POLARITIES OF DANCE

Re-directing, Throwing, agitating, playing with the attention and polarities of the form of Contact Improvisation.

In this workshop we will practice, explore, and play with polarities of dance in Contact Improvisation. Contact Improvisation started as a movement experiment. An experiment to watch how a spontaneous reaction arises in an often extreme situation. To experience and notice the physical forces governing our bodies and the reflexes that deal with them. The initial research of CI had an element of risk and was rooted in polarities – safety in unsafe situations, training of the patterns and readiness to challenge them with awake raw reflexes of body, investigating relaxed letting go of control and alert attention in every moment.

In this workshop we will practice skills that safeguard the body in landing, bearing weight, organising the structure in transitions. We will then work with playful challenging of each other to create surprising situations that train alert, focused attention and responsive body. We will grow our skills of landing, protecting, and saving ourselves in any situation and research the balancing between alert attention and relaxed exploration. We will build and deconstruct movement patterns in order to continuously enrich and enliven the spirit of improvisation. Through the qualities of recoiling and debouncing we will generate plasticity in the body and simultaneously allow the exploration of redirecting the movement.

This workshop is suitable both for beginners and for experienced practitioners, who wish to experiment and develop their practice.

>> Facilitators

ADRIANNA MICHALSKA (PL/IN) is an independent artist with a background in somatics, Contact Improvisation, and various improvisation methods studied across the globe. She graduated with a BA degree in Dance and Culture from University of Surrey, UK. In her work she incorporates poetry, movement, visual arts, and philosophy to feed her curiosity about cognition, attention, collective understanding, and other aspects of living and interacting between the internal and external worlds. Currently based in India, she co-founded InContact collective with local Contact Improvisation dancers and continues to discover what it means to share the art of improvisation with people from different backgrounds.

MARIA RUTANEN (FI) is a dance artist, teacher, and choreographer living in Berlin. Her approaches to dance and choreography are inspired by various somatic practices, instant composition, and contact improvisation. She holds a Master’s degree in choreography from the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT). She has studied movement for years under the guidance of various methods and teachers, as well as through independent research. When teaching contact improvisation, she is interested in researching solo movement and movement qualities as part of CI practice. In particular, research on the effortless sharing of weight, the ability to suspend, expand, recoil and soften movement, and how the body sensitizes with another body. Working with touch raises questions about the potential of touch to meet others as equals, which she is intrigued to ponder. She taught in several European countries, Iran, West Africa and India.