1. Re-childing. I’d like to create a space, perhaps in the mid-point of the festival, which people people enter as adults and leave as children – seeing the festival through new childlike eyes, playing with their new child playmates and bringing their innocence into the space. This would be informed by my experiences working with masks, clown, immersive performance and live-action role play.

2. Exploring, subverting, perverting and swapping our masks. This is about bringing our self-concepts, the stories we embody about ourselves, and our constructs of “who we are” and playing with them in our dancing. For me its a very joyful experience to turn these ideas about myself on their heads, and I’m curious about how it would be to do it as a group, to try on other people’s ideas and to play with that chemistry together. For me this is about the ‘adolescence’ of the festival – that point where everyone is beginning to figure out who’s who, and ‘how things work’….I’d like to play around with that.

Read Laura Staniland’s biography

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

My own interest and engagement in this experiment is to have the opportunity to share that which calls me to the jam. My questions include:

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?

Research Proposal – Ki Dialogue

Just as contact improvisation can be perceived as a series of dance moves, tricks and learnt acrobatics, Aikido can also be seen as a sequence of martial techniques likened when performed well, to a dance. The reality for me however, is that the essence of these two art forms could not be further from this understandable misconception. It lies somewhere in the intimacy of a graceful oblivion which, when I try to think through, conceptualise or anticipate often becomes mechanical, uninspirational and cumbersome instead of vital, frank and breathtaking.

In this class/lab we will explore:

• unilateral/multi-directional Ki extension
• directional awareness/clarification
• a touch based sense of bodily articulation
• injury prevention
• awareness of muscle tension/relaxation and its clear links with mental tension and or projection
• principles of traditional Ki Aikido in order that we might then bring them with us to the jam
• surrender to the naturally occurring oscillations of contrasting forces that arise from the act of two bodies moving together

As well as Koichi Tohei’s principals of non-hierarchy and universal love, in my experience trickery, disappearance, play and seduction are all woven into the art of peace.

This class/lab will be held similar to a traditional Aikido dojo class, consisting of the formal exploration of martial techniques including immobilization.

Read Richard Sarco-Thomas’ biography

PROPOSAL: 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.

As we already know, there are a lot of associations with each color and how we react emotionally to each one, they influence us so much and we hardly realize. The experiment is a personal and group therapy for and with others establishing the reality of your time and your time of healing. The color works entirely by direct contact with the body: bringing to light the canvas in places where we need to heal.

METODOLOLOGÍA OF THE EXPERIMENT

An introduction connecting with your colours inside and outside the Rainbow that creates color, meditation and breathing.

Each choose two colors one clear and one dark.

Choose a part of your body from top to bottom, and paint two colors: one in one area and one in another.

All this is is guided with k jachadur music. As the music changes, connect with another person. This new person continues to paint the canvas of your body with their dark and clear colour. Creating in each stroke a ying yang of color.

Continuing into the next change, choose an area of your body without paint and connect with another person…

Dance…

PROPOSAL OF A SECOND JAM: ”RAINBOW HEALING”

This would be a jam of improvisation with painting.

Leaving colors in different parts of the game space.

From here a more free-form structure but also guided by music.

Community paint job  to achieve a group canvas, they are all the colors, and all propositions…

Throughout the game with free movement.

Read Maya Gonzales Nieves biography

This research is about delving into the sensory-motor cycle, that is the relationship between perception and action, as constructing an understanding of the world. The focus goes to the relationships of the body in nature - recognizing that everything is interconnected and every body-microcosm is indeed a component of other body-macrocosm (and vice versa, to the immeasurable).

Using information such as anatomy, physiology, ecology, to give directions to follow through in the research, experiencing concepts with embodiment, creating an inventory of affinities and metaphors inherent to the cyclical patterns that can be observed in the micro and the macrocosm.

Fostering the intention of listening, it is quite essential to this work to maintain a direct relationship with nature (and having the least possible urban interference). The search for a state of perception out of the ordinary, where the boundaries of perception and action, expression, become diffuse and questionable, input and output melt into one another, accepting the vulnerability of the state of “not knowing”, “non-doing”, and perhaps to ”non-being.” BEING THE MOMENT.

The demand for different qualities of presence is a central idea in Improvisation. Experimenting with different focuses and parameters to react to the present moment, we establish the scores that make space for the freedom of new perceptions and behaviors.

Read Beu Tornaghi’s biography

We experiment with swarm behaviour by setting collective scores and giving single individuals extra ideas to touch and lead the swarm. Combined with different types of games like competition (agon), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry) and vertigo (ilinx) such a jam could reveal hidden emotional bonds in a community. We try to awake the swarm intelligence in us.

Read Betrand Kludor’s biography

°1 EMOTIONAL BODY FRAMING – Our bodies hide our deep emotional grammar. We sharpen awareness and communication of our six basic emotions joy, anger, disgust, sadness, fear and surprise. By adapting our bodies to the various emotional states we plunge into these different moods. Reverse body reading is one way to induce emotions deliberately. We focus on core patterns of body language (f. ex. closing, crossing, expanding) and facial expressions. We experiment with different emotional touches and other contacts.

°2 GAMESTORMING – Having sharpened our basic emotional states, we start to construct new realities, where to use them. We play with different types of games like competition (agon), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry) and vertigo (ilinx). Being a child every moment in life is part of an interesting game. We make up our own rules. The technique of gamestorming tries to chase away the parents in our heads

Read Bertrand Kludor’s biography

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