CPPM is welcoming its next guest artists, Roel Swanenberg and Arjan Gebraad, for the workshop The Readiness is All, taking place from 27 October to 1 November 2025 at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. The workshop will culminate in an Open Class on 1 November at 19:00 in the EMTA black box, offering audiences a chance to witness the collaborative outcomes and the evolving creative processes that have shaped the week.

Roel Swanenberg, a multidisciplinary theatre artist born in the Netherlands and based in Belgium, is known for his ability to bridge classical texts with contemporary performance. His creative work brings together embodied storytelling, poetic dramaturgy, and audience engagement, forming a distinctive voice within the Flemish and Dutch theatre landscape. Over the past two decades, Swanenberg has collaborated with companies such as Het Nationale Theater, Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Theater Artemis, Het Toneelhuis, and Het Nieuwstedelijk. In 2008, he co-founded the theatre company kinderenvandevilla with Wanda Eyckerman, creating internationally recognised performances including Alleen op de Wereld and Leeghoofd. His solo work Shall I…? explores Shakespeare’s sonnets through contemporary media and personal narrative, revealing his continued curiosity for how language, body, and sound intertwine. Alongside his stage work, Swanenberg teaches at LUCA School of Arts in Genk, mentoring film and acting students through an approach that values creative autonomy, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and physical awareness.

Arjan Gebraad, also from the Netherlands, is a performer, director, and dramaturg whose practice expands across theatre, dance, and circus. After studies in Cultural Sciences at the University of Tilburg and directing at the Maastricht Academy of Performing Arts, he trained with both SITI Company and Mary Overlie, experiences that profoundly shaped his understanding of ensemble performance and non-hierarchical composition. His artistic work is remarkably diverse: he has served as dramaturg for urban dance and hip-hop projects, made short dance films, performed as a simulation actor in training contexts, and developed socially engaged works with the artist collective Tilburg Cowboys. As the founder of The Windmill Collective, Gebraad continues to experiment with new forms of performative research, exploring how performers can become authors through embodied investigation and creative dialogue.

Over the years, Swanenberg and Gebraad have formed a strong artistic partnership grounded in shared values of experimentation, curiosity, and pedagogical innovation. They have collaborated as co-directors, teachers, and researchers, and are both active ambassadors of the Mary Overlie Legacy Project, dedicated to extending her ideas to new generations of artists. Their joint teaching embraces The Six Viewpoints as a living practice, treating performance as a field of observation and participation rather than creation from hierarchy. Their approach invites performers to attend to the materials of Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story, allowing compositions to emerge organically through collective attention and spatial listening.

The workshop The Readiness is All draws its title from Hamlet’s final words — a reflection on presence and acceptance that resonates deeply with Overlie’s philosophy. Throughout the week, CPPM students will engage in physical training, improvisation, and compositional exercises that investigate how perception can become a tool for creation. By combining physical theatre, textual exploration, and ensemble awareness, participants will learn to use composition as both a technical and poetic method for making performance. The process emphasises curiosity, responsiveness, and the dismantling of hierarchies between performer, director, and text, nurturing the performer’s authorship and sense of artistic independence.