2011 Touch&Play Festival

To move within physics is to realize your body. To dance with chemistry is to accept your soul. Combining both could be the most exhilarating thing you have ever done.

Touch&Play (2010)

 

Open Touch&Play Festival 6-9th of October near Barcelona, Spain.

three days of Workshops, labs and jams exploring the edges of Contact Improvisation

Here the workshop line-up so far:

A Touch Of Seduction

By Daniel J Hayes
An intense and playful laboratory exploring contact improvisation as a tool for seduction.We will be examining how well we can read another’s desires and with subtle persuasiveness transmit our own.

Improvising Contact

By William Woolf & Caroline Waters
Working & playing with the essence of contact (a state of meeting) & the essence of improvisation (making use of whatever is available) we’ll be exploring the nature & nurture of improvisational freedom, dissolving the conceptual & experiential boundaries separating dancing from not dancing, teaching from learning, meeting the moment from missing the point…

The Dance Of Hope & Patience

By William Woolf & Eva Tsagariki
What is happening now?
What is wanting to happen?
What is my part in the play?
Working & playing with awareness, time & space as creative potential, we’ll be attuning ourselves to the call of the moment, the shape of the moment, the flavour of the moment…
Becoming a melting pot of ingredients, creative potential unfolds as the music of life.

Tango: Passion & Duality

By David Firmin
Tango is a dance in which the emotion defines the possibilities of movement. In this workshop we will explore the couple as a source of creativity to create this movement. Establish an intimate relationship through the embrace. Accept the dynamic of the emotions that arise. Create a common listening to move together with the music. Develop a partner’s dance with/without conflict. Open the dance from the couple to a shared space.

Face 2 Face Physics

By Daniel J. Hayes
Why is it that in the democratization of the body through contact improvisation the face was left out? Instead of indulging in the normal chemical reactions that take place in face to face contact what happens if we enter into the physics of lips chins and noses? For the more daring there will also be the possibility to experiment with  technically sound tongue twisting.

Capturing Contact

By Ramon Roig
In this workshop Ramon Roig, an experienced video artist, will guide us through a series of exercises giving us valuable tools to capture the romance, mystery and sponteneity of classical or more edgy contact duets.

Drama and Contact

By Sonja Bruhlman
I would like to explore what happens if we take images, emotions and qualities of different characters (and ultimately ourselves) into a contact encounter (a physical encounter of two people). In other words: how can allowing us to live emotions expand the possibilities of finding different qualities in the dance? And vice versa, how can the touchability that we experience in contact help us to find authenticity in acting?

Awakening the Tiger

by Queralt Jorba
In this workshop Queralt Jorba, a Psychotherapist specialized in Movement Therapy will play with the concept of the tiger that lives inside all of us. While in normal life we try to sublimate and ignore this tiger in this exploration we will be invited to delve into and cultivate this strong animalistic energy and investigate how we might relate to ourselves and the other in this state.

Bound Together

By Martin Shaw
With the help of this two rope artist we will create a contact bondage jam where we can explore what it is like to dance and play with your movement restricted by rope and what happens if you are bound directly to your partner.

skin to skin

By Clarice Goulart
An invitation to explore the dance of our naked bodies. How does it feel to share nudity in a group situation where contact improvisation is what brings us together? By inviting nudity to the dance, we intend to extend it’s potential for self exploration and liberation of own limits and fears. We will also question the sexual interpretations of touching a naked body by exploring nudity in a non-sexual way.

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Commencing sundown Thursday 6th,completing Afternoon Sunday 9th.
(The final schedule will be uploaded shortly)

The festival is an open collaboration between motivated individuals and is organized on a non-profit basis. all income will be used to cover costs and any profit will be fairly divided between organizers and the teachers.
participation in the event is only open to members of the Palau Mercer Guals cultural association. Memberships can be acquired on the spot free of charge.

suggested donations:
Full festival: €45,- (30,- concessions)
Touch&Play Party Saturday night: €10,- (€5,- concessions)

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Below is the old festival information about the T&P event organized in June

Please disregard it

In this second edition of the T&P Festival and first edition of the T&P experiment we hope to take you on a journey exploring the (al)chemical edges of Contact. We ask ourselves what happens when we stop ‘dancing’ contact and just start doing it. Can we look beyond the weight sharing, lifts and spirals and find the essence of what it means to be in Contact with someone?

After an inspiring first edition of the festival last year in Berlin we decided to also create a space for more rigorous research into the boundaries of Contact: playful, sensual, sexual, emotional, forceful, therapeutic, political and spiritual. The Touch&Play Experiment  is a container for structured self guided exploration into this (al)chemical body and how it relates to our form and community.  This week-long lab is open to a select group of teachers, performers, investigators and other dedicated individuals from the CI world and other related disciplines.

The festival will follow on directly from the research week and be enriched by the experiments and relationships developed there.

Festival registration is OPEN

but we only have a few package tickets for the festival and post-workshop left. We may release more festival only tickets in May after we’ve visited the venue and reassessed its capacity

There are still tickets for the 4-day Post-Festival Intensive, “Poetics of Touch” by Karl Frost (29 June – 2 July)

Touching and playfully yours, Daniel & Jenny