How can participatory performance create spaces for gathering around experiences of grief, exile, and loss? How might participatory performative scores cultivate practices of mourning that hold fracture, asymmetry, and vulnerability?
This practice-based PhD project investigates participatory performance as a method for assembling bodies in relation to grief. Through performative scores that incorporate movement, reading, voice, touch, and sound, the research explores performance not as representation but as an embodied procedure for mourning.
The project began by examining exile and diaspora through collective reading practices, where texts functioned as sites of multivocal gathering and shared interpretation. Over time, the research shifted from reading toward listening, as intensified political violence and displacement exposed the limits of language in holding lived experience. This shift opened a sonic and affective dimension within the work, where voice, resonance, and vibration became central elements in the exploration of collective mourning.
Working through a series of participatory performances and collaborative research processes, the project develops artistic scores that invite participants to inhabit grief together rather than resolve it. These works explore how bodies gather through sound, attention, and shared presence, and how performance can hold asymmetry, distance, and vulnerability within collective experience.
The research unfolds through iterative cycles of artistic production, participatory events, and reflective writing. The written dissertation takes the form of a series of letters to an anonymous reader, continuing the research through epistolary reflection as a relational and performative practice.
Li Lorian (1987) is a performance-artist from Jerusalem. Her work explores performative means of diasporic living and examines Jewish cultural connections between body, text, and the act of reading. Her work questions existing modes of sovereignty and is looking for the imaginative potential of the performance-space to extend beyond given realities.
She was an artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, 2016-2017), Schaubude Theater (Berlin, 2020), Tights: Dance and Thought (Tel-Aviv, 2022), and more. Her work was shown at different venues and festivals, such as Theatertreffen Stückemarkt (Berlin 2018), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main, 2020), and the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel-Aviv, 2022). Along her artistic work, she moderates theater and performance-art workshops for art students, people with special needs, and Jewish-Arab youth.
She is a graduate of the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem (2011) and the MA Choreography and Performance program at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen (2020), supported by a fellowship of the DAAD.