“Contact improvisation in Water is a partner dance form, emerging from sharing physical contact in a playful cooperative way. The movers let the physical forces such as mass, momentum or buoyancy lead them into the unknown. As no one decides where to go, they engage deeply in a nonverbal communication, where they listen to which dance wants to grow at the present moment. Here are a few aquatic focuses for us to discover:
– To ground yourself and develop an organized and relaxed structure in water, in order to give clear directions to your floating partners, using therefore your whole body.
– To interact in water, listening and percieving, and learning to get friends with the unexpected. Our body becomes a fluid moving support, inviting our partner(s) to ride on waves created by the common momentum.
– To dive into subaquatic contact improvisations, develop confidence in disorientation and enter another space-time dimension. The warm sea invites you to experience effortless relaxing underwater. You learn how to use your center to go in spiral and swaying dances with our partners.” (Manuela Blanchard, www.earthandwaterdance.com)
Dancing Contact in Water, we engage in our bodies special mechanisms, which allow us to slow down our breath rhythm and heart rate, to tune our mind on a meditative state – attentive, alert and at the same time relaxed. Beside this we learn how to help the other to let go of tentions, transmitting to our partner the state of non-doing, throught the bodily contact and through the very simple fact of just quiet presense. We also learn to interact with water, using its support and letting it to dance us, to continue and to develop our movement. By means of this we get to the effortless movement. We also recollect the patterns of Developmental Movement, that one day appeared in water, and nowdays are helping us to move ergonomically – in water environment, on land, in the air.
Contact in Water is a very personal and very deep experience of dance. For this kind of dance only a very warm water is suitable, because when relaxed, our bodies stop producing the habitual amount of heat. That is why we make this festival on Koh Chang, where the warmest water, plain sand shore, sun and the island create a unique microclimat, and the empty beach lets us to preserve the athmosphere of intimacy, and permits for very authentic and personal dances to happen.
For disclosing contact in water we use the elements of watsu, capoeira, tango, Developmental Movement, contact improvisation, and the very unique exercizes, that inherent only contact impro in water.
