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

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?

Read Sonja Bruhlman’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

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

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

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

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.

Accept the emotions as a dynamic.

Create a commun 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.

Read David Firmin’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

Still we often have the idea of being disconnected and/or we actively or unconsciously disconnect ourselves (from ourselves and/or our environment). Our body tells this lifelong story (‘embodies’ this process) of dis- and reconnecting, forming, de-constructing and reforming. ‘Armour’ is a metaphor to grasp this idea of different ways of defending against our fundamental ‘wholeness’ and openness. It starts with our cells (with more or less space to develop), and shows itself in (openly loving or ‘armoured’) behaviour.

I propose exercises to dive into this ‘hidden’ (but visible) and mainly unconscious story of ourselves, our ‘body memory’, the body that we ‘are’ (in stead of ‘have’).

There are several ways to do this: by exploring breathing, body segments (or even individual muscles), the body-as-a-whole, emotions or ‘character structures’ (and their constitutive environment). (But whatever the ‘access point’: it all comes down to the same thing…)

I call this process ‘phenomenological’ as it transcends the distinctions/categories we commonly like to make (subject/object, body/mind, nature/culture, physical/biological/psychological/cognitive/sociological/ecological/spiritual…). Of course, I use them (as I use language), but to point to what in principle cannot be divided: our aliveness, our experience and its embodiment, that is an ongoing process of ‘contracting’ and creating our environment.

This praxis has a therapeutic (one more label…) dimension, but I do not wish to call it therapeutic as such. For the sake of curiosity, belonging and pure celebration: it is fun to get clearer about ourselves, our feelings and needs, and the way we embody them.

And as far as we’re dancers: I’ve always been wondering what ‘artistic’ dance might become if we would allow ourselves to let our bodies ‘talk’ the way they are (with its vulnerability, its past and present pains and ecstasies) in stead of imposing our own or borrowed schemes and expectations upon it.

Read Koen Vanbiesbrouck’s biography