This class focuses on coming into the sensing body and creating a ground from which we are able to connect through touch, weight sharing and playfulness. I will bring elements from my experience with somatic practices, contemporary dance, and martial arts. We will work on grounding ourselves in a sense of safety and feeling held, so that we can open our senses and focus on the relationship between the inner and outer, the center and the periphery, poetically and anatomically.. It is my hope that by connecting deeply inwards we will expand our capacity to connect deeply outwards. Our main anatomical focus point in this research will be the spine, which Steve Paxton called “the dark side of the body” – the other side, or the inside.

The class is open to all levels, beginners are welcome – though it is not specifically a beginners class.

Mathilde Mensink is a dance artist, singer and CI practitioner. She studied Contemporary Dance at Iceland Academy of the Arts and Tanzfabrik, Berlin and is now based in Berlin. In her artistic practice, she works with various mediums, but always anchored in the body. She is interested in the intersection between art, sound, somatics and healing as communal and individual practice. She has practiced CI for 10 years and has studied the practice with Dorte Bjerre, Juli Gabor, Matan Levkovich, Noam Carmeli, Ivona Olszowska, Nita Little, Vega Luukonen, Hugh Stanier and others. Her practice is rooted in a somatic approach to movement. She dances with soft sensitivity and playful wildness.

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Collective Inquiry – Karthik Rajmohan

A collaborative and playful inquiry into critical questions of the body. How can we tune ourselves to be spatially agile and ready to flow in and out of contact? Embodying listening, somatic communication and engaging our range of attention from spatial to skin levels. Expand our perception to include all bodies in space as part of our dance. Understanding how every moment is relational and how collective agreement can empower our sense of interconnectedness. We allow our bodies to fall beyond conscious choice so that we can readily support our co-creative dances that emerge from simply being present.

Karthik Rajmohan is a dancer, musician and yoga practitioner based in Berlin, Germany. He holds a diploma from Attakkalari-Centre for movement arts (Bangalore, India) where he studied various styles of contemporary dance, Kalaripayattu, Bharatanatyam, ballet, body conditioning, art history and anatomy. During dance school he was introduced to Contact Improvisation and Instant Composition, which soon became his main focus and defined the next years. He has worked with several dance companies, arts collectives and social organisations in India and Europe, while developing a teaching practice.

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Attention! Gravity! ways to play with the obvious – Katarzyna Brzezinska

During the workshop, we will focus on exploring solo, and in contact, layers and connections between our attention, play of internal physical structures, forces and tensions, as well as always “moving-living-flowing-changing” bodily and spatial relationships. Through the fundamentals of the Ilan Lev Method, we will dive into elements of release-rest and stimulating the body in playful functional explorations, as well as in rich and dynamic dialogues with gravity. As we weave our explorations into dancing, we will uncover pathways in which the play with attention, gravity and own physicality facilitates diverse processes of movement dialogues in solo, as well as in contact improvisation.

Level: Open, though a strong love for movement research is welcomed

Katarzyna Brzezinska (PL) has dedicated around 25 years to her exploration of the body, movement, dance and creativity, and she generously shares her expertise through teaching movement, contact improvisation, somatic performance research, instant composition and embodied choreography. In 2019 she became a certified Ilan Lev Method Practitioner and ILM Movement Teacher offering ILM movement courses and treatments for movement amateurs, practitioners and professionals. Her own work and artistic research includes: poetry and imagination in relationship to tangible and scientific facts of reality, physics and anatomical structures; layers of human identity; “perfect imperfection,” as well as states of presence.

photo by Patrick Beelaert

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Opening Possibilities – Caterina Mocciola

My proposal is based on the integration of the Laban Bartenieff System lens with my research and study of Contact Improvisation. We will focus on studying our Core – meant as the Center of Gravity and Levity, observing the Dynamic Alignment that allows us to modulate the movement of our core and the sharing of weight. We will look at the different Body Connections to explore how these elements can Open Possibilities, for an understanding through a specific approach to movement and how this benefits our Contact Improvisation and Improvisational skills.

Caterina Mocciola (IT/AUS) an independent performer, teacher, producer, besides being a translator and interpreter. She works with Contact Improvisation, Real Time Composition and choreography. Her dance takes inspiration from Feldenkrais, BMC, ViewPoints, Release Technique, Body Weather and Kung Fu, while the foundation of what her teaching and dance practice is Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore.

She taught regular classes at TanzFabrik, Marameo and for the Dance Intensive and co-facilitated the Underscore while in Berlin. She has co-organized ECITE in Italy and has taken her work both as a performer and teacher in Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Israel and Japan, at international Festivals, Universities and teaching intensives.

Currently she is the interpreter for the first module of the Laban-Bartenieff Movement Analyst training of which she is also about to become a Certified Movement Analyst.

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Basic CI principles for all levels – Jenny Döll

To hell with fancy class titles! I like putting it plain and simple: we will practice Contact Improvisation. We begin with an exploration of developmental movement patterns to support physical softening, strengthening, to train our perception and to find our embodied relation to our surroundings and gravity. We will add touch with other humans to explore what we can do when we move with shared weight and allow ourselves to be led by the other and by gravity. The class will end with open CI dances.

Jenny Döll is a dance- and movement teacher (CI, improvisation, Pilates) and performer. After her initial studies in movement-and music education (Dalcroze method) she became obsessed with dance and studied in Freiburg (TIP) and with many international teachers within the field of CI and improvisation. Currently she is training to become a teacher of Bewegungsevolution®.

photo by Bodo Philipp

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As Soft as the Body, as Sharp as the Mind – Jonas Marx

In this class we will explore what I call Compositional Contact Improvisation. It is the combination of principles both from Contact and Instant Composition in order to create a space where our dances can be connected both through physical touch as well as through sensing and witnessing the overall composition(s) of all moving bodies in space. For that we will examine a couple of exercises for both body and mind, as well as for movement in solo, duo and ensemble. The class will give a frame for integrating the softness of the somatic body with the joy of the physicality of dancing, as well as with the clarity of the compositional mind.

Jonas Marx is a dancer, poet and musician. Originally trained as an architect, he came to dance and somatics first through Contact Improv. The love he developed to this form then expanded to Instant Composition. Besides these two forms he also practices Authentic Movement and Body-Mind-Centering on a regular basis. He trained – among many others – with Julyen Hamilton, Maya Carroll, Deborah Hay & Nita Little. He is both a member of Berlin‘s vivid contact scene and a regular performer in dance pieces with his colleagues from the Instant Composition realm, which are shown in theatres across Europe.