Category: CPPM news

3 to 8 August 2026 · Horohronos Dance studio, Athens

A performer’s most honest work often begins where habit ends. That is the ground Physical Lab sets out to reach, and for a week at the start of August the CPPM cohort worked there, in a dance studio in Athens, with the company’s founder Yorgos Karamalegos.

The physical theatre workshop in Athens ran from 3 to 8 August at the Horohronos Dance studio and opened the Greek leg of a four-month Erasmus+ traineeship through Italy and Greece. It was the fourth of the journey’s five phases, and the first after a month in Venice.

There is a joke buried in that itinerary. The cohort left the Biennale, where contemporary art shows itself to the world at maximum volume, and arrived in the country that invented theatre in the first place. They did not spend the week on ancient texts. They spent it on the body, which is the one piece of equipment nobody has managed to redesign since.

For Karamalegos it was also a homecoming, though not entirely: he never quite left. He was born in Athens and trained there, at Nelly Karra’s school, before a career in Greek film and television and a move to the United Kingdom in 2001, and his Lab still returns to Greece every year for its residency on Crete. This time Greece came with students attached.

Working from the body outwards

Karamalegos starts with the body and works outwards. The practice is movement-based and slow, built on close attention to impulse and sensation, which sounds gentle until you notice what it is doing: taking apart the patterns a performer has long stopped noticing they have. The method has a name for the quality of attention it asks. He calls it the Tasting Principle, meaning you meet material slowly enough to register what it actually is, rather than what habit expects it to be.

The unlearning is the harder half. A trained performer arrives carrying habits that were useful once and have since gone automatic, and the week worked at exactly that seam. It is uncomfortable, in the way useful things often are. What comes out the other side is not a new technique laid over the old one. It is a body with more available to it.

Karamalegos puts the principle behind that plainly. He does not believe there is one acting technique that works for everyone, because every actor is a unique ecosystem. His role, as he describes it, is not to fit performers into a predefined method but to help them understand how they are built and how they function, so that what they arrive at is not a borrowed method but a technique emerging from their own nature.

The practitioner and the laboratory

Karamalegos founded Physical Lab in London in 2011 and has built the method there since, teaching short Labs across Europe and the United States. Before that came a decade of physical-theatre making in Liverpool, where he co-founded Tmesis Theatre and the festival Physical Fest. He directed the award-winning solo Wolf Red in 2013 and acted in the film The Last Note in 2017. He has taught at LAMDA, RADA, the Drama Centre and Williams College.

Karamalegos had taught at CPPM before. He was here as early as the late summer of 2019, when the programme was barely under way. The students who stood in front of him in the Athens studio, though, were CPPM’s third cohort, meeting him for the first time. The week belonged to a summer built to get students out of the home studio in Tallinn and into a room with the best in their field.

The road continues

This is the fourth dispatch from the traineeship. The first told the story of the opening residency in Melpignano, and the second and third followed the cohort through its month in Venice, from the guest weeks with Punchdrunk and Theatre Re to the six audio walks made at the Biennale. From Athens the road turns inland and south, to Karyes in the Peloponnese, where the four months end with a residency at the Marina Abramović Institute. The cohort stays in the country that invented theatre a while longer. It just keeps climbing.

Studio time with practitioners like this runs through the whole degree. Read more about the CPPM programme.

29 June to 12 July 2026 · Centro Teatrale di Ricerca, Giudecca, Venice

For two weeks either side of the turn of July, the CPPM cohort worked in a theatre on the Giudecca with two of the companies that changed how audiences meet a performance. First Punchdrunk, then Theatre Re. Each week ended with the doors opened to the public.

The physical theatre workshops in Venice opened the third chapter of a four-month Erasmus+ traineeship carrying the whole cohort through Italy and Greece. The venue was the Centro Teatrale di Ricerca on the Giudecca, the long island across the water from the tourist city, where the programme held its Venice residency for four weeks from 28 June. Like every phase of the journey, the Venice chapter was shaped by Cracalia ETS, the Italian cultural association that is the umbrella for the entire traineeship. The two guest weeks came first. The two weeks that followed belonged to the cohort’s own making.

A week inside Punchdrunk’s practice

Sarah Dowling led the first week, 29 June to 4 July. She has been a Punchdrunk collaborator since 2002, and the roles behind her are the company’s landmarks: Lady Macbeth in the original Sleep No More in London, Dolores Grey in The Drowned Man, and on The Burnt City both original-cast Hecuba and Associate Director. Alongside that she makes her own dance and theatre work and is an Associate Artist at the Royal Opera House. Punchdrunk itself, founded in 2000 by Felix Barrett, built the form most people now mean by immersive theatre, where the audience walks through a world rather than sitting in front of one.

What she brought was not a lecture about a famous company. It was a practice the cohort stood inside. The week worked on spectatorship in immersive and site-sympathetic space, and on the making processes underneath it. Material was built fast and deliberately unjudged, the body given simple instructions and left to find the rest. Attention went to communicating the feeling of a movement rather than its appearance. The audience became a variable to compose with: how close they stand, where they place themselves, how long they are willing to look. Architecture stopped being a container and became a partner, a boundary to seek out and work against. By the third day the question had turned to the spectator’s senses, and the answer was mostly slowness. Do not bypass the small things. Let temperature and texture and sound arrive.

Her way of working was itself part of the teaching. Complete preparation, total attention to the room, and no wasted energy. That combination is worth remembering as a model of professionalism in this field, independent of any aesthetic. The week closed with a public open class on 4 July.

Actions first, meaning later

Two days later the room changed hands. From 6 to 12 July, Guillaume Pigé and Mary Johnson of Theatre Re led a week on the company’s own making process. The governing principle is one Pigé states plainly: actions come first and the meaning arrives later. The work has to be found, not planned and not invented, which means getting on your feet before you have decided what you are doing. In Theatre Re’s room there is no right and no wrong. There is only play, and the best idea in the room is the best idea in the room, whoever brought it.

The starting point is a piece of vocabulary inherited from Étienne Decroux, the verb to be. Not a state of mind but a readiness: the performer available for action, the zero from which every choice is made. From there the company works through four ways of writing, which is their word for building material. Writing with space, where a truthful walk is articulated by stops and changes of direction, because a stop invites meaning. Writing with weight, worked in pairs through touch and response, because weight is what gives things value. Writing with rhythm, which they call dynamo-rhythm, the amalgamation of energy, speed, tempo and trajectory that decides whether a gesture carries dramatic value or merely happens. And writing with inner space, the body articulated part against part, lines of force running through it.

Each of the four follows the same arc. Find something truthful, articulate it, observe what it actually does, transform it, and keep what survives. What accumulates is a physical repertoire rather than a set of scenes, and the scenes come later, out of the repertoire. One of the more useful discoveries for a room full of makers is that Theatre Re treats transitions as physical problems in their own right. What began life as a way of getting from one moment to the next has, more than once, turned into a scene of its own.

The music is not added afterwards. It is devised alongside the movement from the first day and performed live, so that the musicians respond to the performers in real time rather than accompanying a finished thing. That is why Mary Johnson was in the room all week. A London-based multi-instrumentalist and theatre maker, she trained in percussion at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and graduated with first-class honours in 2022, and she plays percussion in Theatre Re’s The Nature of Forgetting. She played the week rather than scoring it.

Theatre Re was founded in 2009 by Pigé and makes highly visual, non-verbal theatre carried by original live music. Its subjects are the large human ones, memory and family and life and loss, reached through the body and the score rather than through speech. The name comes from the prefix. To rediscover, to reinvent, to reveal, to remind. In 2026 the company marks fifteen years of professional activity, with seven mid-scale productions toured to 88 venues in more than 51 cities across 17 countries and three continents, and The Nature of Forgetting was named Best Physical Theatre of the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025. Pigé has been an Associate Teacher at RADA since 2011, and his history with CPPM runs longer than most: he first taught here in January 2020, with the programme’s first cohort, and again in 2023. Venice was his third time teaching here, and his first with this cohort. The week ended with a public open class on Saturday 11 July at six in the evening.

Two weeks, two opposite entrances

Put side by side, the weeks approached the same craft from opposite ends. Punchdrunk begins with the spectator and builds a world for them to walk into, so the composition is of attention itself. Theatre Re begins with the performer’s body and what it can be made to mean, and trusts the audience to read it. One week asked where the audience stands. The other asked what the body is saying before anyone decides what it means. A cohort that has stood in both within a fortnight holds a sharper instrument than either week alone would have given it.

What weeks like these leave is rarely a finished piece. It is a set of questions that keep working after the guests have flown home. Punchdrunk’s methods rest on rigorous world-building beneath the surface an audience ever meets, which leaves a maker asking what the unseen nine-tenths of their own work is, and whether they have actually built it. Theatre Re leaves the harder discipline of making before understanding, and of trusting that the meaning will arrive if the action is true.

The road continues

This is the second dispatch from the traineeship. The first told the story of the opening residency in Melpignano. The two weeks that followed these guest weeks turned the cohort from students of other people’s methods into makers of their own work, and produced six audio walks through the Venice Biennale. From Venice the road turned to Greece, to Athens and then to the Peloponnese.

A degree that puts its students in rooms like these. Read more about the CPPM programme.

Presented 25 July 2026 · Giardini and Arsenale, Venice · walkable while the Biennale runs

Six audio walks now run through the 61st Venice Biennale, made by CPPM master’s students in two weeks in and around the exhibition. Anyone with a Biennale ticket can walk them. They are what the cohort made in the closing fortnight of its month in Venice, the third chapter of a four-month Erasmus+ traineeship through Italy and Greece.

The Venice Biennale audio walks grew out of Watching Otherwise, a seminar on spectatorship: how we watch, who is allowed to watch, and under what conditions. Imanuel Schipper led it. A dramaturge and performance studies scholar, he has worked with the theatre collective Rimini Protokoll for more than twenty years. He is also a long-standing guest teacher at CPPM, having first worked with the programme in 2020 and 2021. Like every phase, the Venice chapter was shaped by Cracalia ETS. The Italian cultural association is the umbrella for the entire four-month traineeship.

From an olive grove to the Giardini

The seminar opened with a week on Corfu, at Elaionas, an olive-grove retreat near the village of Arillas. That week laid the theoretical ground. First the group read, walked and watched together, starting from Jacques Rancière’s claim that the spectator is never passive. From there the reading widened. Claire Bishop brought distracted attention, Diana Taylor the body as a memory no archive can hold. Then came Schipper’s own question: how does a spectator stop being a bystander and become a co-producer of the work? No one needs the reading list to walk the walks: they carry the questions on their own. Two weeks in Venice then turned theory into practice. The walks grew in direct relation to the Biennale itself, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh as In Minor Keys.

An audioguide turned inside out

Each walk turns the ordinary audioguide inside out. It does not explain the art. Instead it asks what you are doing when you look at it: where your attention goes, what it passes over, whose gaze you have borrowed without noticing. As a result, you end the visit having seen the same exhibition as everyone else, and a different one. The makers call the walks first passes rather than finished artworks. They were made inside the two weeks of the seminar itself, so the questions are still audible in the walking.

Behind the walks sits a discovery about how performance gets made. Anette Pärn, one of the makers of The Walking Alive, came to the seminar carrying a phrase she had never quite settled: “structure releases content.” Her suspicion had always been “that something arbitrary can only produce something arbitrary.” Two weeks of making an audio walk shifted that: with no time for contemplation, decisions had to be made fast, stuck with, and built on rather than returned to. And they “did not stay arbitrary for very long. Each one narrowed the field slightly, so the next one had less room left in which to be random, until at some point the choices seemed to be made by the thing itself rather than by us.” On the far side the phrase held: “the walk exists, and it holds whatever it turned out to hold.”

The Venice Biennale audio walks were made independently of La Biennale di Venezia. They were not commissioned by the Biennale and are not part of its programme. Yet the exhibition stays exactly as it is. The walk only changes how you move through it.

Six walks, thirteen makers

Each walk starts at a real point in the Giardini or the Arsenale and runs on the listener’s own phone. Some groups merged in the process, so six walks emerged, made by twelve CPPM students and Laurits Muru:

• Petra: the one who stayed by Juuli Hyttinen (Finland) and Maria Papachristodoulou (Greece). A walk about movement and displacement, where art, nature and an unexpected companion change how you experience the Biennale. 21 min · Giardini.
• The Walking Alive by Anette Pärn (Estonia), Dita Lūriņa (Latvia) and Leah Rose Gayer (UK). Some things are simply waiting: the walk begins with a countdown and ends with an unexpected return. 21 min · Arsenale.
• The Garden Beneath the Garden by Ana Trif (Romania) and Laurits Muru (Estonia). What if the Giardini could reveal the invisible layers of power, memory and imagination beneath your feet? 27 min · Giardini.
• Coffee Date by Elar Vahter (Estonia), Avery Gerhardt (USA) and Charis Taplin (UK). A walk with the lady who knows it all about the Giardini della Biennale. 25 min · Giardini.
• Venetian Archive by Edward Skaines (Australia) and Clarisse Degeneffe (Belgium). A futuristic journey into a post-AI era, when the century’s most influential artistic mecca has become an archive. 16 min · Giardini.
• Inventory by Zhenyan Ding (China). Can time, boundaries, the past and the future also be inventoried and measured? 29 min · Giardini.

The twelve are members of the current CPPM cohort.

How to walk them

The walks were presented on 25 July as a sharing for the cohort, and they remain accessible. Walking one takes a Biennale day ticket, headphones and a charged phone. Interested? Then write to info_cppm@eamt.ee or ask any CPPM student.

The road continues

This is the third dispatch from the traineeship. The first told the story of the opening residency in Melpignano. The second covered the two guest weeks that opened the Venice chapter, with Punchdrunk and Theatre Re on the Giudecca. Venice closed at the end of July and the cohort travelled on to Greece, first to Athens and then to the Peloponnese, where the four months end with a residency at the Marina Abramović Institute.

The walks were made by students partway through a master’s built around making. Read more about the CPPM programme.

This summer, for the first time, the whole third cohort of CPPM is on the road together. From 10 May to 6 September 2026, an Erasmus+ traineeship carries the group through Italy and Greece: Melpignano, Corfu, Venice, Athens and the Peloponnese. Its first chapter, a six-week performance residency in Italy, closed in June. Melpignano, a small town in Puglia, became home.

Like every phase of the journey, the performance residency is hosted by Cracalia ETS, an Italian cultural association. The guest workshops and encounters follow Cracalia’s own artistic and organisational practice. The association shapes the pathway and brings in the guest artists who lead it. Taken by the whole cohort as part of the degree, the four months are built as one continuous professional journey. The ground of its opening phase was the simplest and hardest thing of all: contact.

Four weeks of slow days in Melpignano

In the first four weeks the cohort left its usual premises in Tallinn far behind, and the days ran slow. They were structured through invitations rather than fixed plans, the way a residency needs to be. Mornings began with a run or a swim in the sea. Then came an open somatic session, led by Silvia Marazzi. The movement practice served each person’s own agenda of self-regulation and activation. By midday the group had gathered at Palazzo Marchesale, headquarters of the residency. The gathering was held by Cracalia’s guest practitioners, Fabio Ghidoni, Flavia Ripa, Francesca Ziggiotti, Selvaggia Tegon Giacoppo, Anita Krem and Kymbali Williams, who helped the group think through the day’s shared and individual creative tasks and invitations. The town was already part of the work: its streets, its squares, its people. When it went right, the research spilled past schedule and plan. No one knew how to stop the session, and no one wanted to.

It was a residency built on contact: with the place, with its people, with each other. Students lived together, cooked together, failed together in daring attempts, shared their thoughts, and tried again the next day. What they made was not polished for an audience back home. It was made for the threshold itself, for the people of Melpignano who watched it take shape. By the final week, those people were part of it. What you bring back from four weeks like this is not a finished piece. It is a different relationship to your own work, an entry point into practice as research, and a strong clue as to how you would like to organise a residency of your own.

What the residency leaves behind: the TЯA Project

One outcome of the first four weeks of this performance residency in Italy is not a performance but a website. Across four editions in Melpignano since 2021, the TЯA Project has grown into the residency’s own method for documentation. It rests on the premise that a residency produces relations before it produces work. Those relations deserve the same rigour as the work itself. So rather than a gallery of production stills, the site holds a set of instruments built to answer a question every residency eventually meets: what remains once the artists have gone, and who has standing to say so. Each tool makes the residency’s relations visible while they are happening, not reconstructed after everyone has left. Each is offered as a method others can test or push back on, rather than a finished claim. Documentation becomes part of the practice, not an afterthought to it. That insistence makes the project a live reference point in the wider artistic and academic conversation about what a residency for performance makers actually owes the place that hosts it.

Merging into Matter: Become a cliff. Become a river. Be a leaf.

From 8 to 20 June the performance residency in Italy turned from the human community to the earth. Choreographer Ephia Gburek and accordionist Vincent Valente of Djalma Primordial Science led Merging into Matter, two weeks of “body weather” dance research weaving sensory perception and imagination. Gburek studied butoh with Min Tanaka and Kazuo Ohno in Japan and cofounded Djalma in 1998. The company’s works blur the distinctions between theatre, dance and performance, appearing in theatres, galleries, derelict buildings and landscapes.

The days were divided between studio work and outdoor immersion in the Puglian landscape. Each morning an intensive warm-up connected the group to the place, to sensation, to breath and voice. The research that followed was guided by a poetic language and accompanied by Valente’s live accordion, deepening connection to a partner, an object, an environment. The practice slowed down until movement imperceptibly detached itself from stillness. The cohort approached matter as existence, blurring the line between the animate and inanimate worlds. Daily training became what the artists call an act of metamorphosis.

Next stop: Venice

The performance residency in Melpignano was the first of the traineeship’s five phases, each tied to the place that hosts it. So the journey is only beginning. A short preparatory phase on Corfu followed, laying the ground for the next chapter. Since 28 June the cohort has been in Venice for a four-week residency at the Venice Biennale, centred on audio walks developed with Imanuel Schipper of Rimini Protokoll. The walks are documentary performance, inspired by the city and the Biennale itself. This is the first dispatch from the traineeship: the Venice chapter gets its own story here soon, and the road continues to Athens and the Peloponnese for a one-month residency at the Marina Abramović Institute.

Why CPPM sends its makers on the road

The traineeship rests on a conviction at the centre of CPPM’s pedagogy. Performance makers are formed in real working contexts, not simulated ones. The programme is practice-led throughout. Its students train studio-floor with the artists who made the field. They make their own work for real audiences from the first semester. A four-month traineeship, opening with a performance residency in Italy and taken by the whole cohort together, extends that logic to its conclusion. As a result, the working conditions of an emerging artist’s future become the curriculum itself: unfamiliar places, new communities, found spaces, sustained collaboration.

Curious where a performance residency in Italy can take an emerging maker? Read more about the CPPM programme.

CPPM is welcoming its next artistic encounter, Valga/Valka: Space × Architecture × Performance, beginning on 29 April 2026 at VARES, the Valga Architecture Residency, on the Estonian Latvian border. For two weeks, students of the MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre are transforming the streets, public spaces and shared rhythms of Valga into a living site for performance, architecture, choreography and community exchange.

From the black box to the streets of Valga

After twelve months of intensive work in the black box studio in Tallinn, CPPM students are stepping into a new phase of their artistic journey. Valga becomes their threshold: the point where studio-based training opens into public space practice, site-specific performance, community encounter and the wider international residencies that will soon take them onwards to Italy and Greece. 

The residency explores Valga and Valka as a unique cultural, spatial and geopolitical border-space. Students are investigating how architecture, movement, local histories, public encounters and the material layers of the town can become starting points for performance making, compositional structures and dramaturgical thinking. Here, the town is not a backdrop. It is a collaborator, a host, a map, a score and a stage.

Performance, architecture, mapping and the gift

During the residency, CPPM students have been working with Mona Camille, Seychellois German set and costume designer; Olivier Van Den Hende, actor and director from the USA and France; and Peader Kirk, Irish British performance maker. In dialogue with the architects and place-making practices of VARES, they have explored how bodies read space, how public places carry memory, and how performance can emerge from direct attention to where we are.

Their process has included site-specific performance, site-responsive performance practice, embodied enquiry, spatial observation, walking practices, performative mapping, devising, urban performance, relational aesthetics, crafting with found materials and guerrilla filmmaking. Alongside this, the students have been thinking with the Situationist International, the films of Elia Kazan and Marcel Mauss’ writing on The Gift: asking what it means to arrive in a place, to be welcomed, to create in public and to offer something back.

Join CPPM in Valga on Friday, 8 May 2026

The residency culminates on Friday, 8 May 2026, when CPPM students will share their work in Valga during the town’s first Long Table event, taking place ahead of the traditional Border Fair weekend.

The Long Table will bring together Valga’s Estonian, Latvian, Russian, Romani and Ukrainian communities to share food, stories, cultures and traditions. CPPM’s temporary community of artists from twelve countries will join this celebration with processions through the streets of Valga, breads baked from their homelands, films created during the residency and songs carried from their own cultures. We warmly invite you to join us in Valga on Friday. Come walk with us, gather around the table, encounter the films, listen to the songs, taste the breads and experience how a town can become a shared performance. CPPM has been generously welcomed by VARES and by the people of Valga. This final sharing is our gesture of gratitude: part procession, part feast, part film event, part song, part spatial intervention and part gift.

As part of CPPM’s commitment to contemporary performance, professional development, postgraduate education and international performing arts education, this intensive residency supports students in developing artistic practices that are responsive, collaborative and deeply connected to context. Through physical performance, choreography, public space practice and performance making, Valga/Valka: Space × Architecture × Performance asks how art can move through a town, how strangers can become guests, and how performance can bring people to one shared table.

The project is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

On 23 January 2026 at 21:30, the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT) hosts a public panel discussion titled “What Is Devised Performance and How Do You Eat It?” The event accompanies CPPM Triptych: Political Movement, created by students of the MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making (CPPM), and takes place in the foyer of the academy. 

The panel brings together Sandra Küpper (German dramaturg and festival curator, Senior Lecturer in Dramaturgy at EAMT), Nicolette Kretz (director, dramaturg and writer based in Bern), and Alissa Šnaider (Estonian visual artist, choreographer, dramaturg and curator). The discussion is moderated by theatre critic and researcher Karin Allik.

Together, the speakers explore devising as both an artistic impulse and a working method, including what draws artists to it and what kinds of conditions help devised processes flourish. The conversation circles questions of collective authorship and responsibility, including the familiar tension of whether shared responsibility risks becoming no responsibility at all, and what it takes to stay accountable while keeping the work genuinely collective.

The discussion also touches the ethics and realities of collaboration, from rehearsal conditions, time, preparation, and the people you choose to work with, to how a space is shaped where every voice can be heard without losing a shared direction. Running through this are larger questions about politics and context: whether devised theatre is political in its essence, how freelancing and project based production models influence devising, what wider social impact this way of working can have, and whether devising has become mainstream or is still in the process of becoming.

Entry is free, but registration is required.

CPPM is excited to announce the premiere of CPPM TRIPTYCH: POLITICAL MOVEMENT, a vibrant performance programme featuring three newly devised works by the international cohort of the MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making (CPPM) at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. The CPPM TRIPTYCH premieres on 23 January 2026 and continues with performances on 24, 26, 27, 28 and 29 January 2026.

CPPM TRIPTYCH: POLITICAL MOVEMENT brings three distinct performances into one shared curatorial frame: political movement. Across the evening, audiences are invited into three different artistic worlds, three different devising strategies, and three different ways of transforming individual perspectives into collective action. Expect cultural polyphony, sharp theatrical contrasts, and a compelling sense of how movement can be political, physical, and poetic all at once.

The programme

WalkYourChair

Performance dates: 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 January 2026
Time: 18:00
Venue: Balti Jaama Tunnel

A site specific performance that begins with an audio guide and a simple proposal: take your chair for a walk, sit wherever you want, and see what happens if you let it lead you. In a space built for passing through, four performers give body and breath to four chairs, opening a surprising shift in how we perceive presence, place, and permission.

Creative team
Co authors and performers: Dita Lurina (Latvia), Daniel Ortiz (Colombia), Anette Pärn (Estonia), Edward Skaines (Australia)
Set designer: The Third
Sound designer: Kymbali Williams

EMIT

Performance dates: 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 January 2026
Time: 20:00
Venue: EMTA black box

You have received an invitation from EMIT, and it is polite to accept it. Framed as a celebration of new beginnings, EMIT plays with the rituals of togetherness and the seductive language of hope. It welcomes you in, draws you close, and asks what it really means to gather, connect, and imagine a better world.

Creative team
Co authors and performers: Clarisse Degeneffe (Belgium), Juuli Hyttinen (Finland), Jeson Joy (India), Oskar Moore (Latvia), Maria Papachristodoulou (Greece), Ana Trif (Romania)
Set designer: Kairi Mändla
Lighting designer: Siim Reispass
Sound designer: Kenn Eerik Kannike

Night Watch

Performance dates: 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 January 2026
Time: 23:00
Venue: EMTA black box

Night Watch invites the audience to drift on the border between wakefulness and sleep, where movement becomes a way of sensing austerity, abundance, and resilience. The performance conjures embodied worlds and future visions that appear when reality slips into fairytale like abstraction.

Creative team
Co authors and performers: Zhenyan Ding (China), Leah Gayer (Germany), Avery Gerhardt (USA), Charis Taplin (UK), Maarja Tosin (Estonia), Elar Vahter (Estonia)
Set designer: Kairi Mändla
Lighting designer: Siim Reispass
Sound designer: Kenn Eerik Kannike
Video artist: Ave Palm

CPPM welcomes its next guest artist, Peader Kirk, for a two-week workshop beginning on 8 December 2025 at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. Known internationally for his bold performance-making practice across sound art, theatre, and site-responsive work, Kirk returns to CPPM with a new intensive that moves fluidly between theory and practice, engaging with the urgent tensions of our contemporary world and the role of the artist within it.

In this workshop, participants will work principally through practical exploration, while also stepping back to reflect on their creative processes and the moment we collectively inhabit. Kirk invites students to set aside the notion of “creative solutions” and instead dive into the strategies, processes, and provocations that underpin performance making today. Through task-based exercises, compositional approaches, and collaborative enquiry, students will generate material, build encounters, and create moments of performance that question how a work comes into being—and how it works. Along the way, they will explore physical languages, text generators, identities and personas, games that don’t yet exist, spontaneous composition, grids, resources, and the seeding of change. There will be rigorous questioning, imaginative experimentation, and laughter.

Central to Kirk’s methodology is the idea that artistic work emerges from a question about how the world is right now – a question impossible to answer in words alone, one that demands a creative response. This workshop asks participants to consider the fraught terrain of the future: Is it something we can shape, or something predetermined? Is it close at hand, or still out of reach? What might a “better future” look like, and better for whom? These provocations will guide the group through hands-on explorations that bridge performance, politics, imagination, and lived experience.

Running 8–19 December 2025, the workshop culminates in an Open Class on 19 December at 19:00 in the EMTA Black Box, where audiences are warmly invited to witness the outcomes of this dynamic, exploratory process.

This intensive forms part of CPPM’s commitment to world-leading postgraduate education, international collaboration, and advanced artistic training. Situated at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn, CPPM continues to offer transformative training opportunities for artists seeking to expand their creative development, physical performance, and performance-making strategies.

CPPM is welcoming its next guest artist, Mart Kangro, for a week-long workshop starting 1 December 2025. Kangro is one of Estonia’s most influential contemporary dance and performance makers, known for his conceptual, philosophical, and deeply reflective approach to embodiment, presence, and the semiotics of the stage. His practice bridges choreography, devised theatre, and performative research, making him an exceptional mentor for international artists seeking advanced professional development in physical performance.

Throughout this intensive, participants will engage with Kangro’s signature themes: presence and disappearance, memory and forgetting, embodiment as inquiry, and the subtle dramaturgies of gesture. Drawing from his extensive background, from classical ballet and work at the Estonian National Opera to major European collaborations, Kangro guides CPPM students through a process of movement research, text work, reflection, and sensorial awareness. The focus lies in understanding performance as “philosophy in action,” where thought becomes physical, minimal action becomes meaningful, and performers cultivate precision, intelligence, and vulnerability.

The workshop runs 1–6 December 2025, culminating in an Open Class on 6 December at 19:00 in the EMTA black box. Everyone is warmly invited to join and witness the week’s research and discoveries shared by an international group of artists.

This workshop is part of CPPM’s ongoing mission to foster artistic innovation, international collaboration, and high-level professional development for contemporary performance makers. Through intensive workshops, international masterclasses, and renowned guest artists, CPPM continues to position Tallinn as a leading hub for postgraduate education in physical theatre, choreography, performance making, and advanced creative research and development.

CPPM at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn continues its commitment to high-level professional development by welcoming its next guest artist, Clément Layes, for the workshop Dancing the Creature, starting today. Layes, a renowned choreographer, conceptual performance-maker and co-founder of the Berlin-based company Public in Private, brings to CPPM more than two decades of artistic research integrating contemporary dance, physical theatre, circus, visual arts and philosophical inquiry. His internationally acclaimed work has been presented at leading venues and festivals worldwide, including Théâtre de la Ville, Kaai Theatre, Walker Art Center and the Venice Biennale.

The workshop Dancing the Creature invites participants into a playful, poetic and cross-disciplinary exploration where the body encounters objects, imagination and conceptual thought. Rooted in somatic attention and the agency of both human and non-human bodies, the workshop opens pathways into altered states of creativity, object play, sensory fine-tuning and installation-making. Participants explore humour, repetition, failure, and the subtle architectures of attention that support artistic vitality. Rather than a linear technique class, the process unfolds as a shared journey, offering performers tools to expand their physical performance language and rethink collaboration, presence and creative development within contemporary dance and performance making.

The workshop runs throughout this week, and CPPM warmly invites everyone to an Open Class on 29 November at 19:00 in the EMTA Black Box, where the participants will share insights and outcomes from their intensive research with Layes. This workshop forms part of CPPM’s broader mission to create world-leading training opportunities and international masterclasses that support postgraduate education, artistic innovation and the evolving landscape of contemporary physical performance in Tallinn and beyond.