PERFORMING MARX: REHEARSING REVOLUTION

A rehearsal for revolution. This workshop turns Marx’s ideas into movement. Through indoor and public-space exercises, students explore how social and economic forces are written in our bodies - a physical inquiry into labour, class, and power.

This is not a reading group. It is a rehearsal.

Karl Marx wrote about labour, alienation, and value, and how under capitalism human activity becomes both a necessity and a commodity. This workshop brings these ideas into the body, asking how work, class, and power are performed, and how conditions of production shape social relations. Participants translate Marxist concepts into action and choreography, exploring how production, class, and surplus value can be experienced as physical states, collective rhythms, and social encounters. Exercises will take place in the public space, bringing ideas from the lecture hall into real-world contexts and testing how social and economic structures are enacted in everyday life. Each session combines short theoretical impulses with practical exercises that explore cooperation, conflict, and the dynamics of ownership and exchange, creating a space where thought and action meet.

In dialogue with the UdK Summer University theme ENOUGH!, the workshop asks: when is enough enough? It is an ENOUGH! against capitalist logics that have become normalized and embedded in our bodies and collective consciousness. Using socialist concepts as material, the workshop cultivates artistic and physical transformations, allowing participants to develop an embodied understanding of social and economic relations.

The week culminates in a showing in public space, where participants present short performative experiments developed throughout the exercises. This final session provides both reflection and a chance to share embodied insights into labour, value, and collective action with a wider audience.

Schedule

The course will take place: Mo - Fr // 10 - 17. A detailed schedule will be distributed in advance of the course commencement.

Equipment requirements

Comfortable clothing for indoor activities and movement-based practices is recommended.

Stefan Mießeler has been working since 2013 as a writer, performer, and theatermaker in the performing arts, developing his own plays and performances. His work combines theater with pop-cultural approaches, popular entertainment with performance art, and ambiguous texts with participatory and immersive settings.

His play Bullseye was selected in 2025 for the festival Politik im Freien Theater. Set in the wild party atmosphere of the Darts World Championship, Mießeler autofictionally explores his experiences as a working-class child.

Mießeler studied English and Media Studies in Bielefeld. He teaches at UdK Berlin and has been offering workshops as part of the Summer University program since 2023, including the course Reclaiming the Streets (2024), which focused on political performances in public space.