Performance is an act of becoming: the assumption of a role, the construction of an appearance, the repetition of a gesture until it becomes the norm.

It may depend on an audience, but it does not always need one. Performance can be directed toward the self, another person, or an imagined presence or expectation. Authority is often performed through language, posture, ritual and display. Identities are performed and negotiated in public. Institutions, too, perform themselves through the ways they address people, organise space, grant access or withhold it.

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.

Enter The Lab
Darat al Funun’s Lab sits directly on the street. It is part of the foundation, but spatially independent enough to take on a character of its own. Its place put in constant relation with people passing by.

For this open call, we are interested in the Lab both as a space for performance or as a performative space. A work might take the form of an act, gesture, intervention, or encounter, but it might also unfold through the way the space is occupied, experienced, or made to operate over time. Is the Lab the stage, the performer, or a character in the work? Where does the audience begin? Its identity might be stretched or temporarily displaced. The question is not only what can happen inside the Lab, but what the Lab itself can be made to do.

The Open Call
We invite artists and practitioners across disciplines to propose a work for the Lab that engages performance both as an act and as a concept. We are interested in works that probe its politics and possibilities: how performance can shape perception, redistribute roles, alter relations, or make something possible that was not there before. The work may involve live action, sound, installation, spatial intervention, or another form altogether. What matters is that the proposal considers not only what happens in the space, but how the space itself participates in the work.

We are especially interested in proposals that engage the Lab as a site in its own right, and test what it can become as an unconventional space of performance and performativity.

Applications are accepted from Palestine and Jordan, in Arabic or in English.
To register, please fill out the form here.