Exploring the contact with the air among others by moving your body with the help of low flying trapezes. Especially the skin can touch or move the air, but also the body can be extended by other materials (e.g. strips of linen, cloth, material, robes, floggers, etcetera). Also from the outside the moving can be influenced by interruptions of the flow (can be done by hands but also by tools such as a flogger)

Comparing the movement and sensibility of the skin, bones, muscles, nerves when the body as a whole is moving already because of the trapeze and you are free to experiment and to move in and out of this movement while being moved anyway (or not!), comparing all that with the senses that are awakened when working on the floor.

Low flying trapezes can be used alone or together with others to move on and to play with. The trapeze is your partner, so you will always make a duet (or, if another person appears on the trapeze, a trio).

The floor will be starting point, resting point, contact and meeting point; on and off you can go. The movement continues.

www.skinneraerial.com (movie 4 and 5 for a very sweet vanilla version of what’s in my mind)

Read Wim Franken’s biography

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. In it, participants write their edgiest questions on slips of paper, in this case specifically regarding sexuality and gender, initially focused on questions of if and how our experiences and identities as lesbians/queer women informed or shifted our dancing or interactions with other dancers. These questions are shuffled and anonymously asked to dancers as they move. Dancers respond both verbally and with their movement. The information that arises from kinetic space, from bodies in contact, can be deeply surprising, reveal the unexpected and offer pathways into truths we weren’t previously aware of. We’ve videoed and audio-recorded some of our research. Some of us offered a performance of it at Mazopalooza, a CI festival in Mazomanie, WI in January 2011.

http://www.vimeo.com/21837906

I would like to bring this exploration to a wider community (across genders and sexualities), using this score as a method to research gender and sexuality as we move, dance and find words. Coming from a queer-centric and kinetic perspective, this research offers gifts and depth to all of us. For me, gathering experience and information from a wide spectrum of people will deepen the research (and it will be fun!). During our time, if participants desire, we can play with variations on the score (i.e. same sex scores, all queer score, etc). I am happy to work the malleability of the score and with the collective curiosities of the group. Performance of the score is certainly possible

Read Kim Lasdon’s biography

I am including a series of questions and notes on responses that arose from the ongoing lesbian bodies/contact improvisation project as an example of where these explorations can go. This information is supplemental.

Questions from 12/5/10:

Is it possible to have two women dancing together in a way that could be read as lesbian without having any sexual content or sexual references? What is that way?

Is there a lesbian way of being? Is there a lesbian way of dancing?

How does identity arise in dance?

Gendered dance

How much of dancing as (the category) ‘woman’ is dancing as lesbian and how much of dancing as lesbian is dancing as woman?

If there is no fixed lesbian identity, or of there are so many variant lesbian identities, how do you make dance/performance of lesbian visible/readable in CI? Will it always be audience dependant?

In CI, if a wash of heterosexuality/heteronormativity is placed on everyone, how do we disrupt that as lesbians? Can the dances be queered, especially if our dance partners cannot read it? How?

Queer gender or queer sexuality? Are there ways to queer gender without queering sexuality and viceversa? What are they? Are there ways that lesbians queer gender in CI without queering sexuality in CI? What are they? How do our genders inform our sexualities and viceversa?

At jams (as in Madison) where sexualized energy is downplayed and discouraged, what part does a strong lesbian presence play?

Is there a difference between queer dancing (either male/female/trans) and straight dancing? What are the markers of these differences?

-bossy thighs

-being a base

-reciprocity (my turn to lift, my turn to ride, my turn to lift….)

Queer women avoiding each other in dance spaces due to fear of the expectation that we will be attracted to each other or that there will be an expectation that we *should* be attracted to each other.

Being ok to dance with the ‘otherness’ of another as queer. The quality of listening. Observation that it’s much more likely that a straight guy is not listening in a dance.

Lesbian identity has big contradictions that don’t really make any sense…so does CI.

Inhabiting a role and sticking to it. (tabletop)

Lifting into a pose vs. dynamic lifting; relationship to queerness

Tendencies and assumptions that are cultural markers but are not prescriptive or set to how a dance will actually go.

CI as a place for misfits and difference. Is this a queer notion? Is it our notion based on Madison or American CI? If so, is it a projection of our own queerness?

Lesbians are hard to read except by other lesbians. How much does it take for something to be read as lesbian sexual energy?

How much sexuality/sexual content has to be present when two women dance together before it would be read as lesbian? Would it be simply sexual or would it be lesbian? What other markers would have to be present/presented?

What about butch identities in CI?

What is ‘real’ lesbian sexuality?

Notion of queer sexualities as freedom from certain sexualizations.

As queers, learning when it’s safe to share and when it’s not. Does it lead to a specific deep listening?

Questions that were written as part of the “Shadow of Contact” score danced on 1/30/11. Questions were scribbled on scraps of paper and asked to dancers as they moved:

-are some types of dance more appealing to us as dykes, both to do, to watch?

-What part of your body do you feel your genders? What part of your body do you feel your queerness?

-How can the category ‘lesbian’ be visible without sex being visible?

-lesbian dance/gay male dance, why are there differences in visibility, type of work, etc?

-Where does your sexuality reside in your body right now?

-is sexual orientation the most embodied part of your identity, or dance a part of your identity? What about race, class, gender, etc?

-are there places/times in your life where you forget about your queerness?

-How does your class background affect you as a lesbian/queer dancer? Do you feel class in your body? Where?

- How would *this* dance change if you were packing/binding?

-Do you express/feel more of your genders/sexuality when dancing with other queer women than when you dance with straight men/women? Why?

- I don’t know what this has to do with dance but I’m wondering about the queer body as mother, the body of a child of queer parents with a “donor” not a father…?

-What makes a work (or a body) queer?

-When do you have an expectation that shared queerness will create a connection? Have you had times when it doesn’t?

Based on the upper text, 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 you read and listen body language in order to fulfill the need of the person on a physical level?

I work with children and old people. Why do we touch them easily: why is it hard with the ages inbetween? We know physical contact in four socio-economically “permitted” areas: in a partnership, in dealing with children, old people and animals. We know it is because of sexual issues. Still we need affection, tenderness and cuddles. There are so many grey zones in between intimacy, sexuality, love and friendship. And all definitions change from contact to contact, from situation to situation. Especially for people who have no access to or knowlegde of body work or contact dance whatsoever. How can one cross these barriers – the habit of talking somebody out of sadness/anger and crying? Wouldn’t it be better just to hold the person close in your arms until it just feels better? What can value feelings better than touch? Our longing for it never stops.

I personally would like to combine all facettes of my work: touch, sex, intimacy, love, relationship issues, questions around polyamory and bisexuality. I’ve visited cuddle parties. What is the appropiate answer from the contact dance scene? How to create a safe space where you feel protected enough to be vulnerable using CI? At the moment I organize the touch based experimental movement BodyLounge, I work via touch with demented people, my interest in BDSM and feminist porn conflicts with the longing for a primary relationship and a family.

Bodylounge – extracts from a review by Dara Colwell

A journey of physical movement, BodyLounge was created by performer Ina Stockem to blur the line between real life and theatre.  Like many performances, BodyLounge begins in the dark – except that here the entire audience is literally left in the dark. They are blindfolded. “By taking your sight away, you are immediately thrown back on your other senses”, says Ute Pliestermann, who organized the production and also performs. “It takes censorship away. It‟s like covering your eyes when you are a child – because you think you won‟t be seen, you are allowed to do anything. So you express yourself in complete freedom.”

At BodyLounge, the performance both moves around and through its audience, but what I found the most exhilarating was how much everything depended on trust. As an interactive participant, I had to trust my interaction with unseen strangers, which allowed me to play. Having hands coming at me from all directions certainly helped unlock boundaries. “Touch is really becoming a taboo, it‟s experienced as being either scary or dangerous”, says Pliestermann. “People need to be touched, not only in a physical way, but in a deeper, ideological way. This is what we‟re trying to achieve with BodyLounge.” Or, as one guest put it so well on their website: “BodyLounge is the closest you can come to the first good sex in your life. It can also be like being a baby again, blind and clumsy and loving your nine armed, seven legged mother whatever she does to you, even if she spanks”

Check out the website: www.bodylounge.eu

Read Ina Stockem’s biography

a) The boundary between sexuality and sensuality is drawn differently by different people. This is rarely a conscious choice but mostly a question of people’s sexual and body socialization, which often differs systematically according to gender and sexuality. One major factor determining people’s strategies of desire, their personal constructions of sexuality/sensuality is the overwhelming patriarchal and heterosexist structuring of sexuality. In very very broad strokes, a structuring that posits men as hunters, women as prey, that defines desire itself as an active, symbolically male energy, where men have bodies and women are bodies, that encourages men to convert all kinds of affective energies into aggression and/or sexual excitement, while encouraging women to convert all kinds of affective energies into caring, tenderness and tears.

I am interested in the question of how and why people sort their feelings into “sexual”, “sensual” or other, specifically in the context of contact improvisation and in how they feel about the potential of contact improvisation to contribute to an emancipatory transgression of how mainstream society orders sexuality/sensuality.

b) Doing a lot of contact improvisation can change sexual desire. It can diminish, possibly because some of what usually gets channeled into sexuality (needs for nourishing touch, spontaneous movement expression, being held, etc) are satisfied through contact improvisation. Sometimes it gets more, presumably because the practice wakes up and circulates vital energy and sexual desire is one expression of that. It can also change quality, feeling deeper and fuller, sometimes more rooted in physicality and less hotwired to images and thoughts.

How:

A session of this lab could start with a sensory/physical warmup, move into contact improvisation, followed by a discussion of specific questions in small groups, then a mix of moving and talking, followed by a round for exchanging impressions.

Read Daniel Mang’s biography

Physical contact and sexual intercourse play a major role in Bonobo society, being used as what some scientists perceive as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconciliation. Bonobos are the only non-human animal to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face, genital sex, tongue kissing and oral sex.

Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behaviour by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual intercourse between mothers and their adult sons; some observers believe these pairings are taboo within Bonobo society.

When Bonobos come upon a new food source or feeding ground, the increased excitement will usually lead to communal sexual activity, presumably decreasing tension and allowing for peaceful feeding.

The Bonobo Garden is an experimental lab where you can explore yourself by playing. Survey your impulses and behavioural patterns in an open but safe space of encounters!

Saskia will go into aspects of apish as well as human communications. During the process we will activate our senses and look at the resulting emotions. We will primarily focuses on these four interrelated factors:

Smelling – explore the human chemistry bond
Seeing – activate your heart through eye contact
Onomatopoetics – free your self by using your voice
Actions – gestures, food sharing and sexuality – Get what your inner ape wants!

With an introductive learning experience, we will amplify our sensory perception. After that you will accompany to a journey back into your inner native being and 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. You should have a good mind for playing and exploring and have no problem with nudity and contact. Clothing as well as the use of tools are optional, communication is reduced to onomatopoetics.

Read Saskia Mieszalski’s Biography

How is doing this affected in practice by the gender of the people, or race, by their proficiency in the verbal languages being used? How about if one is a teacher and one a student, if one has learning disabilities, if one is well known and experienced and one a newcomer?

Many of my explorations of these topics have taken place within the queer community. I feel that queer and Contact Improvisation perspectives have so much to teach each other and am excited about the opportunities to link my (sometimes) separate explorations of the two. At the Copenhagen Queer Festival last Summer I taught a Contact Improvisation workshop titled ‘Queer in Motion’.

I believe that learning to recognise and respect each other’s physical and emotional limits can be incredibly liberating and enabling of creativity and exploration, therefore I would like to contribute to creating a Safer Spaces Policy for the event, and procedures for maintaining the event as a safer, creative space for exploration. I would also like to offer a workshop exploring these topics through movement and discussion.

Read Rachel Dean’s biography

My name is Jocasta. I practise Tantra, both couples, singles and solo work. So far a large part of my journey has been about sexual healing. So now I also offer that to others. To me Tantra is a way of living life as well as a meditative practise. My experience of it is that it includes everything, every feeling, thought, emotion or state can be a doorway into Tantra.

It is all life energy – When you welcome what is there and go with it, you release that energy and can use it to dance through a door. Tantra includes sexuality and harnesses it’s energy, because sexual energy is base life energy.

I feel Contact Improvisation and Tantra are often dancing hand in hand inside of me. 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.

The space will be intimate, experiential, in movement and in stillness. It will be held as ritual sacred space. A balance of men and women would be ideal.

My relevant experience:

Tantra

• 1 year couples training with Sky Dancing Uk.
• Lots of singles work with Geho, Sarita and Margo Anand.
• Many hours of homeplay with my beloved, other people and by myself.
• Tantric healing massage sessions – 4 hand or solo sessions.

Contact Improvisation

• Dancing it since 1996 – 3 years in Outokumpu dance school, Finland.
• Many visits to Earthdance
• Teachers worked with: Nancy Stark Smith, Martin keogh, Ray Chung, Charley Morrissey and more…
• Attending festivals:Freiburg, Earthdance, Nim, Gottingen, Ibiza, London, Burning man
• Organising: Bristol regional jams

Read Jocasta Crofts biography

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 (Judo, Aikido, Savate/Kickboxing and Boxing. It could be called a fighting laboratory, which provides a high state of awareness and presence to ensure a safe and joyfull experience for all participants,especially for people, which are not used to play with their “stronger energies” pushing, wrestling, jumping on each other can be part of the vocabulary…

Bad Contact

I would also like to explore “Bad contact”, in which we could each explore stretching the limits of dancing with our partner, including the use of lips, teeth, unusual areas of the body (or even tearing off each others clothes or slapping)

Read Ulli Wittemann’s biography

This lab is about drawing connections between some issues in queer and polyamorous relating and some aspects of contact improvisation.

We will look at dependency, autonomy, support, falling and fear of falling, reciprocity, leading and following, etc, as they appear as physical principles in the movement practice, and as they appear in attempts to forge affective relations beyond and against compulsory heterosexuality, male domination and privilege, and the norm of monogamy.

Read Daniel Mang’s biography

Connect to your primordial appetite. Innocent and lustful. In the workshop we explore the senses and reflexes connected to the active mouth. An exploration into contact by What kind of dance is born when we first awakening the reflex to actively reach for the ‘food’?

When one finds satisfaction with someone or something one thing that happens is that more and more is demanded. More is demanded out of abundance, not less. Satisfaction breeds a particular kind of dissatisfaction. Most of us are taught to deal with these situations by denial. ‘Don’t want more.’ ‘Be thankful for what you have.’

One understanding in bodily processes dissatisfaction is a response to satisfaction and simply generates an appetite for expanded possibilities of living.

The workshop is indeed a celebration of the appetite for expanded possibilities of living.

Read Marina Kronkvist’s biography