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

If improvisation tends toward fixity, it is the job of improvisers to unravel its becomings.  Recognizing that contact improvisation is a name that has become familiar territory for many, the Touch & Play festival offers a new angle from which to explore the permutations and explosions of a touch-based movement practice which has arguably both resisted and succumbed to definition.  This research project investigates the openings created in our thinking about contact and improvisation through the frame of the Touch & Play experiment, and asks participants to articulate how their work relates to wider frames of ‘the world’ in social, natural and mental spheres.

touch + talk is a series of curated moving conversations around practice, experimentation and thoughts about how our touching and playing impacts on the world around us.  Why do we do what we do?  As Phillip Gehmacher, curator of the walk + talk performance series featuring choreographers asks, ‘How can you make sense of your own physicality and how can you speak of it?’ (Gehmacher 2009).  And, in touch + talk, how can you do this in tactile conversation with others confronting the same challenge?

touch + talk will ideally take place once each day throughout the experiment; each session will focus on one question and will be a maximum of twenty minutes.

Two or three responders will address a question together by moving and talking in a studio or stage space with an audience present.  The list of questions will be made available to the participants of the Touch & Play experiment and individuals can nominate themselves to address a particular question and sign up to perform touch + talk on a particular day.

Spillout from these encounters can take the form of further discussion, labs or performances.

Questions on the palette include those posed to dance makers by Chrysa Parkinson, Anna Halprin, and the 2007 project by Good Move, AT LARGE with Reasonable Doubt.

• Why do you dance/move/touch/play?
• What questions underlie your practice?
• What do you want others to receive from your work?
• How is your work provocative?
• What challenges you most in your practice?
• How does your practice relate to health – that of yourself and others?
• How does your work relate to the environment you live in?
• How do you refine or develop your senses? (Parkinson 2010).
• What are the by-products of your work?  What by-products do you think are garbage, or toxic, or wasted? (Parkinson 2010)
• How do you use and challenge your desires?
• How does your practice impact upon the nonhuman?
• Is there anything you would like to see change in your community of practitioners?

If you don’t understand the question, answer what you think it means.

Read Malaika Sarco-Thomas‘ biography

The workshop “Voice-body through the emotions” invites you to dive into our invisible body: the voice. A free body is a fertile ground for a free voice. The sound produced and resonated by a body-tool runs through the physical space in the form of vibratory waves, reflecting your current emotional vibrational-state. Therefore, experiment with emotions becomes a valuable tool to access internal and external spaces previously not covered by the sound-motion. Through movement (contact improvisation) and sound (basic voice techniques) we can transition between various states of being, expressing our creative totality.

When we are in a continuous movement flow, we enter into a meditative state where we become the agent of the action and at the same time a conscious witness, leaving the duality of everyday mind that fragments facts into right and wrong. All happenings are part of a spiral where everything is positive and negative; everything is a duality within the unity that is perfection!

The voice is one more palette of colors that can be used in this context of dancing the present moment. Practising listening to one another and yourself until there is no more separation creates a unique movement-sound body traversing the time-space.

The “Voice-body through the Emotions” workshop intends to investigate the state of the body as flesh, bone, emotion and sound!

There are voices that sing and move in me and I just open space to their expression and existence!

Purpose: awakening the expressive freedom that exists in each one of us through contact improvisation and through the connection with our capacity to produce infinite sounds

For whom: all people in the path of self-knowledge, not necessarily with previous experience in contact improvisation andor voice work

Conclusion: at the end of the course we will make a big wheel (round robin), where participants take turns between three roles: mover, spectator and sounder. The sounders will improvise around a Brazilian ritualistic song learned in class.

Read Milla Caputte’s biography

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

and conventions, a compelling aspect of group psychology. To what degree are we able to interact with, or become a part of, a certain environment?

I’d like to work with a focused group researching, challenging and inventing scores for public spaces. For our final experiments we invite all participants in Touch+Play to join. We might dance with a medieval castle or investigate reversal of the sky through aerial dance. The project continues in Germany and Denmark, read more about the 100

DANCERS http://www.liveartinstallations.com/100dancers

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!

Touch…

the street sign, the bus-stop and the tree in the park. Melt into your surroundings, enter the flow of images. Touch the magic world underneath everyday life.

This workshop mixes elements from Physical Theatre, Clowning and Contact Improvisation. We’ll explore the borders between play and reality, inner and outer world. What does it mean to play outside defined spaces, to enter everyday environments? When the group becomes a swarm, are our minds going to touch?

Can play be a door to altered states of consciousness?

During the first part we connect as a group and then with the world around us. We’ll explore how by opening our perception we can transform the group into a swarm and the world into a playground.

In the second part we’ll leave the workshop area and courageously set out to play. An object, a plant, a wall or a street sign. They all can be our partners and the starting points of a collective image.

Read Martin Panla’s biography

Many body workers tell stories of how they are massaging some part of the body, something unexpected like the knee, and suddenly there client will burst into tears. The touch stimulating some memory to surface.

There is a big crossover between drama and therapy; in fact drama was my first therapy as a teenager, before I had even considered my need for therapy. Drama gave me the ability to deal with the world, the people and their strange ways that I had not quite learnt yet.( Being offered a different experience of life than most and having learnt a different set of rules than most it seems too.) It gave me a front. There was a big space however between what I presented as my front and the back (what I felt I was not allowed to show).

Studying shiatsu helped bring my front and back closer together. To not just be a whole bunch of nervous and chemical reactions, but have a body too, to find my ground and my feet upon it.

The desire to perform never went away, but it became less necessary.

Touch was my first healing place and I have discovered over time that this is not just my experience. Learning how to move, and express myself in movement is my second, but they are very closely entwined for me. One feeding the other.

So I am still interested in those stories (memories) that we store, in our cells, in our bones, in our organs, all these hiding places many with the same story but a different view of it.

I am interested in bringing our words and body into authenticity and this is not always pretty and tidy. Not always what our conditioning would want us to expose, not what our parents would have rewarded us for. Often painful, when we are not used to meeting these parts of ourselves. Our little wild selves, the parts that are still free, the parts that have never given up having something to say.

How can we access those stories for our healing, for our creativity? For performance or for therapy. Embodied performance, embodied therapy, embodied creativity whether personal or public, that is what my project is about.

Somatic Dialogue – Proposal for exploration at Touch&Play 2011

Two bodies meet.

What happens?

A dialogue.

A somatic dialogue?

What personalities can be unleashed by bringing words to our movement as we dance together? What are we really saying to each other?

Do we express in movement within the container of contact dance what we cannot express elsewhere, or do we play out versions of ourselves. What are we really saying?

“Look at me, look at me!”

“I want to fuck you”

“You smell and are very sweaty so I am not going to get to close”

“I can’t really relax into this dance because I need to fart.”

(Add as you want)

What would happen if this was unleashed and how could it feed performance, release the animal, and shine light on the shadow?

What other words and stories do we contain within our bodies and how does movement help to find and express them?

Using basic BMC principles of touch, movement, visualization and play, we would explore our bodies as a resource for incredible creativity to spark dialogue and performance.

Read K’lo Harris‘ 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

Read Marina Tsartsara’s biography.

Short Description

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.

Long Description

What is it to be a witness? How does the witness influence the establishment of a group mind, a shared energy? Can we move and be a witness at the same time? How can we share the witnessing through the movement? How can the re-cognition of the personal physical limits be a focus of amplitude of space and movement (internal and external)? How can we keep researching intensities widely touched by emotions, sensations, feelings, thoughts,…?

The alchemy of our affections goes across borders, perspire, in the blank of our meetings, the continuous change of skin, the deepness of ours folds.

We are going to explore many possibilities to be alive with these questions in the movements: to be and at the same time share the experience, to see and to be seen, to touch and be touched, to invite and to be invited, etc.,… not in an absolute sense, but as the emergence of a moment that is always in process. This embodied experience in the tactile space of the dance will offer us the potential to act on new levels of physical play and also on new levels of embodied involvement.

From Authentic Movement, we bring the concept of witness and the appropriation of judgment as part of the work in Movement Conscience. From Contact Improvisation, we bring the exploration of the biomechanical possibilities of the improvisers (touchers), the process of combining masses and weights as part of the way to improve the perception in the dance: new dovetails, flights, rolls and falls are not compulsory; they are only possibilities.

Read Guto Macedo’s biography