About Laura Geiger

Laura Geiger is an artist and creator of relational and perceptual practices exploring unfinished encounter, projection, participation, animation, and contact before coherence.

Her work creates live environments where people can remain in relation with what has not yet fully settled into meaning, interpretation, or familiarity.

Drawing from puppetry, applied theatre, somatics, improvisation, participatory art, and relational experimentation, she explores how people organize themselves around understanding, reassurance, coherence, and control and what becomes possible when those processes slow down.

lineages and influences

Laura’s background spans visual art, performance, voicework, ritual facilitation, movement practice, puppetry, applied theatre, and socially engaged group work.

Across these forms, a throughline remained constant: an interest in how people change through participation, improvisation, collective attention, and embodied interaction.

Her work has included handmade puppets, textiles, participatory installations, improvised performance, ritual structures, public interaction experiments, and long-form collective practice spaces.

Early work focused on creativity, spirituality, expression, and embodied self-development through voice, movement, ritual, and improvisational practice.

Over time, Laura became increasingly interested not only in self-expression, but in how new forms of self and relationship are socially produced through interaction itself.

Applied theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, Social Presencing Theater, clown, fooling, improvisation, and social therapeutics became major influences in this shift. These practices moved the focus away from insight alone and toward rehearsal, experimentation, collective creation, and the development of new relational possibilities.

Social therapeutics was especially influential in opening a radically different understanding of development: not as the discovery or expression of a fixed inner self but as something relational, collective, improvised, and continuously produced through participation itself.

development of the work

Laura’s early facilitation work focused on voice, expressive arts, movement, ritual, and participatory group process.

Over time, her attention shifted toward what happens before interaction settles into familiar roles, explanations, identities, or responses.

Improvisation revealed how quickly people move to interpret, reassure, stabilize, and make each other recognizable.

Moments that could remain emotionally alive, uncertain, awkward, excessive, or unfamiliar often collapsed almost immediately into coherence, explanation, or relational habit.

This tension between openness and stabilization became a central focus of the work.

Deep Puppetry™

Deep Puppetry™ emerged through Laura’s study of puppetry, somatics, applied theatre, and relational practice.

Using handmade puppets, constrained interaction, silence, touch, improvisational structures, and material experimentation, the practice explored projection, attachment, awkwardness, tenderness, dependency, animation, and the instability between object and other.

Over time, the work increasingly became a practice of remaining in contact with what resisted immediate interpretation, familiarity, or control.

Participants often found themselves unexpectedly attached, protective, uncomfortable, responsible, or emotionally exposed in relation to objects made of fabric, paper, breath, and attention.

The work has been taught internationally through multi-level trainings, artistic intensives, and participatory workshops, including collaborations in Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Europe.

turning toward unfinished encounter

Across many years of artistic, relational, and participatory practice, Laura became increasingly interested in how quickly interaction settles into explanation, reassurance, familiarity, and coherence.

Again and again, she observed how awkwardness, projection, difference, and uncertainty were rapidly stabilized into recognizable identities and relational patterns.

This became a central question in the work:

What forms of relation become possible when people remain in contact with what is not yet fully known or resolved?

current focus

Laura’s current work explores what happens when people stop rushing to define, stabilize, or fully understand themselves, each other, and the world around them.

Through participatory structures, relational practices, unfinished interaction, and material experimentation, she creates conditions where uncertainty, projection, awkwardness, and partial unknowability can remain present long enough to become perceptible.

Current areas of inquiry include:

• contact without capture

• projection and alterity

• relational perception

• unfinished encounter

• participation before stabilization

• animation and companionship

• how people organize around reassurance, familiarity, and coherence

• and how relation changes when those movements become visible

approach

Laura’s work is experiential, participatory, and practice-based.

Rather than teaching techniques or interpretations, she creates conditions where people can perceive how interaction is already organizing and experiment with different ways of remaining in relation inside it.

The work draws from somatics, performance, applied theatre, relational practice, improvisation, and socially engaged art.

background

Laura holds a degree in Sociology and has pursued interdisciplinary training across puppetry, applied theatre, somatics, movement practice, relational methodologies, and spiritual inquiry.

Her work has been presented in artistic, educational, and organizational contexts internationally, including Rutgers University, the University of North Carolina, Anna Lindh Foundation, Misk Global Forum, and Folkuniversitetet Malmö.

Over the past two decades, she has created participatory workshops, performances, trainings, and relational practice environments exploring embodiment, collective attention, social interaction, and improvisational participation.

She is the creator of Deep Puppetry™ and Relational Fieldwork.

If you’re curious about the lineages and influences that have shaped this work, you can read more here.