective movement as a living terrain. As we dance together, new forms emerge, reshaping the landscape we move through and opening pathways for new ways of being together in motion.

Meg Stuart (US/BE/DE) is a choreographer, director and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company, Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, ranging from solos and duets to large-scale choreographies, videoworks, site-specific creations and improvisation projects. Recent creations include steal you for a moment (2024) and GLITCH WITCH (2024). Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theater and visual arts, driven by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines. Through fictions and shifting narrative layers, she explores dance as a source of healing and a way to transform the social fabric. Improvisation is an important part of Stuart’s practice, as a strategy to move from physical and emotional states or the memory of them. She passes down her knowledge through regular workshops and master classes in- and outside of the studio. In 2025, with the support of Forum Dança, she organised a first edition of the ‘Mystery School’, an unconventional and experimental studies programme for performing artists. Stuart has directed and choreographed a range of video works, including a four-part series for Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s CC:World project, Shelf Life for Steirischer Herbst ’23, and, most recently Sulphur Edges — a 60-minute film created in collaboration with participants of the Mystery School for the Walk&Talk Biennale (São Miguel, Azores). These works explore the presence of the body in relation to space and landscape, reflecting her ongoing interest in the conditions and potentials of embodiment. Stuart has received several awards in recognition of her oeuvre, among which the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018 and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography.

More about Meg Stuart: www.damagedgoods.be

Guy Cools | Workshop “Who needs a dance dramaturg: dance dramaturgy as a dialogical practice”

“The generosity and openness of Guy Cools made this workshop even more rich and informative: we were thinking together” (Evaluation of a participant)
The underlying idea of the workshop is that as a choreographer you don’t necessarily need a dramaturg but you should develop your own dramaturgical reflection on your artistic practice.
The workshop will offer participants practical tools and exercises to reflect upon, to evaluate and eventually to transform their creative process. Using the cross, circle and labyrinth as graphic symbols, the participants will discuss the essential polarities of the creative process: perception, formation, intuition, experience. Through practical and physical exercises the workshop will explore how dramaturgy/the dramaturg can contribute to this process as witness, dialogue partner and ‘editor’. The group will focus in particular on dramaturgy as a dialogical practice and ways to organise and support this dialogue. The final goal of the workshop is to gain a different, renewed perspective of one’s own creative and choreographic process and methodologies through discovering the diversity of practices of the other participants.

Guy Cools (BE/CA) is a Belgian dance dramaturg. He worked amongst others with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Christopher House (CAN), Akram Khan (UK), Andrea Nann (CAN) (www.guycools.com). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice Rewriting Distance (www.rewritingdistance.com). His most recent publications include In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016); and Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). From December 2022, he is full time professor in the dance department of UQAM, Montréal.

More about Guy Cools: https://www.guycools.com/