Foundation Gül Gürses, founder and director of the Theater des Augenblicks, moved from Turkey to Vienna in 1981. After studying acting at the conservatory in Istanbul, working as an actress at the State Theater, the Bakiröy People\'s Theater in Istanbul and at a theater in Ankara, she decided to come to Austria. \'I wanted to enroll in theater studies at the university and gain the possibility to create innovative and socio-political theater,\' Gül stated when speaking about why she was motivated to forge her own way in a foreign country. One of her first projects was directing the play Letters to Taranta Babu (Briefe an Taranta Babu) by Nazim Hikmet in Turkish at Vienna\'s Center for Drama in 1985. The founding of the group \'Theater des Augenblicks\' followed in 1987, in collaboration with actress and dancer Sigird Seberich. In the beginning, the artists were not bound to a fixed space; they worked as an independent theater group. In this constellation Gül Gürses produced the German premiere of the play Letters to Taranta Babu in 1988. Immediately afterwards she went on tour with that piece to South Tyrol, a bilingual region in the north of Italy. In 1989, Gül Gürses produced Guernica, a theater performance after Picasso, for which Hakan Gürses wrote the script. This extraordinary play brought Theater des Augenblicks invitations to the International Theater Festival in Istanbul and to the Music Festival in Trent, among others. International Dance Laboratory The International Dance Laboratory\'s cycle - realized in three phases between 1996 and 2000 – has become a stable network of European performing artists. Participants involved in this project were: the Nordisk Teaterskole (DK), the LOT-Theater (D), the Compagnie Irene K. (B), the Scènes Bleues Compagnie (F), Sound Art (GB), and many others. The term \'dance\' in \'International Dance Laboratory\' stands for far more than \'dance\' – it refers to movement, expression, bodily representation, and going beyond physical as well as mental limitations and identities. These are not simply dance workshops, but more an attempt to allow artistic ideas to dance. 1996 Jahre der Einsamkeit The first part of the cycle was titled (Years of Loneliness) Jahre der Einsamkeit An interdisciplinary performance project incorporating object installations, sound installations, living installations and a video showing of the work came to life. This project – one of the first art projects of its kind in Austria – was sponsored by the European Commission (under the Kaleidoscope program). This project\'s innovation once again reestablished Theater des Augenblicks\' role as an organization, which forges new paths in the theater landscape through creative concept. 1997/1998 Dans le ravin de tes yeux The second part of the \'Loneliness\' cycle was staged in 1997/98 including the performances Human Protocol and dans le ravin de tes yeux – silence . This international project was once again made possible by the support of the European Commission. The rehearsals took place in France, Germany, Belgium and Austria. Both of these exceptional pieces were created and presented to the public in Vienna, Braunschweig and London (on invitation by the Festival of Central European Culture). 1999/2000 TransChance In 1999/2000, during the third part of the \'Loneliness\' cycle, Gül Gürses ventured into new territory with TransChance I and TransChance II. Performances on gender identity were composed and shown in Vienna, Istanbul and Braunschweig. In Istanbul the Theater des Augenblicks project team collaborated with a Turkish lesbian, gay and transgender cultural organization in researching historical and contemporary gender identities. The performance TransChance in Istanbul was unique, because many Turkish amateur actors/actresses worked alongside the professional artists of the Theater des Augenblicks. Based on the rich experience the project gained from their work in Istanbul, the performers conceived the actions to follow, scheduled for March 1999, in Vienna. The performance series TransChance I built upon the video documentation of the activists in the Turkish gender studies group. Using this material the performers in Vienna invented an interactive game for the performance. The concept of TransChance II – turning talks, developed by Gül Gürses and director Jörg Weber (Germany), dealt with textual fragments written by Birger Sellin, who lived with autism. This production presented Birger Sellin\'s work for the first on stage time in Austria. A remarkable characteristic of Gül Gürses and Jörg Weber\'s directing was the concentration on processes of breaking through boundaries on many different levels. The spectators could observe simultaneous actions that took place in diverse \'isolation rooms\' (in which the performers were fully \'enclosed\'). In the turning talks performance four international artists (from Norway, Turkey and Austria) were fitted into specially constructed machines. These constrictions enabled the artists to speak from within a space of incredible loneliness, similar to what Sellin communicates to us through his writing: \'I no longer want to be an inside me\' (Sellin, 1993). TransChanceII is a collage of text monologues with a strong accentuation on physical and performative aspects. In order to capture the multi-leveled character of identities, their sense of incompleteness and constructedness, as well as their relationship to social and psychic loneliness special contributors were asked to take part in the project. Heike Keusch (Vienna) and Sevval Kilic (Istanbul) assisted in bestowing Sellin\'s texts with expressiveness from their positions as persons \'deviating\' from the norm by choosing an alternative gender identity or sexual preference. The Norwegian actress Anna Dworak, who had taken part in the International Dance Laboratory cycle from the very beginning, and Ayse Dodanli, an actress from Istanbul, also contributed to the creation of the piece. During the TransChance program, the Theater des Augenblicks hosted a symposium called \'Trans-Identity in Cross-Cultural Comparison\'. Papers, reports and analyses on the subject provided the basis for opening up a forum of discussion on identity and the current situation of transgender persons in Austria, Turkey and India.