What about the Body?” – School of Experience is a project in three modules for and with student(s) from four different departments, initiated by Düsseldorf choreographer Ben J. Riepe and his team and first implemented in 2021 as part of #TakePart, funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

The School of Experience dealt with artistic questions about the reality and relevance of our physical and sensual live experiences. In three modules, we joined the students to challenge our traditionally purely cognitive ways of gaining knowledge with a physical and sensual resonance space, even in times of increasingly digital encounters, through our own physical experience. We asked one another how we can find our way back into and with our bodies, and wanted to address the effects and differences of digital encounters and bodily co-presence in real space and physically illuminate them in exercises and experiences and in various performative and participatory formats in nature and indoors, in virtual and analog spaces. In contrast to a purely cognitive “schooling” that often neglects experiencing and allowing an inclusion of one’s own experiences, the School of Experiencing was about developing exercises and practices that lead to one’s own intuition and thus creativity. Through a comprehensive understanding of performative art and artistic processes, we tested how to develop a new social approach in order to understand this “new world”, at whose threshold we stand with all its (climate) crisis implications, but also the possibilities of a new world order, through our own experiences and to participate in shaping it in a self-effective way.