MA STUDIOS 2026-28

MA STUDIOS is a two-year Master’s program for dance makers and performers interested in a research-based studio practice in contemporary dance and choreography. We consider contemporary dance as an open-ended field in continuous development, embracing transnational practices that seek diverse expressions, meanings, and values. More than an enclosed space for developing skills and experiments, studio practice opens onto the messy realities beyond its walls. In a similarly generative sense, choreography is the grammar underlying the movement of bodies within environments.

For its third edition (2026–2028), MA STUDIOS will explore relational and environmental dimensions of collaboration—understood not only as integral to every creative process but also, in a broader sense, as a site for social and political in(ter)vention.

We take a broad and multifaceted view of collaboration as:
• Sharing authorship and ownership across diverse roles within a project or working context;
• Generously studying together and exchanging resources, skills, knowledge, time and space;
• Cooperating within the institutional framework of P.A.R.T.S., related institutions, the landscape in Brussels and beyond;
• Taking collective responsibility for everyone’s well-being.

How do we navigate differences in capacities, experiences and lineages in order to enrich an ecosystem of artistic work and collective study in dance, as well as the society in which it is embedded? This challenge forms the basis of a pedagogical experiment: PARTS invites applicants who are already working together or seeking new alliances to apply to a program that aims at collaborative outcomes.


THEMATIC LINES OF INQUIRY

This edition offers a timely focus on creative processes that extend beyond the horizon of the individual artist as single author. It invites research and reflection along several interconnected notions and questions:

Relations > physical, material, social, historical, environmental, mutual, multiple—that condition, sustain, mediate, or emerge from an artistic practice, even when it appears to carry an individual signature.


Ecosystem > a dynamic context in which people, materials, places, times, and more-than-human entities are interdependent and interact in complex ways; a space where individuals not only act, but also support, hold space for, or serve as a resource for both human and non-human endeavors; where skills, resources, and energies are exchanged and circulated rather than exploited and exhausted.


Lineage > an attentiveness to divergent lines of descent, where exploring the past may shape a potential history within an unfinished present.

Potentials of a ‘we’ > what becomes possible insofar as we do not act alone?

As a frame for the program, these lines of thought offer a broad framework—rather than a strict theme—within which participants and guest artists can shape their own trajectories. They are meant to leave plenty of room for participants to explore their own directions and shape their collaborations in ways that are artistically and socially fruitful to them.