About Laura Geiger

Laura Geiger is a participatory artist, facilitator, and creator of Relational Fieldwork and Deep Puppetry™.

Her work combines puppetry, applied theatre, somatics, improvisation, social practice art, and participatory experimentation to explore how interaction organizes in real time.

Through live practice environments, material experiments, and collective situations, she investigates how meaning, roles, responsibility, and power emerge between people before they become fixed.

artistic lineage

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 participation, rehearsal, collective experimentation, and the creation of new relational possibilities.

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 how people develop through interaction itself: through rehearsal, improvisation, collective attention, and social experimentation.

Applied theatre, improvisation, and somatic practice became increasingly important as the work shifted away from expression alone and toward participation itself. She became especially interested in moments before interaction settles into familiar roles, explanations, or responses.

Improvisation revealed how quickly interaction rushes toward recognizability. Moments that could move in many directions often collapse almost immediately into familiar roles, meanings, and responses.

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, and improvisational structures, the practice explored care, dependency, projection, responsibility, tenderness, and control as lived relational dynamics.

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

turning toward the relational field

Through teaching Deep Puppetry™ across different cultural and social contexts, Laura became increasingly interested in the limits of individual-development and anti-oppressive approaches on their own.

She observed that many relational patterns do not emerge primarily from individual belief or mechanization, but from interactional pressures and field conditions that organize participation before conscious intention.

This led toward her current work: Relational Fieldwork.

current focus: relational fieldwork

Laura’s current body of work, Relational Fieldwork, investigates how participation shapes interaction and how the timing of meaning formation influences power, responsibility, and possibility.

Rather than focusing on individual insight or communication techniques, she designs interactional experiments where participants can experience:

• when meaning begins to form

• how quickly interaction becomes coherent

• how participation organizes before conscious choice

• what happens when that process is slower

This work develops the capacity to remain in contact with what has not fully settled into meaning yet.

The aim is not to avoid meaning or resolution, but to shift their timing so that participation can reorganize before familiar patterns repeat.

approach

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

Rather than teaching techniques or interpretations, she creates conditions where participants can perceive how interaction is already organizing and experiment with different ways of participating 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.