Anjelika Doniy

Authentic Movement, Self-exploration, Contact Improvisation and Body-Work. 13-14 March

The first relationship of a baby with the world starts with a hug. The purest entrance to dancing is like a hug and reconciliation with our thoughts, body limitations and fears. We will hug ourselves and broad the territory of our movement, dance and our concepts of ourselves and our understanding of dance. Authentic Movement is a beautiful tool to connect to an inner impulses. It is a possibility to express feelings, images and information from the subconscious that come through our bodies. 

We will be experiencing the movement and finding pathways inside the body in relating to others with an inner guideline. In this workshop we use the form of Authentic Movement as a resource for finding material for the contact dance and its development. 

Body-Work allow us to find a flow in our body, calms the mind and connects us to our state of being. It teaches us about inner alignment and touch qualities, it is also a wonderful way to let our nervous system integrate our experiences. 

We will use these inner resources for our creative process and development  in Contact improvisation practice.  To coordinate centre of the body and the limbs, seeing the body as an entity.  Integrating spirals into movement, using three-dimensional, multi-level and ever changing space around us.  Integrating the space behind the back into dancing.  Understanding the body ability to flow, pour, move the body as WEIGHT. 

Dance as a process of transition in the quality of attention through the touch, sight, system of signs, that we naturally possess – the process of true daintiness. We make room to process this in writing and sharing. The dance is our teacher. Like the caterpillar moving into the butterfly we will use movement and expression for transformation.

Nitipat (Ong) Pholchai

Dancing Space and Time: the Poetics of Embodied Physics

  • Is space empty or full of things?
  • How do we embody the fluid continuum of gravitational landscape?
  • How are we presencing inside the matrix of time?

The human mind thinks and sees in lines and traces of meaning which imparts social and cultural conditioning. (But they aren’t necessary real in a physical sense) How can we decode and deconstruct that strong visual reliance in order to free ourselves, so that we can simply and authentically “meet”—with our inner animals, with another body, with other nature and whatever else that is present and available in the field of potentials. 

Contact improvisation, in my understanding, is a meditation on the meetings via the body. And meetings are “events”–like kisses–happening, unfolding emergence in the universe. We will attend to, explore and journey along, a.k.a. “dance”, with these meetings. The workshop is geared towards beginners new to the practice, as well as experienced practitioners with curiosity about artistic and/or phenomenological approach to embodiment.

Exercises inside the intensive are drawn from these materials:
– Classical contact movement principles of small dance, rolling, inertia, momentum, liquid spirals, and textures of touch. 
–  Drawing, writing and notating and its anthropological implications, including the research on embodied drawing practice of the contact improvisation pioneer Nancy Stark Smith-          Blind rituals, which is my dance research with a Thai blind dancer, about blind perception of space-body, and dancing contact as inclusive healing rituals and multi-modal communication.

David Lim

Levity in Dance

What is our relationship to gravity in dance? How can we make ourselves light? Concepts we might explore include gradual pouring of weight, using the earth and our knowledge of human anatomy to leverage our partner’s structure, extension of our limbs to help us fly and land, use of our breath, awareness of our center of mass and our muscle tone to find the ideal balance, and awareness of the arc of flight to help us find the best moment for perching and landing. We’ll explore these in a safe, fun and supportive environment. All are welcome!