Liminal Berlin: Exploring the Interface of Movement, Writing, and Cityscape

We will explore the liminal spaces of Berlin by traversing the city, conducting movement explorations and detailed observations of the built environment. Participants will read and reflect on the city’s cultural history and create their own written responses.

The etymlogy of the word liminal can be traced back to the Latin term limen, meaning threshold. This intangible “in-between” is a ripe space at the precipice of a boundary. In this interdisciplinary workshop, co-taught by a professional dance|theatre artist and poet, Nicole Nigro, and a professional dance artist and lighting technician, Cathy Walsh, we will immerse ourselves in the in-between. Exploring the interface of movement, writing, and cityscape, with Berlin in all its diversity, as the territory of our artistic research. We will go looking for liminal spaces: in the capital, our bodies, and our practice. Participants need not have any previous experience in theatre, dance, or writing. They only need to be open to new experiences in an exciting city.

As keen observers we will move through Berlin drawing on the work of the situationists, whose focus on the spectacle emphasises how the city can actively transform its explorers. Participants will spend their time traversing neighbourhoods, while completing a series of movement experiments based on situationist theories of la dérive (drift) and keeping a liminal record of their findings. Simple choreographic devices are explored while employing Rudolf Laban’s efforts to shape our experiences: gliding, pressing, wringing, punching, floating, slashing, flicking, and dabbing through the architecture. These durational exercises will open an “in-between” space - shifting our state into a heightened awareness, generating detailed observations, and creating an accessibility for sensitive writing.

Excursions into the city reflect on cultural history with additional readings from Berlin-explorers, such as Christopher Isherwood and Audre Lorde. Like these writers, we respond to the built environment with our own observations. As part of the revision process, participants will spend one day participating in a formal writing workshop. Our prose - reflections on liminal spaces - can be forms as various as poetry, the essay, diary writing, fictional narrative, or docu-fiction. Observations, intimate movement explorations, and situationist experiments in the German capital distil as polished creative written work.

Course leader

Nicole Nigro and Cathy Walsh.