Work in Progress Showing "THAT Feelings..."
- Miriam Strasser
- Oct 3, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 13
“THAT Feelings...” at Cabaret Experimencial Vol. 02
In September I had the honor of returning to LaExperimental in Barcelona - a place I co-created almost ten years ago. This cultural project offered me a one-week residency,
which culminated in Cabaret Experimencial Vol. 02.
There, I shared the very first public work-in-progress showing of my new performance “THAT Feelings...”
🎥 Watch the video recording here:
📸 Photos by @nricciphoto
LaExperimental — my roots in collective creation
LaExperimental is more than a venue. It is part of my personal, artistic and human journey.
I was part of the group that founded the cultural association and transformed an occupied house into a legalized project.
Together we invited city politicians to visit and recognize our work, built a website and social media presence and opened the space to the community.
We hosted weekly jams, countless workshops and often took art to the streets of Barcelona - at a time when street art was thriving. It was there that I offered my first weekly Clown Laboratory and we organized bigger events such as cabarets and weekend-long intensives.
Beyond performances, LaExperimental was also a way of living: sharing space, creating in a collective, playing music together. During that period, I began to write in Spanish - mostly poetry - and this practice pushed my language skills to another level.
In 2016, I was responsible for programming and project coordination. Returning now, years later, as an artist-in-residence felt like coming full circle.
The residency and the first showing
My residency at LaExperimental lasted one week:
4 days of research for THAT Feelings
1 day of teaching, offering a Butoh-Clown masterclass
1 day of technical preparation for the stage
and finally, the Cabaret Experimencial Vol. 02, where I shared my first work-in-progress showing with a live audience.
About the piece: “THAT Feelings”
“THAT Feelings” - a micro-ritual of resistance, sensation and release.
In this Butoh clown étude, Homo Kemoni – a non-binary being suspended between human and animal, norm and instinct – enters into a silent confrontation with a constellation of clothes pegs - symbols of social pressures like the rigid expectations of gender, the violence of categorization and the bodily resistance they provoke.
These objects do not merely cling to skin - they provoke emotion, awaken micro-dramas, pull expression from beneath the surface.
The face becomes a stage. Muscles speak. Each twitch is a gesture of refusal, each grimace a struggle for agency.
A study in tension, tenderness, and the comedy of persistence - where feeling is not performed, but extracted.
Clothespins as metaphor
For me, the clothespins are more than stage objects.
They are emotional wounds, traumas, unresolved experiences made visible on the body. They are the physical traces of what society clamps onto us: gendered expectations, the weight of unspoken rules, the wounds of not-fitting-in. Pressed into the flesh, they force the body to speak what language cannot – a map of traumas that are personal yet collective, invisible until they are performed into existence. The act of struggling with them becomes a process of catharsis.
But catharsis is not solitary - we cannot heal alone, we need others. And not every wound will disappear. Some remain, and that is part of who we are. That is good. We can learn to live with them - without suffering.
In extending this research from the face to the whole body, I seek to map the intimate cartography of persistence, resilience, and release - and to explore how absurdity and tenderness can coexist in the same gesture.
🎥 Watch the very first video-research, with the face only, here:
Audience Feedback
✨ “Thank you - simply thank you for your performance! I mean this sincerely and from the bottom of my heart.”
✨ “For me, your piece was the best of the entire cabaret, because it truly touched us as an audience. We so rarely see Butoh on stage… thank you for bringing it to us.”
✨ “What you did was incredibly intense! You left us all in awe.”
✨ “What a brilliant idea - and how deeply we lived it with you! Every single clothespin you removed released a wave of relief in me. I want to try this myself, at home, as a ritual to let go of things inside me.”
✨ “What an amazing idea to combine Butoh and Clown! I had never seen that before - thank you for your creativity.”
Looking ahead
This showing was just the beginning of an investigation that I will continue to unfold. I am grateful to LaExperimental for hosting me, to the audience who shared this first fragile step, and to the many collaborators who make this journey possible.
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