Workshops & Research Proposals
Check it out. Here a list of some of the exciting, weird, comforting, scary, touching and playful classes, labs and experiments that are being proposed.
The proposals from the Intensive teachers have a defined workshop format which will treat the stated subject matter. The proposals from the T&P researchers are starting concepts for the exploration at the T&P Experiment and are subject to change before they are presented at the Festival.
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The Sensuality of the Senses in the Biospheric Dance - Paola Motto
Authentic Contact — Guto Macedo
The setting of work I created with Soraya Jorge is not Contact Improvisation or Authentic Movement. It is a relationship that is established between the forms, the intersection, the sharing, the hybridization. It is not one or the other. In Authentic Contact, there is no loss of the point of view of each approach, although it demands detachment from their original forms.
Basics of Dominance and Submission - Felix Ruckert
Bodily poetics - Anna Jussilainen
Bone Sex: The Erotic Body, Deep Touch, Weight and Motion - Jess Curtis
Building safer spaces and consent — Rachel Dean
One of the aspects of Contact Improvisation that appeals to and fascinates me is its potential as a playground for learning, practicing and experimenting with the ways in which we communicate and build relationships as human beings.
CI as Spiritual / Tantric meditation — Sabine Sonnenschein
CI, as a tantric practice, means experiencing an “us,” which arises from non-intentionality, from improvization, and from the moment.
Dancing has neither future nor destination, but is always now, in this moment. We are present in dance in the present. A deep encounter becomes possible, if I am not looking for anything from you nor you from me.
Connecting to your colours - Maya Gonzales Nieves
One or more sessions of therapeutic bodypainting. Looking for ways for individuals to draw on the large canvas of their body with their own emotions and momentary states: breaking through barriers of fear and introversion
Deconstructing Masculinities - Daniel Mang
A lab about contact improvisation as a tool for developing alternatives to conventional masculinites, exploring issues of homophobia, competition, fear of intimacy, conventional male solidarity versus alternative forms of bonding between men.
Drama and Contact - Sonja Bruhlman
I would like to explore what happens if we take these 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?
Embodying the Human Chemistry of Movement and Communication — Dieter Rehberg
Idiolektik
Somatic Dance
The function of the mind in the process of touch (based on buddhist psychology)
Anatomy and physiology of touch
Sex on a Cellular Level
The emotion of weight
Entanglement and Disintegration – Felix Ruckert
Gaming Emotions - Bertrand Kludor
Gaining stronger emotions, instead of taming emotions. The workshop seeks to enlarge personal and collective emotional playing fields on two traces. The first trace sharpens basic emotions and translates them into movements and contacts. The second trace introduces different types of games to enrich the playful site of emotional contact improvisation.
Genders & Sexualities on the Surface: researching the embodied experience - Kim Lasdon
I’ve been investigating and researching a project called ‘lesbian bodies/contact improvisation’ with my local community (amazingly abundant with queer women!) in collaboration with lesbian/queer women dancers in Ireland. Our investigations include dancing the ‘shadow of contact’ score, which was generated by and came to us from the West Coast/San Francisco contact community.
I wanna hold your hand - Sensual Pleasures/Social Spaces - Jess Curtis
Ki Dialogue - Richard Sarco-Thomas
What is happening energetically when we are in a state of physical consensual communion with another/others? Where do the barriers naturally come in and where they dissipate? What defines awake: immediate, constant, surrender, compassion, powerful, vulnerable, aggressive, undetectable, undeniable, integral and paradoxical?
Life cycles - Laura Staniland
Low Flying Contact - Wim Franken
It is difficult to get a space that is suitable for a project like this and to have interested bodies & minds to experiment with the mixture of dance, flying and bdsm. I am very curious about what will happen in the given situation (e.g. using movement, trapezes, nakedness, bdsm, silences) and how people will experience this, both as performer and/or spectator.
Intimacy Lab - Karl Frost
In this lab, there is an invitation to look through these lenses of intimacy, sexuality, and sensuality, as well as the nameless other states and emotions that may intersect with these territories. We explore contact improvisation, but for this lab, we will allow ourselves personally to open these doors for our own perception and processing.
Meditation, Sensing and Surrender — Linda Priha
At the moment I am very much into different dynamic meditational practices (Osho meditations and others alike). I am interested in how through practising them I can often find total surrender, letting go and being in Here and Now.
Melting Buildings - Pipaluk Supernova
My experiment is bringing our dancing bodies and souls out into the ‘real world’. Traveling as a group we can take the freedom to break social rules
No Love Without Jealousy, No Jealousy Without Love — Paulina Święcańska
During my workshop on the Touch and Play festival I will present ways of transforming jealousy, using games and exercises. In conditions of common trust and security we will try to observe, analyze and understand our partners’ and chiefly our own fascinations and needs.
Pain Processing - Felix Ruckert
Origins of Sensibility and Lust — Marina Kronkvist
As a contribution to the Touch&Play Festival I offer a workshop I will give at the Sydney Xplore-festival in April 2011. I’m also very interested in what the days of Experiment brings up to offer at the Festival
Playful Physics — Robert Anderson
I’d like to offer a workshop (very much in the style of a laboratory) on the theme of expanding our potential to play within the form of contact improvisation. I believe that the form offers a wonderful structure for adults to meet and explore parts of themselves that are usually kept hidden away.
Poetics of Touch — Karl Frost
This workshop will focus on the art-making inside of the practice of contact improvisation. We use our base in the physical skills and sensitivities of contact improvisation to explore a kind of collaborative art-making of personal experience… the poetics of human contact.
Postromantic Dance — Daniel Mang
3 Lab proposals: 1.1. “Sensual Politics” 1.2. “Deconstructing Masculinities” 1.3. “Postromantic Dance”
Rituals of Intimacy - Felix Ruckert
Sensual Extremes- Felix Ruckert
Sensuality as a State of Awareness and Internal Experience — Karl Frost
Sensuality is often conceptualized as something we do to or with someone else. In this workshop, we explore sensuality as the pleasure of the senses, focussing primarilly on proprioception (the sensorial experience of the body, primarilly originating in proprioceptive in sensory information from nerves in the joints and muscles).
Sensual Politics - Daniel Mang
The basic ideas up for reflection and discussion in this lab: a) The boundary between sexuality and sensuality is drawn differently by different people. b) Doing a lot of contact improvisation can change sexual desire.
Simple & Pure - Federico Finamore
We are going to work on streching to achieve more flexibility and relaxation in our postures: we are going to align our bodies and we are going to massage our bodies, feet and heads.
Somatic Dialogue - K'lo Harris
There is a school of therapeutic thought that believes in body memory, that the body stores memories, this is especially true perhaps of trauma. If we do not process it then it does not go away but finds some were to hide until a situation arises that will unlock it again, allowing us another chance to heal perhaps.
Working with(out) armour: transforming (motoric, emotional, ideological) blindness — Koen Vanbiesbrouck
My interest is in integrating (my) body and mind (or rather letting go of disintegrating experiences and patterns) and overcoming ‘dualism’ so common in Western culture, theoretically as well as in (my) daily life.
Swarm Games - Bertrand Kludor
We experiment with swarm behaviour by setting collective scores and giving single individuals extra ideas to touch and lead the swarm.
Tango: Passion & Duality — David Firmin
The tango is a dance which the emotion defines the possibilities of moving. In this workshop we will explore the couple as a source of creativity for the movement. Establish an intimate relationship through the embrace.
Tantric Doorways into Contact — Jocasta Crofts
I would like to offer a space to go deep into meditative practises using breath, opening the senses, working with the energy that is generated by the male/female polarity, moving energy through the body centers of the Chakras. All these will be our doorways to open our dance, alone or together.
Tantra: Movements of the Soul — Xavier Domenech
In this proposal, we aim to work out how we experience our soul, spirit or essence, in relation to our sexuality and our masculine and feminine poles. In that way we connect with the truth of the movement of our body.
Tenderness is a form of existence - Ina Stockem
I want to explore touch as a communication tool, a language of touch to connect. Why are there so many highly developped methods of giving professional feedback, on communication skills via coaching, intervision and mentoring – based on verbal language only? How can u read and listen body language in order to fulfill the need of the person on a physical level?
The Art of Presence - Benno Voorham
The Bonobo Garden - Saskia Mieszkalski
Saskia will go into aspects of apish (and human) communications. During the process we will activate our senses and look at the resulting emotions. After this introductive learning experience, the space will be opened for all forms of apish interaction. Ambient jungle sounds and a selection of typical Bonobo food will be provided. The rest will be left to the participants’ imagination. Clothing as well as the use of tools are optional, communication is reduced to onomatopoetics.
The Biggest Playground! - Martin Panla
Play… is beautiful, is noisy and silent. Play is a door that leads to the present. Play is the antidote to patterns and concepts. Are shoes made for walking and bus stops for waiting? Let’s forget what we’ve learned and discover the biggest playground!
The Sensory-Motor Loop - Beu Tornaghi
EcoCreative Research focusing on/through the sensory-motor loop challenging understandings and questioning perception, balancing attention and intention.
The Soft Man — Ralf Jaroschinski
This is a specific, sensual take on contact improvisation which focuses on exploring male sensuality within a safe and contained environment.
The Strong Dance & the Bad Dance — Ulli Wittemann
In Touch and Play I would like to create a space for exploring the “strong dance”, in which I want to integrate my 20 years experience in different martial arts forms. I would also like to explore “Bad contact”, in which we could each explore stretching the limits of dancing.
The Voice-Body through Emotions - Milla Caputte
What happens at the meeting of one or more bodies in space? And if the voice joins the play? The workshop “Voice-body through the emotions” invites you to dive into our invisible body: the voice.
Touch&Talk - Malaika Sarco-Thomas
If improvisation tends toward fixity, it is the job of improvisers to unravel its becomings.
Undercurrents — Jamus Wood & Lee Bolton
This workshop is an enquiry into what we are actively not thinking, actively not feeling and actively not sensing. How we can bring this sensory landscape into our dancing and relationship with another with the possibility of sharing more of who we are.