Dreaming the Asklepion 2025

Performance by Zoë Kreye, Alexa Solveig Mardon, Lisa Prentice, LIVE Biennale2025, 2838 E. Hastings. Photo: still from video documentation by Alger Ji-Liang.

Dreaming the Asklepion is an interdisciplinary performance and installation project that reimagines ancient healing spaces as contemporary, immersive environments for collective transformation. It is a collaborative work by visual artist Zoë Kreye, dance artist and craniosacral therapist Alexa Solveig Mardon, and visual artist and craniosacral therapist Lisa Prentice whose combined practice includes developing rituals for transmuting embodied and spiritual experiences into the creation of sculpture, painting, and movement. Dreaming the Asklepion draws inspiration from ancient Greek Asklepions—holistic healing centers that integrated ritual, aesthetics, and embodied experience as tools for personal and societal restoration. During this performance audiences are invited to co-create the work by moving between the roles of witness and participant. During the performance sessions participants are given the opportunity to receive moments of bodywork from the performers: gentle hands-on contact akin to cranial touch which could include light contact with one’s heels, hands, arms, knees, head, neck or belly. Physical contact during the performance is always optional and negotiated verbally with the performers.Thinking through the ways architecture, sensory design and artistic setting can be used as therapeutic tools in their own right, the artists ask: what would a contemporary Asklepion look like? Perhaps, one where intuition, sensation, and art are central to collective healing.