Performance arts converge around a shared understanding of space as something produced through use rather than fixed by design. In a choreographic practice for example, space is not a neutral container but an active structure shaped by repetitive, rule-based movement. Dancers trace geometric patterns that reveal latent spatial orders, transforming architecture into a lived and temporal experience. The body is treated as a primary tool for questioning and redefining spatial norms, emphasizing presence, duration, and embodied action over representation.

Examining the issues of use, Jonathan Hill’s concept of occupying architecture argues

that users actively reinterpret and remake architectural space through everyday practices

that may diverge from the architect’s intentions. Skateboarders exemplify this principle. By riding ledges, stairs, handrails, and plazas, they repurpose urban architecture from spaces of circulation or control into terrains of play, risk, and improvisation. Their repeated movements generate alternative spatial readings, turning functional elements into performative surfaces.

Like dancers, skateboarders operate within self-imposed constraints—gravity, rhythm, repetition, and failure—while revealing the physical and social qualities of space through sustained action. Their practices expose architecture as dynamic rather than static, authored not only by designers but by bodies in motion. In this sense, skateboarding functions as a form of performance art and spatial choreography, occupying architecture through embodied repetition.

The project embraces this active relationship between body and space, proposing architecture that supports multiple interpretations, temporal occupations, and performative readings. Rather than dictating function, it invites users to choreograph their own interactions. In doing so, the design positions architecture as a living framework—continuously shaped by movement, sound, presence, and collective experience.
Within this framework, we explore where the performing arts stand today and which elements characterize them, in order to identify the convergences in their research practices in relation to space and the subjects of experience.

Drawing on theories of performance, postdramatic theatre, and contemporary dance, a set of critical concepts emerges that reflects current research in the performing arts, leading to the construction of a framework that gathers and codifies them. Through this framework,

six points are highlighted as the core characteristics of contemporary performative creation and research: performance as shared presence; a turn toward the real; presence–absence; a performative relationship to history; fragmentation; and a connection with the city.

Groups producing postdramatic/postmodern performances in Athens today are identified, and an analysis of a selected body of their work is carried out. These groups include Mkultra, Blitz, Medea Electronique, Nova Melancholia, Bijoux de Kant, and the choreographer Sofia Mavragani of the Fingersix network. These are groups that approach performance as a research practice from different artistic fields and are particularly interested in their relationship with the city. They operate through structures that favor collectivity, abolishing hierarchies and adopting horizontal models of collaboration.

From the overall body of work of these groups, performances were selected based on their variety in terms of the urban spaces in which they are presented. Each performance is permeated by the six points of the framework, and the analysis observes which characteristics of contemporary performing arts are incorporated and in what way.

Dimitra Vreda / Constantine Cosmas