Master Class STAGING EVIL: Folk Devils, Social Dramaturgy, Performance and Object Making by Steven Warwick
General Course Description
“What is evil? Have you ever wondered why you/ we use the term? Evil is something unimaginable, how would you represent it? Have you ever wanted to stage it? This course is a five day intensive course which will be held at Berlin Art Institute from June 30 to July 04, 2025. A class like this seldom occurs, and is for the curious. Warwick’s own practice is wildly diverse and crosses many accepted boundaries and preexisting notions of what it is to make art. Using his book length essay Notes of Evil (Floating Opera Press, 2022) in which he argues that ‘evil’ doesn’t even exist, or at least in the way we currently frame it. It serves as a point of departure to provide a cutting edge discursive framework, you will learn both how to make work and also how to be able to theorise and articulate your unique perspective in this world.
The Staging Evil masterclass focuses on connecting disparate strands of queer, cinematic and critical contemporary theory alongside praxes such as experimental electronic music, theatrical performance, creative writing, video, sculpture and installation art to take you on a journey which will help you question your own preconceptions and enrich and expand your ongoing artistic vocabulary. There is a focus in this class of being present in a space, together, learning something in real time, and allowing yourself and the class to unfold in the present moment. By coming to the BAI classroom context, Warwick will present something not available online and so esoteric, a singular thinker who seamlessly bridges artmaking, theatrical, musical and writing fields, you will be uniquely enriched by this experiential and experimental learning programme.
In Warwick’s own practice, he stages a performative situation, using writing as the point of departure and works across various media, including video, sound, performance, sculpture and installation in various formats of exhibition making, theatre, performance, concerts, book length essays, criticism and cinema. He has released albums on the PAN label, lectured at Cal Arts, CSM London Vienna Art Academy, and exhibited at the ICA London, Quai Branly Museum Paris, SMK Denmark, Issue Project Room NYC ,KW Institute for Art Berlin. He has also co-authored Fear Indexing The X Files w Nora Khan ( Primary Information, 2017) and the experimental writing performance duo Elevator to Mezzanine with DeForrest Brown Jr. He is also a regular guest and contributor to the New Models podcast.” (Text by courtesy of Steven Warwick)
Learning Outcomes
This five day course focuses on connecting different islands of possibility. Through a combined rigorous theoretical framework and fluid approaches to praxes, you will facilitate your own approach to how we stage ‘evil’, garner an understanding of why we even still use the phrase, how you create meaning and articulate a narrative convincing for the public stage of appearances and representation. Bridging research and artistic practice, critical discussion, rethinking queer, technological, linguistic and art history, each session will build upon the former with the goal of dismantling preconceived ideas about socio-political taxonomies, binaries, and systems. Collaboration and group discussion are also integral parts of the course. Participants will have the opportunity to engage with fellow artists and share areas of knowledge. This exchange of ideas and experiences can further enhance the learning experience for all involved by manifesting desires and goals which you are yearning to realise. By being exposed to previously unknown approaches, artists can refine their skills and open up new techniques into their work.
The course will incorporate readings from sources such as Uncanny Horror, shadow self, activist rhetoric, media theorists, film, television, theatre, music, installation and performance.
General Guidelines
This course is designed for artists of all disciplines and for those interested in learning about understandings of evil and how we as a human collective, stand to articulate that which we cannot understand or seek to articulate and parse through storytelling and narrative as well as extra sensory affective environmental presentations.. The course will incorporate mythologies and theories, symbols, and ideas. No prior knowledge of the subject is necessary to participate in the course. However, participants should have an open and engaged attitude towards the subject matter and be willing to experiment.
Benefits
- Participants will learn, adapt and form their own ideas and approaches to staging evil.
- Participants will learn new approaches and connecting strands of theory and praxis which are both esoteric, disparate and universal to create new tools for meaning making.
- After the class, participants will be comfortable workshopping their own projects and be open to developing their work with a performative aspect in their practice.
- Participants will have the opportunity to create new visual artworks using experimental writing, sketching and performance techniques
- Participants will also have developed a set of building blocks to devise new project and artist performances as their practice evolves
Methods and Topics of Teaching
- Lectures and presentations with visual and audio components
- Guided group discussion
- Individual and group instruction
- Assignments and in-class exercises
- Group and individual critiques/feedback
Steven Warwick will present cathedral grotesques, literature, film, activism,electronic music, the artist’s own oeuvre, to look at how we as a society try to stage and represent ‘evil’, aka an unimaginable source of horror, which by definition defies explanation or understanding. Individual and group attempts at trying to locate this evil or perceived problem and how this plays out in society at large. The group will be led by the artist via practical exercises, group discussions, writing methods, workshops. By the end of the course, you’ll leave with practical tools and the ability to produce and build on your work that reflects your unique perspective and voice.
Program Structure with Daily Course Description
Monday
9:30 AM Reception at the BAI
Grotesques, Rhetoric and Defying Articulation – An Introduction to Staging Evil
Morning Session:
GROUP INTRODUCTIONS
To begin the class, Steven will introduce his art practice including a presentation on his sonic, performance, filmic and sculpture methods, research and ideas. The group will also have an opportunity to introduce themselves, their practices and their interest in the course subject. We will have a short exercise asking what each person’s understanding of evil is and how one would want to stage it. After there will be a short lecture ‘What is (staging) evil. Steven will read excerpts from his book and give an overview of the text. Discussing main points such as
- The Gothic Cathedral and Grotesque as metaphor for staging evil, power and representation.
- Victor Hugo’s staging Evil in Notre Dame
There will be a discussion after about the topics with the group and how that resonates with everyone.
The participants will make a miniature clay model of the Lincoln Imp, a folk devil from England which resides in Lincoln Cathedral, which will be dried and ready to take home at the end of the week.
Afternoon Session:
Exercise ‘Consolatio and the Introduction to Cenobite’
Steven will introduce the character of Pinhead from the Hellraiser franchise, and give a short background introduction to the film. Afterwards he will give a performance of his Consolatio piece which incorporates this character for today. Consolatio as a space of convalescence even in a hellscape.
We will then work on workshopping the piece in groups of 2 and solo. The participants will perform the piece which serves as an introduction to inhabiting the character. This exercise will serve as a beginning of adapting the piece to their own character. Something of their imagination, how would they stage something unimaginable or difficult to represent? The focus here will be on how not to represent something. How can a symbol become a placeholder for something more nefarious or sinister? If evil is something that defies categorisation, it must reside in the imagination. How does one manifest that in the physical realm?
Tuesday
Interior Evils
Morning Session:
This Morning, Warwick will present his piece HOUSE. The piece incorporates a short story narrated by the artist. Afterwards students will be given an exercise to write their own short story, maximum one side of A4. The text can be an instant response to the piece HOUSE or an idea that the person has brought with them which they wish to work on. The focus is on responding and improvising and unlocking the imagination and use of narrative storytelling.
Afterwards, each participant will take turns reading out their piece. There will be a group crit before the lunch break. These stories will be collected and printed as a small zine to take away at the end of the week. [They will also be eventually collected ongoing in subsequent iterations of the course for possible release as a publication.]
Afternoon Session:
There will be a group exercise of working in groups of two. In which participants will take turns adapting their story into the Pinhead character. There will be a short workshopping in duos, and then presentations.
Wednesday
Narrative Storytelling, Fairytale and Conspiracy
Morning Session:
Participants are invited to consider fairytales as storytelling for meaning-making in childhood development, with a clear good and evil moralistic narrative. How does this change in adulthood and current narrativization of life? What about when boundaries are blurred and one is tempted to fill in the blanks for answers? Warwick will discuss Kubrick’s The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, The Anti Social Network; Memes to Mayhem and the X Files franchise. Warwick will read excerpts from his books Notes on Evil and also Fear Indexing the X Files. He will also discuss Jung’s topic of the Shadow Self.
Afternoon Session:
After a short break, Warwick will present a short talk about how he used elements of fairytale, storytelling and elements of the notion of conspiracy to incorporate them into his creative work. He will discuss his play works Berlin Belongs To Us (2019) [about city mascots, nationalism and mythology. It appropriates Rivette’s conspiracy film Paris Belongs to Us and retells the founding of Berlin, the Berlin Bear recast as a Greek Myth], and his trilogy of plays Forget Me Not – Pigs Head on a Stick and Urban Renewal (all 2022).
There will be a further group exercise inhabiting the Pinhead character, expanding the space, and different opportunities of staging their work. Mask work and eventual narration of participants’ pieces. They will be further workshopped.
Thursday
Cinematic evils and video nasties; Scum, Elephants and Antisocial Poodles
Morning Session:
Warwick will discuss examples of cinematic evils such as Alan Clarke’s prison film Scum and Elephant, as well as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. He will read an excerpt from his video nasty chapter and there will be a class discussion about the topic. Warwick will discuss his film installation The Antisocial Poodle (2023) and his last album Moi (2019) released on PAN showing how he adapted and incorporated different elements of his recorded output to be staged as a theatrical performance and reformatted across different media, and to parse contemporary hellscapes.
Afternoon Session:
Staging Evil
In the afternoon, participants will be filmed presenting their Pinhead performance and own version of staging evil with their own narrative. There will be two groups one watching the other, and then one large group together. The group will be presenting their works all together and also in sequence, workshopping the interaction. Bearing in mind the ‘evil’ is that which cannot be articulated or explained. The scene will be about trying to avoid definition and explanation. Yet at the same time, students will be invited to articulate or stage that which they struggle to articulate.
Friday
Presentations
Morning Session:
We will screen the filmed performances from Thursday and have a group crit. Participants can reflect on the different methodologies of performing and playing back the works.
Afternoon Session:
There will be some further stagings and in the corridor space of BAI. We will have a feedback session and participants will be asked how they thought it went. Afterwards participants will receive a copy of the documentation, the zine and their Lincoln Imp.
General Information
Duration: June 30 – July 04, 2025
Hours: Each day from 10 AM – 4 PM (including several breaks & lunchtime)
Seats: Min: 6 | Max: 20 | Language: English
Fees: There is a one-off registration fee of €50. The participation fee is €850 per person (without accommodation).
The fee is VAT-exempt by the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery Higher Education and Research pursuant to Paragraph 4 No. (21) (a)(bb) UStG (German Value Added Tax Act).
Your Master Class Instructor
Steven Warwick is an artist, writer, and musician living and working in Berlin. His practice is paradigmatic of an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses theatre-making, sculptural installation, film making, social dramaturgy and composition. His work is disseminated on a multitude of platforms including records, galleries, nightclubs, publications and the Internet. Across these contexts, Warwick creates assemblages of performance, image, sound and language that speak to the ways in which ideologies construct and inhabit spaces, online and offline – from co-working spaces to clubs, television shows and online chat rooms.In its pluralistic live forms, Warwick’s work redefines the expectations and conventions that accompany events such as performance and public exhibitions.
His visual work has been exhibited at KW Berlin; Schinkel Pavillon, Volksbühne Berlin, Klosterruine Berlin, Reading International, Zürich Moves! Festival, Art Night London, SMK, Copenhagen; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Cleopatra’s, New York; Beach Office, Berlin; and Balice Hertling, New York. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as ‘Heatsick’, he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Trouw, Amsterdam; Bergen Konsthall; LAMPO/ Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals. His writing has appeared in Artforum,Texte zur Kunst, BOMB, Frieze, and Urbanomic. He is also a co-author of ‘Fear Indexing the X- Files’, an audiovisual performance-lecture series issued as a book by Primary Information and Notes on Evil, recently published by Floating Opera Press.
More information on the Steven Warwick Website.
