Oryx is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, movement facilitator, body-worker, and researcher. With a BA in Liberal Arts from Durham and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin —focusing on Literature, Cultural and Art History, and Philosophy—followed by formal training in dance, acting, and butoh, Oryx’s facilitation and somatic inquiries are often grounded in the intersections of critical theory, movement, and somatic bodywork. Oryx’s lifelong movement, athletic, and artistic background spans not just dance, butoh, and acting, but martial arts, circus, performance art, and bodywork, allowing them to draw on vast swathes of knowledge and practical research.
They have taught a variety of classes, from functional training and technique classes in conditioning, intensive stretching, contortion; contemporary technique, improvisation, and partnerning; to butoh, somatic investigation, and workshops focusing on exploration and creative practice. Oryx is also a certified interdisciplinary body worker and massage therapist. They have also taught classes and workshops on different massage and bodywork techniques.
Teaching Experience and Focus
Oryx facilitates spaces that prioritize presence, sensitivity, and creative inquiry—where the body becomes a medium for re-imagining relationality, identity, and sensation beyond normative frameworks. They are particularly drawn to how movement and consciously modified embodied experiences can disrupt, reframe, and ultimately re-associate socially encoded notions of the body, intimacy, selfhood, and affect. Their research spans identity and psychosomatics; touched-based and somatic therapies; embodied cultural histories; and the body as a site of memory, transformation, and political imagination.
In their workshops, Oryx offers tools for poetic improvisation and embodied experimentation, creating spaces that triangulate play, mindfulness, and sensitivity. With an emphasis on presence and imaginative inquiry, they invite participants to explore new ways of inhabiting the body, engaging with others, and perceiving their environments.
Oryx attempts to explore multiple topics and methods of approaching movement with their workshops. They offer workshops for dancers as well as the general public, and have offered regular classes and workshops in Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugual, and Italy, in a variety of formats, from dance intensives, to drop in classes, to interdisciplinary festivals.
Workshops Offered by Oryx
Contemporary / Expanded Dance:
Vibrant Bodies: Contemporary Dance Workshop
Vibrant Bodies is a high energy workshop which brings together elements of circus training, partner and contemporary dance, bodywork, and meditation, to invite playfulness, mindfulness, sensitivity, and pleasure into our practices or experience of being in our bodies. The intention is to give various tools to engage with and strengthen our bodies; learn how to relax our bodies; invite awareness; and connect with ourselves and others. Many of the exercises reply on playful partner and group-based exercises to make us sweat and energized, as well as to help us be more focused, aware, and sensitive. The workshop can be adapted from open level to advanced.
Character Development Workshops and Mentoring:
This workshop explores character creation, drawing from contemporary dance, dance theatre, classical theatre devising, physical theatre, improvisation, and image-based composition, encouraging performers to expand their performative range and move beyond habitual patterns. Participants learn to develop characters both physically and psychologically, working with rhythm, gesture, gaze, tension, spatial relationships, and presence, as well as text, speech analysis, and the imagination. There is always an element of exploring how the body generates narrative, atmosphere, and theatrical situations, investigating how movement qualities, emotional states, repetition, imagined circumstances, and physical restrictions can shape layered and specific characters.
The format can be adapted for group workshops, intensive laboratories, company training, or one-to-one mentoring. Sessions may also support actors preparing specific roles, dancers preparing for dance theatre pieces or practices, performers developing stage presence and theatricality, or artists seeking new approaches to devising and character work.
Butoh, Embodied Speculation, and Somatic Research:
Living Sculpture: Butoh Workshop
Butoh is a Japanese dance-theatre that emerged in the 1960s and still thrives today. It focuses on presence, embodied imagery, unconventional body postures and embodied states. With a variety of exercises from classical butoh, theatre, physical theatre, and contemporary dance, including voice and breathwork exercises, Living Sculpture is designed for those interested in exploring different bodily states; new forms of expression and physical symbology; the intersections between theatre, dance, and presence; and is generally excellent for anyone who wants to be present, explore their body, and their own unique physical language. Open to all regardless of experience, but with a variety of prompts and exercises, just as useful for professional dancers, theatre makers, and performance artists.
Butoh and Posthuman Sexuality: Speculative Embodiment Workshop
In this workshop, we explore butoh and posthuman sensuality through improvisational movement, embodied research, and guided somatic inquiry. Butoh, a radical movement practice that emerged in postwar Japan, interrogates the body beyond normative aesthetics—embracing slowness, transformation, synesthetic and speculative embodiment, and the grotesque. In this workshop, Butoh becomes a gateway into posthuman ways of sensing, moving, and becoming. We will explore what it means to inhabit bodies that are speculative, extra-human, or non-anthropocentric—blurring the boundaries between human, animal, object, and atmosphere.
Posthuman sensuality / sexuality in this context is not rooted in technologized futures but in radically expanding our capacity for feeling, perceiving, and existing outside of linear time, fixed identity, or human-centered subjectivity. Through movement meditations, visualizations, writing, and experimental improvisations, participants are invited to touch upon other possible anatomies, temporalities, and modes of intimacy.