Performance can be understood in many ways. Through performance, we may assume a role, construct an appearance, or enact a gesture or action. It may depend on an audience, but it does not always require one. It can be directed toward the self, another person, or an imagined or internalised expectation.

Performance may be a trick, a mask, a step away from reality. It can also be an act of stealth or defence: a way of withholding, passing, protecting oneself, or moving through conditions that demand a certain appearance. 

Sometimes it is precisely through performance that something true comes into view. A role can reveal the expectations attached to it. An exaggerated gesture can expose a convention that normally passes unnoticed. Something staged can make visible what has already been shaping our behaviour all along.

In this sense, performance does not sit outside reality. It participates in making it. It can reinforce the roles and relations we have come to accept, but it can also loosen them: interrupting what appears natural, redistributing who is seen and who speaks, or allowing a different relation to be rehearsed before it has any other place to exist. 

The Lab

Darat al Funun’s Lab sits directly on the street, placing its interior in continuous relation to the outside. Its flexible spatial character makes it a unique space for unsettling the boundaries between artwork and audience, performer and viewer, private and public, visible and hidden.

This open call approaches the Lab as an unconventional space for performance. Performance may take the form of an event, a public encounter, an intervention, or a work shaped through the use of the space itself. The Lab may become a stage, take on a role within the work, or become the “performer” itself.

The Open Call

We invite artists and practitioners across disciplines to propose projects that approach performance as both an act and a concept, and consider its politics and possibilities: how performance can shape perception, redistribute roles, reframe relationships, or make space for something that did not previously exist. Proposals should consider how the Lab as a space might contribute to the development, production, and identity of the work. 

Applications are accepted from Palestine and Jordan, in Arabic or in English.

To register, please fill out the form here.