Intensive with Anya Cloud (US)
This contact improvisation workshop will foster a space where the impossible may become possible.
We will train skills both in and out of physical contact — highlighting the body’s relationship with gravity, space, and survival — for high-stakes, unruly, nuanced, and accountable contact improvisation dancing to take place. My study/practice of the Feldenkrais® Method radically informs the ways that I practice and teach contact improvisation. Finding and keeping agency is paramount. We will develop skills to notice the impact of our dancing/actioning on ourselves, our dancing, and the group. What if we allow ourselves to be changed through this practice? We will insist on the DANCING through a devoted and unapologetically physical research-oriented approach to Contact Improvisation.
My research straddles and navigates extremes – I’m invested in athletic wildness and soft patient specificity. How are power and gentleness related? We will work with our round and permeable bodies as open systems as we cultivate pathways of aliveness, choice, and imagination. We will work with rolling, sliding, falling, flying, disorientation, momentum, endurance, duration, collisions, weight support, composition, and more. This will support and be supported by detailed work around sensitization, pressure, intention, tone, direction, timing, quality, and sequencing. We will develop skills for more attenuated listening, consent, boundary setting, and risk-taking. Some things may feel boring and some things will be thrilling — it will all inform increasing the range and humanness of our dancing. This workshop will be deeply physical and deeply political. How can we practice de-prioritizing in order to allow the conditions to reveal the priority?
Who you are and how you move will impact what happens over the course of the week. We will invite multiple strategies to emerge, queer, disrupt, dissolve, and transform.
