Rachel Gill
WorkAbout
Akademie Schloss Solitude Cooperation Fellowship with Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart2025
Sound and Body Presentation 
Performed by Bilge Dursun, Lea Champagne, Laïs Gruau, Paula Maria Landa Hartasanchez, Eunchae Kim, Luisa Kunth, Ceren Okumus, and Mira Traub.
Heusteigtheater, Stuttgart, Germany
December 17th, 2025From October to December 2025 I was a Cooperation Fellow with Akademie Schloss Solitude and Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (ABK), where I co-taught a movement improvisation seminar with Disocteca Flaming Star (Dr. Prof. Cristina Gomez Barrio and Prof. Wolfgang Mayer). Together, they lead the MFA KTPP (Body, Theory, and the Poetics of the Performative) program at ABK. The Cooperation Fellowship aims to make a crucial contribution to the practice and to the teaching of what performance is today.

At the end of the term, the students presented process-based improvisations from the Sound & Body seminar.

The presentation explored improvisation as a practice of devotional presence, yielding to what is unknowable as a generative space of encounter across the ambiguous terrain of movement. The practice acts as a porous record, where material moves from bodies to voices to image and back again—a feedback loop born of its own ephemerality.

The seminar held moving and witnessing as equally vital acts. Movement was witnessed and translated into drawings, photos, text, and a Super 8 film that I shot and hand-processed. The film was projected as part of the presentation.

A fanzine produced alongside the course serves as a poetic archive of the group’s process and as a resource for others to begin their own improvisation practice. The fanzine was designed and produced by ABK students Carla Laumann and Karina Ferreira Torres.



Photo by Mauro Suarez Torrico



Photo by Carla Laumann