IPPT LONDON 2026
SCHEDULE
SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY
IPPT 2026 - WELCOME
17:30 - 19:30
SUNDAY 1 MARCH
MORNING Session 9:30am
I AM – Warm-up Workshop
Magdalena Stawman-Tuka & bradley jay high
A physical warm-up exploring connection and disconnection in space and movement, unfolding instructions that awaken intuition and trust.
‘How Should We Train Performers in an Era When AI Can Replicate Style but Not Embodied Cultural Memory?’
Dr Alejandro Postigo
Provocation
Artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of mimicking vocal timbres, dramaturgical structures, and even emotional arcs. But what happens to performer training when machines can simulate external markers of performance yet cannot inhabit lived, embodied, and historically situated knowledge?
Drawing on Copla: A Spanish Cabaret—a form rooted in political repression, queer resistance, and intergenerational memory—this provocation asks whether embodied cultural knowledge has become the final frontier of human performance. Should training prioritise lived experience, ancestry, queerness, migration, and embodied memory, or risk allowing AI to flatten culturally specific practices into generic global aesthetics?
‘The Logic of Embodied Knowledge: Lineage and Liminality in the Age of AI’
Irfana Majumdar
Workshop
This workshop explores embodied lineage and emergent knowledge through practices rooted in long-term training traditions such as Hindustani music, Corporeal Mime, and devised theatre. While AI may imitate outward forms of training, it cannot inhabit the embodied processes through which meaning is generated.
Participants engage in guided movement and vocal tasks that foreground repetition, disruption, and improvisation—conditions under which embodied knowledge surfaces. Key questions include:
-
How is lineage carried in the body?
-
How do liminal, in-between states generate knowledge?
-
How can training be understood as relational, somatic, and iterative rather than output-driven?
LUNCH
AFTERNOON Session
Pm
‘The Non-Performing Performer’
Labirion
Workshop
This workshop explores an acting practice aimed at deactivating functional performance. In a society that demands coherence, productivity, and efficiency—mirrored by AI—the performer is invited to stop functioning.
Through phases of disalignment, suspension, and loss of function, participants explore delay, contradiction, uselessness, and non-productivity. The work resists representation, character, and meaning-making, proposing theatre as one of the last spaces where it is possible not to perform.
‘The Algorithm as Director: Crafting “Autoprompts” for Self-Reflective Practice’
Ula Kijak & Małgorzata Jabłońska
Workshop
This session treats prompt engineering as a directorial skill. Participants explore “autoprompts”—using AI as a feedback loop to clarify and refine self-directed training tasks. If an algorithm cannot process an artistic intention, it reveals imprecision in the performer’s thinking.
Grounded in Eugenio Barba’s learning how to learn and Meyerhold’s task-based acting, the session moves from theory into lab-based recursive exercises, testing whether AI can sharpen self-awareness and disrupt habitual studio patterns.
BLACK SQR or DOBA
Sztuka Nowa (Art New)
Performance presentation – TBC
-
Black SQR explores revolution in 21st-century performing arts through a dialogue with Grotowski and post-Grotowski traditions, questioning power relations and ethics of training.
-
DOBA (premiere 2025) is a live performative act inspired by Aleksander Doba and the idea of endless travel, combining myth, biography, music, and endurance.
End-of-Day Reflection
MONDAY 2ND MARCH
MORNING Session 9:30am
4th Monkey Grotowski Club Training
led by bradley jay high
Work presentation
‘I(ce) Scream and Silence: Mythological Voice and Technomythology’
Katarina Maniou
Provocation
This presentation examines mythological voice and technomythology through the concept of scream as a replacement for logos. Drawing on music-theatre works and voice technologies (AI voice cloning, VAS, LLMs), it explores silence, automation, originality, and embodiment, questioning where art ends and life begins in techno-mediated culture.
‘Holding onto the Body’s Origin in the Age of AI: Suzuki Training’
Jingsheng Gu
Workshop
Drawing on experiences teaching Suzuki Training across ideological and technological frameworks, this workshop reflects on the method’s grounding principles as a foundation myth. In an era of digital connection and physical disembodiment, Suzuki’s non-contact approach highlights presence as a relationship with one’s own body rather than with others or machines.
‘The Inverted Cliché: AI as the Ultimate Stereotype Generator and a Compass for Originality’
Ula Kijak
Provocation
Using the anecdote of Sarah Bernhardt as a starting point, this provocation frames AI as the engine of cliché—the statistical average of human imagination. By treating AI-generated outputs as the dominant norm, performers are invited to navigate originality through conscious deviation.
LUNCH
AFTERNOON Session
Pm
‘Virtual Masks: Algorithms Enhancing the Performer’s Body’
Davide Giovanzana
Workshop
This workshop explores digital face filters as virtual masks that extend the performer’s body, similar to Commedia dell’Arte. Through attunement exercises and improvisation, participants investigate layered realities, imagination, and digital embodiment, drawing on concepts of techno-imagination and cyborg performance.
CYNFUNOL COLLECTIVE
Presentation
An exploration of LLMs as living archives of studio practice, inspired by Vakhtangov’s laboratory logbooks and ensemble methodologies. The session proposes an on-site experiment using a locally hosted LLM as a permanent logbook station to gather and entangle participant responses throughout IPPT 2026.An exploration of LLMs as living archives of studio practice, inspired by Vakhtangov’s laboratory logbooks and ensemble methodologies. The session proposes an on-site experiment using a locally hosted LLM as a permanent logbook station to gather and entangle participant responses throughout IPPT 2026.
RADICAL MOVE
Fragments of a film by Aniela Gabryel, followed by a conversation with
Aniela Gabryel, bradley jay high & Professor Paul Allain (TBC)
END-OF-DAY REFLECTION
TUESDAY 3 MARCH
MORNING Session 9:30am
IPPT 2026 Closing Session and Forward Planning
