Methods and Exercises
On this page you can find methods and exercises (informed by disciplines such as theatre, sound studies, urban studies and others) that can help in developing novel understandings of your body and its relation to other bodies in space. A core belief of ACT UP! is that active citizenship starts with the body and the way we understand its potency for action.
These methods and exercises can be implemented by pedagogues with their students, particularly towards developing performance-based urban interventions.However, the can also be useful for a wider public interested in how performance-based methods can be used in day to day life for enriching our embodied experiences and developing novel ways of relating to each other.
ACT UP! Toolkit
Working with the Body
Our bodies are crucial in determining the ways in which we interact with each other. An increased awareness of our bodies, how they relate to each other as well as to the spaces we occupy and, crucially, to the non-human world that we usually tend to overlook is essential in order to address the most pressing challenges we face today. The link below provides a series of exercises and techniques aimed at activating the body and exploring the latent possibilities it holds for developing novel embodied relations in public space.
Site Analysis
The body occupies a physical space at all times. These physical spaces are not empty containers but sites that always carry entangled histories of both human and non-human agents. A site is never neutral and the meanings attached to it play an important role in how we interact with it. More so, sites are alive and their meanings are constantly shaped by the different agents that occupy it. Below you can access a series of exercises aimed at developing more attentive ways of interacting with the sites we occupy. Essentially, the materials presented in this section are useful for gathering site-specific information that can also help in the design process of performance-based public interventions.
Non-Normative Actions
In public spaces, our embodied relations are regulated by societal norms and local laws, among other factors. However, our lives are dynamic and our social interactions posit various challenges that sometimes can not be attended to via prescribed rules and behavioral codes. This section offers some examples of non-normative actions performed by students in Oslo, Norway in 2025. Non-normative actions are an example of how we can challenge our notions of how we are expected to behave in public and on particular sites, but also, crucially, how we can exercise our courage to speak up and make ourselves heard. The courage to speak up is one of the main prerequisites for active citizenship.