PhD candidates

  • PhD Abstract: «Das emanzipatorische Theater. Institutionstransformative Praxen im Theaterraum Zürich» ("The Emancipatory Theater)

    My research project is entitled «Das emanzipatorische Theater. Institutionstransformative Praxen im Theaterraum Zürich» ("The Emancipatory Theater). Institutional transformative practices in theater").

    It arose out of the urgency, based on my more than ten years of practical experience as a permanent dramaturg at Swiss theatres, not only to subject the difficult-to-reform, traditionally bourgeois institution of municipal theatres to a critique, but also to analyse ongoing transformative attempts and processes in the scene and to illuminate them with dramaturgical methods in order to then work out how a sustainable structural transformation of theatres could be possible with regard to social change, changing production conditions in the arts and new aesthetics.

    The project has both a theoretical and an artistic component: in addition to a theoretical embedding in questions of institutional critique in the arts and an institutional analysis of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, an artistic handbook is to be produced that bundles dramaturgical-artistic practices and strategies, exercises and playful experiments for the institutional transformation of theatres that have been tested in the research process and makes them available to other theatre practitioners and organisations that are concerned with questions of institutional transformation.

  • PhD Abstract

    Eliane will start her joint doctoral studies within the Transdisciplinary Artistic PhD Programm in Linz next September. Eliane is a multi disciplinary artist. She studied Film at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne. In Brussels she graduated with her MA in Choreography and Arts at the “Academie royale de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles”.

    Her works are crossing disciplines such as choreography, performance, scenography, writing and film. She is particularly interested in the interplay of media and its limitations. For her doctorate she investigates on atmospheric experience and sensual storytelling and works in different collaborations.

    ZHdK supervision: Anton Rey

    Eliane‘s Website

  • PhD Abstract: Desire to Become One - Sex, Spirit, and Choreography as Active and Receptive Practices

    This PhD proposal critically examines a particular state of being I have been exploring and sharing with others in a diverse variety of pedagogical settings: the moment of a dancer and the world they inhabit enacting an erotic relationship to each other.

    Besides choreography, I draw upon my experience working with Desire in the context of conscious sexuality, and spiritual practice - in my case, mystical Judaism - as strategies using the body as a channel for connection to something beyond the individual self. To me, these approaches are all but different aspects of the same prism.

    Can erotic Desire emerge intersubjectively not only between people, but also between a performer and the space itself? And if so, how are the two phenomena connected?

    I have found Desires between human beings, especially sexual ones, to be easy access points, as there's a lot of curiosity, fear, and energy around sexuality that doesn't take much to bubble up, so people are vividly present. Also, it’s fun! But the more compelling question to me addresses a dancer’s Desires that emerge during performance: for instance, to suddenly change their position in the performance space, their relationship to the audience, or the dynamics of their actions. Not compositional choices based on broad knowledge of improvisation techniques, but a clarity of decisionmaking in which consciousness is not located entirely within the individual, but rather emerges as an active interplay with their environment. There is often a sense of entering a pre-existing channel: it is clear what needs to happen.

  • PhD Abstract: The Future of the Earth: Preenacting Climate Scenarios

    An explorative performance setting, i.e., a performativization environment, has been set up in an old 700 m2 industrial freezer for THE FUTURE OF THE EARTH: PRE-ENACTING CLIMATE SCENARIOS research project. Both climate-related and Anthropocene scenarios are performed inside the freezer with experts from climate, futurology and Anthropocene research as well as politicians, using methods of performative art and pre-enactment. With this polyperspective approach to thematizing, negotiating and rendering possible climatic futures tangible, current options for action are acted out in a vivid manner. There is a difference between talking about a temperature rise of 5° C and actually experiencing it. The pre-enacted scenarios consist solely of scientific studies, their data, tables, diagrams and texts. Through pre-enactment, these scenarios come into use, which links the reception of their speculative knowledge to a tangible, spatial, temporal, and sensory experience. The performative scenario thus evokes insights which are not evident in text-based, visual scenarios.

    In partnership with the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

  • PhD Abstract: A lull nearby: textural, social, and temporal explorations of language in artistic practices

    Anouk will start a cooperative doctorate at the Department for the Performing Arts and Film at Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland and the Research Centre for Culture and Creativity, Teesside University, United Kingdom. This PhD focuses on collective moments of change and exchange to develop a practice - based theory of sensuous address. Moments of meeting are structured by pre-existing conditions, which often obscures their very creation. Sensuous address, in contrast to a hierarchical exchange of information, is an approach to meeting and sharing (knowledge) from their sensory and aesthetic qualities. This aims to counter ideas of intersubjectivity and transactional ideas of learning. An intimate and intensive understanding of shifts can reclaim the importance of movement and experimentation in collective moments. The shift as a notion is central to this project; akin to the shared moment of the transition from waking to sleeping in a lullaby. This is approached through the fields of radical pedagogy, process philosophy, disability and queer studies, as well as performative/material practices in textile, language, and sound.

    www.anoukhoogendoorn.com

  • PhD Abstract: Creating liminal and ritual spaces in participatory performance – The utilization of embodied ritual structures and principles, and therapeutic elements, to propose spaces of transitional and liminal experience

    The project aims at creating participatory and immersive performances and installations, in which audience can experience liminal and ritual aspects. The work will be based on investigations of elements of physical performance (gestures, postures, movements) in the context of death and mourning rituals in several cultures, including a search for possibly recurrent, cross-culturally appearing elements or principles. Based on the often reported lack of such in contemporary everyday life, e. g. for the shaping, marking and embedding of various transitions and processes of transformation, a central aspect will be the utilization of embodied ritual elements, structures, and principles for the proposal of spaces of transitional and liminal experience. Central research questions will be:

    • How can certain mechanisms and structures of rituals, and possibly therapy, be translated into theatrical and performative artistic contexts?
    • How can spaces be designed (including audience participation) to become possibly transformative spaces of experience for ‚audience‘?
    • How can movements, gestures and postures performed cross-culturally in the context of death and mourning rites be adapted in such a way that they mark, shape and accompany transitions on different levels?
    • What effects and functions could such elements take over, and why in the context of theatre and performance?

  • PhD Abstract: Sprechen und Träumen

    Träume besitzen ein spezifisches kommunikatives Potenzial, dessen Relevanz für die sprecherische Ausbildung im Schauspiel bislang noch wenig erforscht wurde. Das Dissertationsvorhaben baut auf dem seit 2020 laufenden Forschungsdeputat „Sprechen und Träumen“ an der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste auf, dessen Erkenntnisinteresse im Kontext der Sprech- und Schauspielarbeit liegt. Hat das Sprechen eines Traums einen eigenen performativen, inhaltlichen und auch gruppendynamischen Wert, wenn es als „liminale“ Form der ästhetischen Kommunikation begriffen wird? Aufgrund dieser Liminalität kann – so die These – die zu entwickelnde pädagogische und künstlerische Praxis des Traumsprechens ein relevanter Beitrag zu einer Didaktik des Schauspiels und des Theaters sein. Sie ist anschlussfähig an hergebrachte Prinzipien der Sprechausbildung wie Handwerk, Leiblichkeit und KoPräsenz und vermag etablierte Arbeitsweisen methodisch zu bereichern. Zugleich ist Traumsprechen im Kontext der Schauspielausbildung geeignet, spielerisch Hierarchien zu befragen und Grenzen zu überschreiten, was für die Zukunft des Theaters bedeutsam werden kann.

  • PhD Abstract: Creative Artificial Intelligence on Stage

    Collaborative Ph.D. project on “Creative Artificial Intelligence on Stage”, University of Tuebingen (Institute for Media Studies, Prof. Dr. Susanne Marschall) and ZHdK (Institute for Performing Arts, Prof. Dr. Jochen Kiefer, Dr. Gunter Lösel).

    How will we interact with AI-based technology and how will we perceive humanAI interactions in our near future? By exploring theoretical and experimental ways for staging human-AI interactions this interdisciplinary practice-led Ph.D. project will search for artistic answers. For the practical part artistic approaches for visualizing and modifying AI-based chatbots will be explored and tested on stage. In parallel a theoretical framework on concepts of liveness, presence and the mediality of AI will be elaborated by encompassing research and literature from technological-, performative-, cognitive- and media-related fields. As we are entering an era of responsive machines, chatbots can be seen as prototypical representatives of this development. How will social, interactive AI-based technology shape our understanding of performance, theater and human-AI collaboration on stage?

    Ilja Mirsky is a dramaturg, programmer, and immersive media artist. He works at the “Institut für theatrale Zukunftsforschung (ITZ) im Zimmertheater Tübingen” and is lecturer at the University of Tübingen.

  • PhD Abstract: 8k to HD

    PhD in Artistic Research on the topic of alternative aesthetics in cinema documentary films in collaboration with the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade.

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  • PhD Abstract: Performing Chronic Conditions – Crip Comedy as a Means of Coping with a Hidden Disabilities

    Comic performative practices of and by chronically ill and dis/abled bodies have for the most part been excluded from the history of the performing arts. However, my research project investigates performative practices that conceive of the chronically ill body as a comic body. With that premise in mind, I investigate crip comedy on, with and through the chronically ill and dis/abled body in contexts such as Live Art and Devised Theatre.

    My research on crip comedy is driven by the questions: How can crip comedy help to make visible the largely invisible ableist discourses of the performing arts, with their hegemonic dramaturgies and virtuoso performing styles, as well as those of implicit, normative body politics? How can non-visible chronic conditions – as temporal phenomena and as a way of knowing and world-making – inform, interrupt, reinvent and re-shape our understanding of normative time, bodies and comedy?

    In analysing crip comic timing, mechanisms, identities, and norms, I employ methodologies, concepts and vocabulary that can help to position crip comedy in the field of the performing arts, artistic research and cultural studies. I aim to highlight peripheral, disruptive and unpleasant qualities of comedy, such as grotesque, scatological, vulgar, cringe-worthy and insider and/or community humor. Therfore, I will set up performative explorations like using a ventriloquist puppet to embody a hidden disability, by keeping a stool diary and by convening a Clinic Clown Congress.

    My research will interlink epistemologies from various disciplines to highlight the as yet still invisible intersections between dis/ability and often non-visible identity categories such as class and queerness. First I will map the field of practitioners depicting and enacting experiences of chronic illness and/or dis/ability in a comedic manner. Next, I will explore and analyze how comedic and therapeutic practices productively inform one other through existing healing and coping techniques like therapy puppetry and clown doctoring. I will thereby try to shift the boundaries between disability arts and medicine, performing arts and cultural studies, between illness and health, and between high art and everyday culture.

    www.hendrikquast.de

  • PhD Abstract: from body to body: embodied listening in contemporary art

    Embodied listening can be framed through the discourse of phenomenology and places the body at the centre of lived experience. This phenomenological approach to listening is pioneered by Dr. Martine Huvenne and starts from an intersubjective space, as Huvenne states in her recent book ‘The Audiovisual Chord’ (2022, pg 40); “Sound is not an objective matter: it is connected to a lived and embodied perception preceded by a feeling. Object and subject are irrevocably correlated, since it is only in listening that sound arises.” Embodied listening highlights how the body is the medium that allows us to enter in relation with the world. Embodied listening is listening and recording as a sensorial haptic experience; using all the senses. As a methodology it places my own body as the first testing ground in my practice. As the project opens up, the work is shared with other bodies, and the final installation is intended to engage with the body of the audience. Embodied listening as a practice is an empathetic dialogue with the world around me and so always lends itself in relation to the world around oneself. Embodied listening is an active listening, is a deep listening, it implies a series of translations and to have awareness of one another. When practised, this listening requires openness and engagement, tolerance and equality.

  • PhD Abstract: Tonales

    The film-based research project Tonales is based on the phenomenon of the tono or tonal in the indigenous culture of Mexico: a spiritual double being of a human being. The word tonal originally stems from the Nahuatl (native Mexican language) word tona or tonatl which means both spirit and sunlight. As a guardian spirit, it appears in various places in Mesoamerica and - depending on the community - can take on different shapes and guises, usually appearing in the form of an animal. The project is based in the community of Macehual in Puebla, Mexico. In the context of oral traditions, ritual acts, and other aesthetic practices, it explores the (in)visible existence and influence of tonales as non-human beings, and observes the interactions between local communities and their environment. To account for the liminal, relational mode of existence of tonales, who traverse ontological registers not least between humans and their material and animate environment, the world is understood as a relational assemblage of acting actors according to indigenous cosmologies, and as such is incorporated into the cinematographic practice of the research. The space in which the artistic research is embedded presents itself in an inescapable intertwining of human and non-human actors.

    Collaborative production processes within communities result in experimental filmic fragments that are presented in the form of a spatial installation to allow for a non-linear and multi-perspective arrangement. Tonales is conceptualized and realized in collaboration with the Mexican artist Daniel Ulacia and in collaborative formats with local groups.

  • PhD Abstract: “HOSTING ECOLOGIES OF ATTENTION”. Concerns at Shedhalle Zürich Through the Decades – A Historiographic Speculation

    This PhD project explores the relationship between artistic-curatorial concerns and institutional transformation. It asks how an institution remembers—what constitutes its “institutional memory”—and investigates how immaterial forms of knowledge(s) and experience are generated, preserved, and transmitted through artistic and curatorial practices.

    Taking Shedhalle Zürich—a self-organized, independent art space with over 40 years of history—as its case study, the project examines both archival and embodied practices as tools to rethink institutional memory, affective labor, and knowledge transmission.

    At the core of the research lies an inquiry into how friendship, care, and love—often overlooked forms of immaterial labor—shape curatorial work and its infrastructures. By engaging with archival materials, oral histories, and exhibition formats such as PROTOZONES (2020–2025), the study analyzes how process-based art can contribute to institutional change and engage diverse publics.

    The project is grounded in the question of epistemic justice: How can ethical and political values be embodied and structurally embedded in cultural institutions? Drawing on interdisciplinary infrastructure theory, it identifies curatorial practices that operate structurally to reconfigure the social, economic, and epistemological conditions of art and knowledge production—across time.

    Mentors:

    Prof. Dr. Bojana Kunst, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, D

    Prof. Dr. Stefanie Lorey, Zurich University of the Arts, CH

    Contact