Contact Improvisation Gathering in Iceland 

The program of the first meeting in January 2020 consists of 5 days of intensive workshops with Anya Cloud, jams, lecture and the Underscore. 

“Everything You Touch You Change and Everything You Change Changes You.”

This contact improvisation workshop will foster a space where the impossible may become possible. Who you are and how you move will impact what happens over the course of the week. We will invite multiple strategies to emerge, queer, disrupt, dissolve, and transform. We will train skills both in and out of physical contact — highlighting the body’s relationship with gravity, space, and survival — for high-stakes, unruly, nuanced, and accountable contact dancing improvisation dancing to take place. Finding and keeping agency is paramount. We will work to notice the impact on ourselves, our dancing, and the group. What if we allow ourselves to be changed through this practice?

My research straddles extremes – I’m invested in athletic wildness and soft patient specificity. How are power and gentleness related? My study of the Feldenkrais® Method is radically informing the ways that I practice and teach contact improvisation. We will work with our round and permeable bodies as open systems as we cultivate pathways of aliveness, choice, and imagination. We will surely work with rolling, sliding, falling, flying, disorientation, momentum, endurance, duration, composition, and more. This will support and be supported by detailed work around sensitization, pressure, intention, tone, direction, timing, quality, and sequencing. We will surely develop skills for more attenuated listening, consent, setting of boundaries, and risk taking. Some things may seem boring and some things will be thrilling — it will all inform increasing the range and humanness of our dancing. This workshop will be deeply physical and deeply political. How can we practice de-prioritizing in order to allow the conditions to reveal the priority?

Throughout this workshop we will acknowledge where we are (Iceland), who we are (individually and collectively), and the complexities of the time that we live in. We will invite the coldness and darkness of Iceland in January be generous and generative forces as we work to be more responsible and more responsive in our dancing.”

Organization team: Natalia Oniśk and Zofia Tomczyk in collaboration with Dance Atelier Reykjavik
Teacher: Anya Cloud www.anyacloud.com 
Dates: 14-19.01.2020
Places: Dansverkstæðið and IÐNÓ in Reykjavik, Iceland
Contact: cig.iceland@gmail.com
Graphics: Aga Nowacka