Our educational pathways combine movement training with bodily and performing practices, offering spaces of deep inquiry open to performers, artists, and curious souls. Through three complementary modules, we explore the body not as a limit, but as a channel for listening and connecting with the surrounding ecosystem.
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Workshop and research project designed and led by Daniela Marcozzi, inspired by oceanic forces and the sensorial experiences of human beings and other animals.
What happens when we start perceiving beyond the five traditional senses?
Beyond the Narrative of the Five Senses is an artistic research and training module that invites participants to explore human perception as something fluid, poetic, and ecological — a living network that connects body, environment, and imagination.
The five senses are often described as windows through which information enters from the outside world and is processed by the body. While this model is not incorrect, it may be limiting.
We don’t just receive the world—we exist within it, through it.
We are not separate from our environment but are part of an energetic web we rarely perceive in its richness.
What if these sensations could be embodied, named, and given performative shape?
In this work, perception is not limited to a system of reception — it is a process of co-existence. We don’t simply receive the world; we exist within it. The human body is not separate from its surroundings but part of a continuous, vibrating field of energy and information.
The module originates from Daniela Marcozzi’s ongoing artistic research connecting life sciences and performance practice.
Rooted in her background as a biologist and performer, this project extends the embodied investigation of Marcozzi’s workshop and research The Urge of Being toward a broader inquiry on perception, ecology, and the politics of the senses.
Drawing inspiration from other species — whales, jellyfish, birds, and humans alike — participants explore what other senses might exist beyond our habitual modes of perception.
Our Western worldview tends to fragment experience: body vs. mind, self vs. others, science vs. art, human vs. nature.
In Beyond the narrative of the Five Senses, we’ll explore the spaces in between these dualities—where mystery, co-existence, and new sensitivities emerge.
Our senses guide our choices, actions, and ways of inhabiting the world. A body aware of its perception is also aware of how it can be shaped — or manipulated — by its environment.
To question the dominant sensory narrative is, therefore, a political and ecological urge. By refining and REDEFINING our senses, we study our relationship with the world. By awakening to how we perceive, we resist the disconnection that modern life imposes on the body.
In an age of ecological and social crisis, Beyond the Narrative of the Five Senses calls for new narratives of perception — stories that begin in the body and expand into the more-than-human. It proposes that sensitivity itself is a form of resistance, and that perception, in its poetic dimension, can become an instrument of transformation.
A workshop by Daniela Marcozzi
A journey where science meets art, and impulse meets awareness and form.
In The Urge of Being, the performer becomes a living organism in motion — a body that thinks, breathes, and vibrates.
Through movement, voice, and impulse, we explore the urgency of expression: the moment when emotion transforms into action, and the inner world resonates outward.
Rooted in Daniela Marcozzi’s research on the biology of emotions and embodiment, this training invites participants to rediscover performance as a vital process of survival, communication, and creation.
The Urge of Being is based on the artistic research that Daniela Marcozzi — performer, director, and former biologist — developed at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri (Switzerland) during her Master of Arts in Artistic Research.
Her research explores the biology of emotions and theories of embodiment, aiming to define an innovative training method based on the urgency of expression, where life science and performing arts come together.
“We’re not just little hunks of meat.
We’re vibrating like a tuning fork — we send out a vibration to other people.
We broadcast and receive.
Thus the emotions orchestrate the interactions
among all our organs and systems to control that.”
(PhD Candace Pert)
The work proposed by Daniela Marcozzi is a group-based training and creative process that includes tools from physical theater, vocal training, movement research, embodiment techniques, composition, and dramaturgy.
A strong component of Daniela’s method comes from the Plastique Sequence and Body-voice training developed in Jerzy Grotowski’s research, transmitted to her by Peter Rose.
The workshop is addressed to students and professionals performing artists.
The training places the performer’s organism in a condition where its homeostasis is continuously challenged, allowing it to self-regulate and react to the immediate moment.
The driving force of the work is urgency, understood as the unconditioned impulse to survive at every level.
Performers are invited to consciously generate their own urgency by working with inner impulses.
In this way, impulses become the main source of performative energy.
The process is based on a continuous dialogue between expression and embodiment — a dynamic give-and-take.
Expression is understood as EX-press = press-out, the act of manifesting one’s impulses;
Embodiment as EM-bodiment = press-in, the process of imprinting the external world inside the body.
The Urge of Being unfolds as a flow of work in which specific exercises from physical theater, Plastique Sequence, body-voice training, text and song work are organically alternated with moments of free improvisation.
This work-stream generates various energetic processes that allow performers to explore the emotional system from the inside out and embodiment processes from the outside in.
Day 1 – Accessing the realm of impulses: focuses on movement research, muscular contraction and elongation, the Plastique Sequence, and related give-and-take dynamics.
Day 2 – From impulse to form: focuses on vocal training, body resonators, and the embodiment of text and song.
Throughout the workshop, we build energetic processes that bring text and voice into the body, integrating movement, sound, and emotion.
It is no longer about theater or dance, singing or text work; rather, it becomes a comprehensive performative experience in which the performer’s organism is fully engaged in all its expressive dimensions — harmoniously, fluidly, and authentically.
By riding the waves of these energetic processes, we bridge body, movement, text, voice, imagination, and dance to generate our own dramaturgy.
Physical intensity: Medium to high
Requirements: Previous experience in performing arts, performative bodywork, or self-awareness practices
Approach: Collaborative — both group and individual work
Open to: Performing artists of all kinds, students, semi-professionals and professionals; also to musicians, visual artists, and somatic practitioners
The driving force of the work remains urgency, the primal push to survive and express.
The workshop leads the performer to enter what Daniela calls the Artistic Survival Mode — a state in which the performer consciously generates urgency and works with inner impulses in dialogue with the external environment. This dialogue — a constant give-and-take — is a continuous rebalancing between expression (pressing out) and embodiment (pressing in).
The training creates the conditions for building energetic processes through which the performer works with the emotional system from within.
This approach reflects the biological role of emotions: in nature, emotions must be expressed from the inside out to fulfill their survival function.
Therefore, in the workshop, performers do not represent emotions through fixed external forms, but rather reach their source — experiencing themselves not as interpreters of emotional states, but as channels of emotional impulses.
This series of five movement research and training sessions, led by Daniela Marcozzi, is conceived as a research field, a space of freedom — a space to surrender to artistic and creative processes, and to be carried into their essence.
The sessions integrate different performative and somatic practices, including embodiment techniques, movement research, dance, physical theatre, writing, and composition.
The sessions unfold as processes between opposing forces:
Attachment ○ detachment
Contraction ○ elongation
Effortlessness ○ intention
Pollution ○ purity
Human ○ more-than-human
Waves ○ particles
These polarities intersect fluidly throughout the sessions. For each pair, the range of stages in between are explored, in order to sense in the body a dynamic process of encounter between opposites — a process that supports and nourishes creative work.
Pulse is also a way of looking at a work of art as a relationship between forces, rather than as a product.
Pulse is a vital dynamic.
An alternation between states.
A continuous oscillation between contraction and release, gathering and letting go.
In the human body, pulse lives in the heartbeat — an endless dialogue between tension and openness. It moves through blood pressure, through breath, through the subtle expansion and softening of tissues. It is present in the nervous system, in attention that sharpens and dissolves, in energy that rises and settles.
Pulse unfolds across living ecosystems.
In the tides that advance and retreat.
In the cycles of day and night, growth and decay, saturation and emptiness.
In the migration of animals, in seasonal rhythms, in the constant exchange between stability and transformation.
Pulse connects opposite states without separating them.
It allows movement between poles and circulation between forces. A vital dynamic where life does not remain fixed, but continuously reorganizes itself through rhythm.
A focus of the research lies in expanding perception beyond the classical narrative of the five senses. The work explores subtle modes of sensing, non-verbal perception, and energetic states of the body; the body is approached as a sensitive territory — capable of perceiving, relating, and creating beyond the habitual sensory understand of the five senses.
This work is open to performing artists, performers, dancers, movers, somatic practitioners, and to anyone interested in physical expression, embodied research, perceptual awareness, and individual and collective dynamics of expression.
A willingness to engage in creative exploration, physical listening, and self-awareness is essentia.