Dancer and performance artist Simona Ferrar is in charge of coordinating these new activites through the conceptualization, organization, coordination, production, and promotion of artistic performances by EPFL students. It expands on the “Improgineering” course given each year since 2017 by Prof. S. Henein as part of the SHS program, in collaboration with artist Joëlle Valterio and the ARSENIC (Centre d’art scénique contemporain). This well established course introduces students to improvisation techniques in dance, music, theatre and performance and investigates their application to engineering design practices.

In engineering, if you have a need and you want to design a dedicated machine, there is not a set path. So how do you start from the void?

I have found that my experiences as an improvisor and a dancer are resources for me when inventing machines, the same as inventing on the stage. It is this parallel that pushed me to include this discipline of improvisation at EPFL.

In the first semester of the year-long course, Improgineering students attend practical workshops on improvisation taught by invited artists of the various disciplines, and lectures on the theoretical aspects of the broad topic of improvisation in the fields of sociology, cognitive sciences and dramaturgy. In the second semester, students work in groups to create and perform a 12-minute improvised piece using artifacts they designed, supported by workshops and feedback sessions, and culminating in public performances at the ARSENIC theater.

As the course is limited to only 25 master’s students per semester, CDH Director Frédéric Kaplan invited Henein to expand the activities through the Performance Lighthouse platform, which will allow Henein and his colleagues to scale up their offerings and reach not only a much larger and more diverse group of students, but members of faculty and staff as well as the larger community.

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PAST AND FUTURE PROJECTS:

Among the projects set in place so far by the Performance Lighthouse is the DÆNCITY artistic residency, organized in partnership with the Théâtre Sévelin 36, in Lausanne, where the residency will take place in April 2025. Choreographers Noémie Cuérel and Matthieu Ruf will lead the students through a 4-day intensive dance improvisation workshop and EPFL collaborator Sascha Nick and Simona Ferrar will coordinate a reflexive workshop during which students will be encouraged to identify the relevance of exploring artistic practices in the context of their EPFL curriculum and/or future career. The residency will be followed by three public performances at Théâtre Sévelin 36 (25^th of April), during the festival Les Culturelles at EPFL (12^th of May) and at Théâtre Sévelin 36’s Magma Festival (13^th of June). An exhibition will accompagny each of these presentations in which the public will discover drawings, photographs and videos made by three EPFL students who will be in charge of documenting the whole residency.

Looking back at 2024, in Autumn, Simon Henein and Simona Ferrar participated in the CDH LUNCHenPHILO discussion “Are engineers improvisers?” and organized a followup improvisation workshop for the EPFL community. They also participated in Liz Wientjes podcast series “The Embodied Educator” in order to share experiences and insights related to the Improgineering course and other projects.

Before the Summer period,Improgineering students presented their work at the Théâtre Le Pommier, in Neuchâtel, thus presenting their work for the first time outside Lausanne. Their performance was followed by the launching of the book Barefoot Academic Teaching, that Simon Henein co-authored with Ramiro Tau and Laure Kloetzer

The Performance Lighthouse regularly publishes calls for students to participate in projects, be it as performers, as documentation collaborators or to share experiences and insights with a public from their student perspective.

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RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY:

Alongside the aim of activating student-driven performance projects, the Performance Lighthouse team gives particular value to the quality of the processes themselves. As well as documenting each process, the on-going projects serve as a fertile ground for pedagogical and sociological research projects. The public presentations give the students the experience of performing in professional contexts as well as representing an opportunity to share insights with the public on the benefits of introducing artistic practices into the EPFL context.

On the research side, along with Henein, Valterio, and Ferrar, Performance Lighthouse includes a postdoctoral researcher in sociology, Dr Alain Bovet, and Tanja Ulrich a PhD student enrolled in the ETHZ-EPFL Joint Doctoral Program in Learning Sciences. These pedagogical research projects study the impact of improvisation on engineering education.

As an offering to the broad EPFL community, amongst the platform’s upcoming projects, Simona Ferrar will lead a movement improvisation workshop open to all EPFL students and staff twice a month during lunch hours, on the campus (RLC), in order to share artistic tools that are likely to nourish imagination and collective collaboration