During the festival there will be intensives, workshops, jams, performances, underscore, morning practice and time for rest, walk, bodywork, sauna, discussions and conversations, etc.
There will be three intensives led by Alessandro Rivellino, Eszter Gál, Jori Snell. The offer is to choose one. The workshops will be held by Nayeli Spela, Luca Kancso, Lena Peled, Elise Malafosse, Judit Dömötör, Arnaud Blondel, Bastien Auber.
- Dancing with the unknown
Intensive with Alessandro Rivellino (BR)
Nature is my home, and offers me the sintonization with inner and outer manifestations as one, a gate for sinestethic ways of being. The somatic field is about recognizing ourselves as nature, and open to the mistery of being a body.
We want to invite dances that are bigger than question and answer between two or more people.
Being channel between sky and earth is the path, and this is totally physical, where touch is not happening for any specific reason more than opening space for dance to manifest.
From the field of sensorial, sinesthetic and kinestetic manifestations, such as breath, minimal responses to gravity, inner movement impulses, the whole sensorial channels and the systems that are constantly moving and changing in us and through the environment, we open to the other, the space that surrounds and contains us, and our practice happens in this space in-between.
This are the bases to explore, together with the primar force that connects us all: gravity.
Silently speaking, dance can take us for a ride, when we open the field for it, and make us forget about the hosts and the guests, and become one with present moment, letting dance manifests.
- Releasing into the unknown
Intensive with Eszter Gál (H)
In this intensive, the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT*) will offer an exploratory framework for discovering Contact Improvisation. We are going to gently begin the classes either alone or with a partner, and by listening to our inner sensations we will practice allowing and creating space to deepen into our inner landscape and explore our dance in solo form as well as in duets, and in trios. We will also play with the basics of CI, practicing identifying support, and by building on the experience of releasing we can discover how to be safe and trusted while taking physical risks. We will explore finding the wonder of our partners’ form, touch, imagination, force, and structure. We are going to enter the dance in different ways and challenge ourselves in extended duets. The aim is to find physical answers to our “questions”.
*The SRT is a somatic dance technique, developed by Joan Skinner, that utilizes image-guided floor work to ease tension and promote an effortless kind of moving. The technique smoothly integrates technical growth with creative process. - Diving into innocence
Intensive with Jori Snell (DK)
This intensive will aim to take a starting point from a “natural place” in us: our innocence.
A not-knowing mind, but highly intelligent bodymind, fluid, multi-dimensional and unpredictable. Moving into a space where we again can discover anew, afresh, what perhaps seemed obvious, and where a natural-ness is given, not searched for.
Discovering and remembering at the same time..touching on the intangible, and to speak to the innocence of new discovery, where our dance is a conversation between what is solid, grounded and real, and the intangible, timeless..
“Somatic” being the theme of the festival… For me a somatic approach is about “embodiment”. In our dancing and explorations, we will explore and question: what does it really mean to embody something, oneself, a dance, a moment? How do we get there, how do we create the circumstances for that to happen? Along with that, we will research if something like a collective somatic sensitivity exists. A field of awareness that interconnects us and our dancing into a larger context, tuning towards an “ensembling” where we flow into a collective spacetime. A state of being where spontaneous composition can be noticed, as a group… We will navigate these territories between our individual/inner states and expressions in movement: solo, duet, trios and the collective/outer landscape, as a group.
Fields of exploration will be: play, the innocence of us in a state of play. Unleashing a free and connected bond with our body; it’s manyfold dimensions, it’s expressions in this very moment. In togetherness. Undoing. Wild, untamed. Safe, yet at the very edge of our being. There’s a poetry there we sometimes hardly can fathom ourselves. We will work with tuning our listening skills, some techniques will be there, however, not as a main focus, but more as an awareness of a structure underneath freshly fallen snow; hardly noticeable, but there. Subtly so. We will train the muscles and skills of accessing our naturalness, giving space to oneself and others, encourage each other. Inspired by the roots and early years of CI where the practice was witnessed by an audience, we will play with conscious and subconscious composition, in solo, duet, trio and as an ensemble, including (embodied) witnessing as an essential part of the practice.
Creative writing & drawing, Contemplative Dance Practice and elements of Authentic Movement are potential elements we will draw upon.
Open for all. Come as you are:)
- Listening to Spacious Silence
Workshop with Nayeli Spela
Skin is the largest organ in the body and yet, it can be just an extantion of another, much larger space.
In this subtle work, we enlarge our perception and senses in order to bring more expended modalities to our field of movement.
We expand our perception in all directions, meaning also into the earth. By this we enlarge the sense of stability that actually helps us stretch our perception in the outer space. If another body contains this expansion of spaciousness, how do we dance with it. What extra possibilities emerge?
To make it simple.
Expanding perception brings more layers in dance.
In order to travel into more layers, we need to start with one basic and this for me is emptiness. This for me is silence.
When spaciousness is embodied, it can be danced, it can be brought into the dance, into the space, into life.
Listening starts with noticing the silence inside the emptiness.
Dance is about becoming the silence and the emptiness.
Spaciousness is the product of listening how silence and emptiness dance together.
- Exploring the body through sensation and feeling
Workshop with Luca Kancsó (HU)
The aim of this class is to let go of the preconceived notions of movement preconceived notions about movement, thereby releasing our physical limitations. Perception, physical sensation clarity and perfection is already the work of the body. In the first half of the class, the sensory sensory experience. With the experiences and memories we have there, we will discover our own dance.
- A dance of sensory perception.
- Where does the dance begin?
- How and in what form sensory movements appear in our bodies and
on our bodies ? - How do they guide our imagination, what images appear ?
We will work with our eyes closed, encouraging and enhancing the journey. During the process of experiencing we will work on pace and speed. We will gradually move from slow to fast. From fast to slow.
In the second half of the lesson:
(I will lead and lead the group through different qualities and into a common and
individual dance experience.)For the second half of the class, I wrote a poem.
” My own body weight and its physical reality. The existing strength that I have within me.
I gain certainty.
I step out of my own weight.
I am in the liquid substance of water where I travel through other bodies.
I become air.
I rest and hide in other bodies.
Soundless.”
- The wonderful dance of earth and air – a recipe for courage and freedom
Workshop with Lena Peled (IL)
The deeper my own body meets the floor and understands how to work with it, the safer I feel working with another body in flight. The security gained in the air, arrives with the ability to land and soften into the floor safely and with ease. It’s just like that; when the ground is stable, you can have courage to fall. When you can meet the floor with friendliness and softness, you can rise out of it without knowing or grasping at how it will all unravel. Developing a sense of security within my own body is the base for freedom, courage and flight. This is my understanding at the moment.
The support of meeting another body comes from the ground. the floor. the earth. Through searching the ground beneath my partner, connecting through their skeleton, rooting through my own bones, I can find the ground in the air around me as well. When there is a clear anchor in the earth, you can find it in the air as well. We will deepen into the floor through the floor, and from the floor in ways that inspire ease of motion. We will emphasize the way the understanding of how the skeleton is built and how it can be used to move efficiently and smoothly. Throughout, we will practice light acrobatics as a way to develop courage in our dance. I invite you on a journey of self discovery with the floor as vehicle of meeting yourself and others. The floor is always there to meet you : it is the best reliable supporting partner! This is a relationship worth investing in!
- Transition, from egosomatic to ecosomatic CI
Workshop with Elise Malafosse (FR)
In this inaugural article “Solo dancing” (L’Attico Gallery, Roma, 7 july 1973), Steve Paxton says: “solo dancing doesn’t exist, the dancer dances with the floor, add another dancer and you have a quartet, each dancer with the other and each with the floor”. I would add to this: dance with the floor before the partner, dance with the space before the partner… because in CI we can easily be overwhelmed by the connection with the partner, to get stuck in a duet bubble! And if I want to touch and to feel you, I need to be touched and to feel myself (as a biological human being as you = MWE): bonding with the earth, grounding into the space, diving under the skin into the “skinesphere”, our home body, sensing the grounding and clarity of the bones, the strength and sensuality of the muscles, the vitality and empathy of the organs, the relational envelop of the skin-fascia, the flow of the liquids and collective bath, the atmosphere through the glands and nervous system… and from all of this dancing with you!
Today, I can observe a somatic subculture into the CI community: the somatic contact improvisers have a specific common language and for me what somatic brings is mainly about undoing CI and letting the form emerge from the content, from the sensing, to let birth and grow the motion from its origin. And in that sense, the original practices of CI could have been qualified as somatic practices: the small dance (release and sensing the micro, pre-movement) and falling/collision (natural reflexes of the body organization).
I will adjust the proposition according to what is alive in time and space during the festival!
- Planty of Us
Worksop with Judit Dömötör (HU)
I would like to propose you different playful practices inspired by the sensory life of plants. These sensory – imaginary games may change our perception and our relation to the human and non human (or more than human) environment and may let us come in a deeper reciprocity with the living world we are taking part of.
Plants have a lot of senses, as much as we know, 15 more than humans. As they are rooted, they need to be very sensitive to be able to act and react to the events or beings around them. Their sensory organs are spread on all their body surface. This diffused sensibility contains the human senses, but also the capacity to feel resonances, humidity, electomagnetic fields and chemicals among others.
I will invite you to experience how we can explore and sense our body and the surroundings from the somatic approach of a „plant consciousness”. I propose to understand together how these perceptional experiments will nourish the movement and the connection to each other. May these journeys bring us a different listening? May we experiment our relationships in a bigger living field? And how does it change our practice of contact?
We will also discover different ways of rooting and grounding, and acknowledge our „linkedness” to each other.Finally we will intertwine the field of sensing with the field of experiencing weight and support to enter a state of dance alone and with a partner.
- Balancing Your Centers
Workshop with Bastien Auber (FR)
The notion of “CENTER” is often evoked in contact improvisation. For me, a center speaks of a notion of balance and makes a periphery exist, often associated with a sphere. We will try to clarify this term to develop a common vocabulary in our practice of CI. We will play during this class to make alive together the different centers that I propose to explore: center of mass, anatomical center, center of perception, centers of the earth and of the universe.. With some games of our balancing bodies, and with the connections of partners, we will approach some technical aspects of the CI: positions of the feet, mobility of the pelvis, axes of the column, support of the eye’s view, precisions of a lift.
- Becoming humanimal
Workshop with Arnaud Blondel (FR)
Human beings obey to the laws of nature just as much as nature is shaped by us, humans. We know that we are animals. We know that humanity is a tiny part of a huge community, the community of life on Earth. But can we truly feel it?
Starting from a simple acknowledgment – we are animals –, we will explore how to create and nurture movement thanks to somatic and “animalistic” explorations. I would like to build this class like a small research proposal: what happens if, during our dancing, we become aware of all the evolution processes that lead to our/my/your human body? What to do with the legacies our bodies carry from other species? This class will start from a somatic (perceptual and imaginary) work on our animal remains to explore them in contact.
We will eventually get to play with contact and improvisation as creatures: human and animal, human because animal. It might take us to the roots of CI (reflexes and instincts) as well as it might take us anywhere else. I have no idea. Let’s find out together!
And…
…of course we will have JAMS every day. Some of them are focused and open, with live music and also silent. This year the music will be provided by Nathaniel Damon (US). There will be one Underscore, maybe outside. As every year we will have a space-time jam, where the time will be given for inclusive performance.
We will also have time for resting and regenerating. SAUNA will work every evenings. There will be space for RESTING and BODY WORKS. And there is forest and endless landscapes to escape and find your space if needed.
In addition we will have discussions, sharings, talkings around CI, community, care and safety. And some topics which will be present during the week.
We are happy to welcome you!