LACE Symposium

It’s an honour and a joy to close what may be our last LACE Symposium at the ImPulsTanz Dance Festival with Kerstin Kussmaul, the originator of the IDOCDE project that the LACE Symposium stems from. As the originator of the IDOCDE project, Kerstin herself has been there since the very beginning. The poetry of endings as beginnings abound.

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Written by Kerstin:

Defining ‘a thing’ simultaneously creates what is NOT: the interstitial. What if this in-between isn’t absence, but the most ontologically radical site? Drawing on my fascia research (tensegrity, feminist new materialism, Greek chôra) we explore the ECM—the body’s liquid crystal interstitium—as boundary-maker. Fascia doesn’t separate; it creates the very possibility of ‘things’ existing: Maybe we arrive at fascial ontology as choreographic practice.

bio: Kerstin Kussmaul (PhD) is a dance researcher and artist whose work focuses on somatics and embodiment. Over the past four years, she has investigated myofascia in movement as the core of her practice-based doctoral research at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her most recent work, the matter of fascia, emerged from this research and can be accessed at [www.fasciamatters.info](http://www.fasciamatters.info/). Prior to this, she explored creative processes in Contact Improvisation through the lens of embodied cognition. She teaches at universities, higher education institutions, and dance centers across Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Kerstin Kussmaul is the founder of IDOCDE and its associated symposium, now known as the Lace Symposium at ImPulsTanz. In addition, she works as a mentor for ImPacT at ImPulsTanz.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

In one of our conversations, Olive described their work—I think it was their work they were describing—as moving from “object-oriented ontologies” to “relation-oriented ontologies”. For context, I’m always on the lookout for an elegant way to envisage what is otherwise difficult to hold in one’s focus, like “relation-oriented ontologies”. I can barely remember what else was said in the coming minutes, that’s how excited I was about Olive’s turn of phrase.

Olive Bieringa comes to the LACE Symposium for the first time this summer.

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Written by Olive:

Doctoral research question: How does ecosomatic choreography foster embodied ethical relationality? Underlying this question is a larger question: How can body-based practices support a cultural shift away from human-centered systems toward a worldview based on interdependence and relationships with all living things?

This research proceeds through artistic processes that generate practices for reweaving relational fields and for producing new narratives of embodiment through somatic choreography. Its contribution lies in the capacity to resonate across contexts demonstrating how somatic choreography can intervene in ecological, cultural, and ethical concerns

The artworks follow an ontological journey from conception to death to ask: What is the impact of practicing and remembering our own becoming? What is the impact of practicing our dying and decomposing? How should we grieve our own potential extinction?

bio: Olive Bieringa works at the intersection of creative practice and pedagogy in dance, performance, somatics and media. She holds a BA in Dance from European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and an MFA in Performance and New Media at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. She is a doctoral candidate at Uniarts, Helsinki. She is Certified Movement Therapist (ISMETA), Infant Developmental Movement Educator® and Body-Mind Centering® Teacher and Program Director of Somatic Education Australasia. She founded BodyCartography in 1997 in San Francisco.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.



BMC® and Body-Mind Centering® are registered service marks of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, used with permission.

In a first for the LACE Symposium, a very special guest this year! Ella Hillström is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, whose critical studies of the way knowledge is produced in the West brought her to Body-Mind Centering® and the general field of somatics, or embodied research. We’re so excited to welcome Ella to our community and cannot wait to find out how somatics informed her research, and her perspective!

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Written by Ella:

In this deep dive, we gather to know and do the face otherwise. During my PhD research in Social Anthropology on the repair of cleft lip and palate, I encountered the biomedical and anthropological limitations of knowing the face. These disciplines know the face through narratives, populations, observations, psychometrics, and standardizations. But what if the face is so much more? Together we will explore and disrupt the face through co-creative, collective methodologies, to reimagine the face beyond identity and reducible metrics - towards a face that is shared, processual, and co-created.

bio: Ella Hillström is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research examines the repair of cleft lip and palate—the most common congenital facial anomaly—to explore broader questions about the social construction of faces. She is interested in creative practices in her research and works with somatic and speculative methodologies. She is also a member of the research collective For the Love of Inquiry (F.L.I.-labs), and has a movement-research practice with Yari Stilo.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Zrinka joins us this year a collaborator on the INTERLACE project. INTERLACE: Art and Action in Contemporary Dance Education is funded by the European Union, Erasmus+. INTERLACE aims to provide dance educators learning environments and peer-to-peer-exchanges for knowledge transfer and for developing inclusive methodologies for teaching creative dance to diverse local communities. Inclusive methodologies are understood as methods and tools aimed at making students feel acknowledged, empowered, and situated in their physical and creative bodies.

Written by Zrinka:

This deep dive will highlight the immune system as a model of collaboration, foregrounding processes of learning through encounter, and the capacity to adapt, respond and ‘predict the unpredictable’. It adopts the title From Cell (Unity) to Community from a series of somatic sessions and workshops developed within the SomaHut program. The title further refers to broader processes that underpin the growth and organization of life on Earth.

A central aim of the SomaHut initiative is to facilitate the transformation of individuals and communities through encounter and collaboration—investigating what the body and the processes that shape it can reveal about learning, support, cooperation and collective practice, following the journey from cell to community.

bio: Zrinka Šimičić is a Zagreb-based dance artist, educator and somatic practitioner. She trained at Laban/Bartenieff Somatic Studies International and completed the SME and IDME programs, and is in the process of completing the Practitioner Program at the School for Body-Mind Centering®. Her artistic research and teaching emerge from an ongoing inquiry into the processes that shape our experience of the living body in and as community, with particular attention to the dynamic between shared and personal dimensions. She collaborates and teaches across diverse contexts, working with students, professional and amateur dancers, children and vulnerable groups. She is the founder of the SomaHut initiative, co-founder of the Improspekcije improvisation festival, and artistic director of Multimedia Hut. She is a faculty member at the Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb (Dance Department) and also teaches in postgraduate programs in Dance Movement Psychotherapy in Zagreb and Osijek.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.



BMC® and Body-Mind Centering®
are registered service marks of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, used with permission.

With the exception of Kerstin Kussmaul, who originated the IDOCDE project, Amaara Raheem is the only contributor who’s previously presented at the IDOCDE as well as the LACE Symposium. As far as the interstitial matters are concerned, how will we know—be able to recognise—someone’s experience? In terms of the symposium, how will the fact of someone’s returning or approaching to symposium for the first time situate the way we’ll be able to perceive each other, know each other, meet each other, and communicate with one another?

the category is, the musings of a curator on a wednesday morning.

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I have participated in many Artist-in-Residence (AiR) programs over the years across different sites, and conditions. AiRs are widely acknowledged as valuable models for exchange and collaboration, and yet they are also built on assumptions, privileging a certain kind of access and mobility. My experience of migration and dance, leads me to continually make, unmake and remake ‘home’. I’m interested in residency practices that attune to this Body, in this Time, in this Place; ‘in-residence’ then as an interstitial process - intentional and also, fluid. We will work inside and outside, please bring layers of clothing and shoes for walking.

bio: Amaara Raheem (b. Sri Lanka) is a dance-artist whose work crosses many borders. Amaara practises multiple belongings, and is fascinated by meeting and exchanging with creative thinkers and workers; uniting experiences, skills, and efforts to make new tools for repair. Amaara currently lives in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia, where she is a Forrest Foundation Creative Fellow, working at Edith Cowan University, exploring ‘in-residence’ through the medium of radio and voice.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Tia Reihana presented at the 2020 IDOCDE Symposium, but only via Zoom. We’re beyond excited for Tia to be joining the 2026 symposium in person!

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Written by Tia:

This work enters taniwha territories, spaces sensed through shifts between body, material, and place. Taniwha are approached as ancestral presences linked to depth and unseen conditions. The work attends to arrival, where the body carries memory. Through breath, archive, and recycled materials, it explores fragments, traces, and relation. Raranga offers a way to hold this, an ongoing weaving of body, story, and place, shaped through small tasks and responsive movement.

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I am a dance artist, researcher, and educator working across choreography, installation, and embodied research. My practice understands the body as a site of knowledge, shaped through relationships to place. I work with movement as listening, attending to breath, memory, and environment. I developed Te Mana Motuhake o te Kauri as a relational framework grounded in autonomy, connection, and embodied exchange. My work moves across site, studio, and community, remaining process-based and evolving.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

curating the interstitial, we asked ourselves about the way long term relationship may be capable of evidencing something deeply felt by the virtue of their ongoingness, or—in Satu’s terms—unfinished-ness. one of the presenters to each of the Symposium days has presented at the Symposium before. Stéphanie’s first appearance was at LACE #2. we are so pleased that Stéphanie’s was able to come back this year, to keep telling her story!

Written by Stéphanie:

Composted Identity is a practice built around a sonic archive, audio fragments layered to blur the line between memory and the present, the living and the dead, the factual and the imagined.

What do we carry in our listening that we cannot access through sight? This deep dive treats sound as the medium of that transformation: a substrate that holds what cannot be looked at directly. The archive we inhabit is already composite, made of what we have lost, what we carry, what others have left in the air, and learning to listen means navigating with the layers we cannot always name.

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bio: Stéphanie Janaina works with the body, memory, and language as territories where identity is both affirmed and unsettled. Through performance, she explores ways of inhabiting other languages and making visible what has been silenced by history or violence. In her work, the body becomes archive and bridge, holding memory and imagining more sensitive modes of existing together. She studies the Mixtec language, variant Tnu’u Dau, as a choreographic and affective device: a way of keeping alive the dialogue with her grandmother and with a collective history.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

we are so pleased to share the honour of this year’s first deep dive with Satu Palokangas!

Written by Satu:

Guided by the question written in the title, this offering invites us into an exploration of the porous, leaking wilderness of our physical forms. Drawing from ecosomatics, cellular biology, and microbiome studies, we explore the body as a site of encounter and emergence, through its symbiotic ecologies, held within multiple fields of relation. Through practices of going under, of expanding time, of attending to the barely-perceptible, we move and touch our way toward generative co-embodiment, while meeting our bodies’ glorious unfinishedness.

While living in a Welsh permaculture community in the early 1990s, I realized I wanted to practice something like permaculture but with far more dancing and bodywork involved. That quest led me to the study and practice of Body-Mind Centering®. These days I teach within BMC®, Laban/Bartenieff and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy certification trainings, run my own somatic offerings, and work at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki exploring ecosomatics and radical regenerative practices with acting students.

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Made with the support of PART Residency, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

FULL PROGRAM OUT NOW!

LACE No. 4: Fractalising Touch
hospitality, integration, & the interstitial
27–31 July 2026. Registration is now OPEN!

www.lacesymposium.com

LACE Symposium is a symposium for dance and other contemporary practices committed to bringing together practitioners working at the intersection of art, academia, and activism!

curated by Deirdre Morris, Sylvia Scheidl, & pavlehidler.

with Satu Palokangas, Stéphanie Janaina, Tia Reihana, Amaara Raheem, Zrinka Šimičić, Ella Hillström, Olive Bieringa, & Kerstin Kussmaul!

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Made with the support of ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

FULL PROGRAM OUT NOW!

LACE No. 4: Fractalising Touch
hospitality, integration, & the interstitial
27–31 July 2026. Registration is now OPEN!

www.lacesymposium.com

LACE Symposium is a symposium for dance and other contemporary practices committed to bringing together practitioners working at the intersection of art, academia, and activism!

curated by Deirdre Morris, Sylvia Scheidl, & pavlehidler.

with Satu Palokangas, Stéphanie Janaina, Tia Reihana, Amaara Raheem, Zrinka Šimičić, Ella Hillström, Olive Bieringa, & Kerstin Kussmaul!

🏡 ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival

🎨

Made with the support of ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.