Performance workshop series "Personal Mythologies"
The Latvian Performance Art Centre announces the creative performance workshop series "Personal Mythologies", which will take place from January to April 2026 in Riga and its surroundings. Conceived as a sustained educational and artistic process, the series brings together artists and interested participants for monthly two-day workshops dedicated to the exploration of performance art through personal, mythological, and ritual-based approaches.
Each workshop unfolds over a weekend. Saturdays are devoted to theoretical input and embodied practice, while Sundays focus on the public presentation of performances created during the workshop. These presentations are shared with a small audience, allowing participants to test ideas in situ and reflect on performance as a relational and time-based practice.
The first workshop of the series, "Dream Mythology in Butoh Aesthetics", took place on January 31 at the art therapy, artist residency, and education centre MĀ Telpa in Riga and was led by performance and butoh artist Simona Orinska. The workshop explored personal dreams by analysing their manifest and latent content on both individual and collective levels. Dream imagery was translated into embodied experience, culminating in the creation of a ritual performance grounded in the principles of butoh. On the second day, participants’ performances were publicly presented at the Žanis Lipke Memorial.
The workshop series continues in late February with Simona Orinska’s "Shamanistic Aspects of Somatic Practice", which examines primordial bodily energy, totemic animals, animism, and mask traditions as tools for accessing embodied knowledge and ritual transformation. In March, artist and curator Laura Feldberga leads "Networks of Power: Collaboration with the Audience in Public Space Performance", focusing on the audience as co-creator and on performance as a relationship-based situation unfolding in public space. The series concludes in April with Feldberga’s workshop "A Ritual for a Riga Bar: Performance as Contemporary Shamanism", which investigates performance as a ritual practice embedded in the urban environment. All workshops take place at MĀ Telpa, while public presentations occur at the Žanis Lipke Memorial for Orinska’s workshops and at the bar Aleponija for Feldberga’s sessions.
The workshops are led by educators with extensive international experience in performance art. Simona Orinska is a performance and butoh artist, choreographer, and certified dance and movement therapist whose artistic practice focuses on the unconscious, the body, ritual, and mythic dimensions. She is also the director of the education centre MĀ Telpa. Laura Feldberga is an artist, performance art lecturer, curator, and doctoral researcher at the Art Academy of Latvia. Her work examines performance as a ritual and relational practice in public space. Feldberga regularly presents her work in Latvia and internationally, and her performance Infinite Blue Skies has been nominated for the 2026 Visual Art Award in the category Artwork of the Year.
The "Personal Mythologies" workshop series builds on an earlier phase initiated in December 2025 at the Pedvāle Artist Residency, where participants worked under the guidance of Finnish artist Tomasz Szrama. During this three-day intensive workshop, performance was explored as an act of presence, choice, and risk, encouraging participants to develop individual creative strategies under conditions of pressure and rapid decision-making.
Participation in each workshop is open to interested practitioners, with a participation fee of 35 EUR per weekend. Applications can be submitted by email to starptelpa@rigaperformance.lv. The workshop series Personal Mythologies is organised by the Latvian Performance Art Centre with co-financing from the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.
