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

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

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

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. Imagine the freedom we can create when we can trust ourselves. When we can trust ourself an active commitment to what we are dancing can follow

Read Jamus and Lee’s biographies

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

Thus, leaving competitiveness behind and possibly redefining male sensuality, this exploration will naturally and very efficiently sharpen the men’s sensibility for their own curiosity, boundaries and desires, and be a delicious and very sensual process in itself.

The class will consist in exercises about centering and increasing the participants’ physical and senses-related awareness.  These will be followed by sensuous body-work including various possibilities of enjoying male touch actively and passively.  And then, thematic improvisations about a variety of aspects connected to this topic will lead to dances which will feel deeply connected, thrilling, and exquisite.

Read Ralf Jaroschinski’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

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

The workshop will look at the kinesthetic side of the dance and the somatic-psychological possibilities of touch and human interaction. The dance will be explored in terms of the felt experience of the dance, both for its own sake and as a potential source for stage performance… dance not just about repeating acrobatics, but looking at a sense of personal meaning within the dance.

Go to Poetics of Touch web page.

Read Karl Frost’s biography.