The School of Visual Theater comes of age as it celebrates its 40th anniversary. Forty years in which knowledge, seniority, and experience have accumulated at the School, and it has ripened like a fruit.

Botanically as well as artistically, the conditions for ripening are deeply bound up with time and duration: the evolution of the artist, of a persona; the maturation of an artistic language and of relationships with the audience. The conference is interested in that stage of life when the momentum of beginnings has passed, adolescence and late adolescence are over, and another driving force has taken their place. We might think of this force as the power of experience.

The Hebrew word nisayon holds within it the meaning of accumulated life experience, as well as that of experimentation: the singular act of testing, of daring to cross a boundary, to venture out ahead of the procession.

The pioneering spirit that characterized the School, and was closely related to its experimental nature, is giving way to establishment and seniority. Performance itself no longer evades conceptual stability, seeping into all the arts as an elusive subfield; it, too, has become established, developing into an independent field that seeks conceptualization and feeds upon it. If this field once saw itself as art’s avant-garde, today we must ask: what is the avant-garde of performance? What glimmers at its margins?

The conference seeks to investigate and open up possibilities in which maturity, seniority, and experience orient the experimental and the singular, allowing manifestations and opportunities to emerge from experience, knowledge, and the wisdom of accumulated time.