IMMERSION LAB #2: Generating Performance Through the Body
IMMERSION LAB by PROJEKT UTOPIA returns for its second edition with a week-long programme exploring embodied approaches to performance-making.
Across five days, five different artists will lead workshops on physical practice to generate ideas, dramaturgy and scenic material. Workshops will draw on physical improvisation, movement scores, choreographic tools, ensemble composition, task-based performance and other embodied approaches to devising.
This is an exciting chance to supercharge your practice, connect with a vibrant community of artists, and make work that feels urgent, alive and unapologetically relevant.
When is it?
Workshops are taking place 5–9 October 2026, 10am–5pm.
Who is it for?
Performers, choreographers, movement artists, directors, devisers and interdisciplinary makers interested in expanding their practice through experimentation and exchange.
Capacity: 20 participants with 2 bursary places available.
The artists leading sessions for IMMERSION LAB are…
Ewa is a Movement Director and Movement Teacher who translates narrative into dynamic, authentic physical performance, blending physical theatre, contemporary dance and collaborative creativity.
She holds an MA in Movement: Directing and Teaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she now teaches as a Visiting Lecturer. Her teaching credits include Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, LAMDA, BODENS College of Performing Arts, Arts1 Milton Keynes and a range of private acting studios. Ewa was awarded a mentorship with Shelley Maxwell through PROJEKT UTOPIA and a place on the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre Observatorship Programme.
Her recent movement direction credits include The Wolves, directed by Roberta Zuric at LAMDA, and Associate Movement Director to Ingrid MacKinnon on Choir Boy at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Ewa’s workshop
Building Stories Through the Body
This practical workshop explores the foundations of physical theatre, focusing on building connection, expressing emotion, and transforming ideas into movement-based narratives.
Participants will develop greater physical awareness, discover different ways of communicating through the body, and explore how to work safely and confidently with touch. Through guided exercises and creative exploration, the workshop will investigate how to create movement with depth and intention, uncovering meaning, authenticity, and personal connection within devised material.
By the end of the session, participants will have developed practical tools for collaborative movement-making, devising, and physical storytelling that they can apply to their own creative practice.
Lucinka Eisler is a British/Czech theatre maker, director, actor and Co-Artistic Director of Inspector Sands, the internationally acclaimed theatre company she co-founded in 2006. Her work combines collaborative devising, physical theatre, movement, text and sound to create bold, ensemble-led performances that explore the social and political dimensions of contemporary life. She trained at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris and is also a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method.
Her productions with Inspector Sands have toured extensively across the UK and internationally, with work presented at venues including the National Theatre, Almeida, Lyric Hammersmith, Southbank Centre, Riksteatern (Sweden), 59E59 (New York) and the Hi Seoul Festival. Alongside her directing practice, Lucinka regularly teaches and facilitates for leading institutions including RADA, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the Almeida, the Young Vic and PROJEKT UTOPIA.
Lucinka’s workshop
Lucinka’s workshop explores physical characterisation as a route into theatre- making, asking how finding character through psychophysical exploration can be a route to generating original material. Participants will bring awareness to their own movement patterns – noticing how a turned-out foot, a habitual head angle, or a particular quality of gaze – is part of an ongoing dialogue between their inner world and relationship to the world around them. We will reflect on ways in which movement is shaped by an individual’s history – personal, ancestral, cultural etc – strategies the system has developed to adapt to its environment.
Participants will then bring this approach to exploring a range of characters – observed and imagined. Through individual and group improvisation, games, and psychophysical exercises, characters are explored from the most understated to the most expressive of registers, in the abstract and the concrete, tested against imagined landscapes and architectures, colours and sounds.
From within these bodies, participants will generate original material through writing, improvisation and devising – building scenes and encounters from within the psychophysical discoveries they’ve made.
The workshop offers a practical, playful method for generating character-led material and is suited to actors, directors, makers, writers or others – any artist who is curious about creating material from the inside of a body outward.
Amit Lahav is the founder and Artistic Director of Gecko, the internationally acclaimed physical theatre company he established in 2002. Born in Israel into a mixed Jewish family, he grew up between cultures and languages—an experience that has profoundly shaped his artistic voice and his exploration of identity, migration, belonging and human connection.
As a director, writer and choreographer, Amit has created acclaimed productions including The Arab and the Jew, The Overcoat, Missing, Institute, The Wedding, Kin and From Here On. His work combines physical theatre, music and visual storytelling to explore complex social and political themes through a deeply human lens.
Alongside Gecko, Amit founded Dream Awake Productions to develop work across theatre, immersive experiences and film. He also mentors artists and organisations, championing a creative practice rooted in curiosity, collaboration, rigour and a willingness to embrace uncertainty.
Amit’s workshop
Led by Gecko’s Artistic Director, Amit Lahav, this workshop offers an introduction to Gecko’s distinctive physical theatre practice and performance style.
Through preparation, ensemble building, serious play and dynamic physical exercises, participants will explore the principles that underpin Gecko’s highly expressive physical language. Beginning with simple starting points, the workshop investigates how movement, breath and presence can deepen connection, communicate emotion and create compelling performance.
Working in a playful, supportive and collaborative environment, participants will gain practical insight into Gecko’s unique approach to physical theatre while developing greater awareness of their own expressive potential.
Ingrid is a movement director, choreographer and intimacy director. As a freelance creative, she has worked on productions at National Theatre, Almeida Theatre, Regents Park Open Air Theatre, Donmar, Jamie Lloyd Company and Royal Shakespeare Company. She is currently an Associate Artist at Shakespeare’s Globe and a visiting lecturer at Central School of Speech and Drama. She has won a Black British Theatre Award in 2021 for choreography (Romeo & Juliet at Regents Park) and 2025 for movement direction (Princess Essex at Shakespeare’s Globe). Recent credits: As movement director or choreographer Choir Boy (Stratford East), For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (Yard Theatre). As intimacy director Les Liaisons Dangereuses (National Theatre), Cleansed (Almeida) and Cats (Regents Park).
Ingrid’s workshop
This workshop will explore the process of building material through play, movement and joy. A space for movement to take centre stage as a mode of storytelling, so that practitioners can flex, extend and mobilise their bodies as well their creative minds. The process of exploring movement as a response to an abundance or lack of joy. Encouraging storytelling from an embodied approach that creates connection. I’m interested in empathy, are you moved when I move? Do you really see me? Can I truly move alongside you? Encouraging practitioners, movers and makers who do not always feel seen to explore their inherent embodied responses to creative explorations – creating a space for full expression.
Ayşe Tashkiran is a movement director, teacher and researcher in the field of movement direction and actor movement. Her undergraduate degree is in Drama from Bristol University, and she then trained with Lecoq at L’ École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris. After a career as a physical theatre performer, she started to movement direct and teach. She joined the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London in 2003, where she leads the pioneering MA/MFA Movement: Directing and Teaching. She is an Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co founded the Movement Directors’ Association, the first professional network for movement directors that advocates
for the field of movement. Her movement direction credits include numerous productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Chichester Festival Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse, Shakespeare’s Globe and Theatre Royal Stratford East. She has also collaborated with PROJEKT UTOPIA on Desire Maps and Let Your Hands Sing in the Silence. Alongside her theatre practice, Ayşe is the author and editor of several influential publications on movement direction and contemporary theatre.
Ayşe’s workshop
Ayşe’s workshop will explore how we nurture and access the body for building physical narratives. Our unique physical aptitudes and orientations will be a starting point for making movement material. How do we start to awaken our embodied imaginations for making physically expressive work. How to encounter the rich seams of our movement creativity to generate physical material for performance. She will be guiding a process that starts with our physical sources, to selecting starting points for making, through creating and testing generative tasks and frameworks, to selecting and structuring physical narratives in movement. We will go on a day’s journey to develop your unique movement practice from experimentation to material for performance through individual and small group work. The workshop will offer you tangible ways of working with movement that you will be able to use for your own unique practice, whilst celebrating the richness of your body as a source for making.
Date and time
5–9 October 2026
Fee £315 per participant.
Booking
Venue
Toynbee Studios
28 Commercial Street
London, E1 6AB
Tel: 020 7247 5102
Plan your visit