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.