SOLO & CI TIROL Fest 2024

“Dancing as Political Healing”

Prioritizing improvisation and collaboration we will play with the possibilities of healing, politics, and dancing together. This laboratory will welcome your curiosity and concerns. What’s up? What inspires you or prevents you from dancing more freely? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to new wars and embodied traumas? How can dancing and care be activated as anti-capitalism, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure, and shared power? We will invite the prophetic ancestors Gustav Landauer and Octavia Butler into the studio to renew our dancing.

“Dancing in sensitivity”

I believe that when we dance, we dance with all the stories we carry inside our bodies.
We dance with information and with memories.
But I also believe that while we dance, we can make new memories and leave new imprints inside our bodies.

I love to work with attention and intention. Receptivity and sensations. This helps to create quality of movement and also allows different ways of meeting each other and cocreating the dance. To enter the flow requires to sense the currents that are already there… inside the body, inside the space… in between us.

On partner caring

We start by landing through relaxing our bodies and surrendering our weight to the ground. We will start moving slowly focusing on the weight of different parts of our body, specially the head.
Coming to partners, we will offer some bodywork on head and neck and will start sustaining it as the partner moves through the space, enjoying being sustained. We will change roles, and merge them into dance.
We make a circle of sustenance as one person moves within blindfolded changing direction with the touch from people in the circle.
Keeping the circle, we will have one person in the middle falling to sides and being sustained, and maybe even offering them the possibility of being elevated.
After some variants working on trust, presence and listening, we will go through a technique exercise focusing on the slowness and care of the partner.
We will finish with a trio exercise (algui and currents), having a trip where two people will be sustaining and moving the third one (who will be blindfolded) through the space.

CI & Conscious Movement

Conscious movement is a personal approach I give to CI by mixing different disciplines to play with and creating specific pathways to walk. The objective of this approach is to create a better consciousness of our body and how we move, so that we can choose and not move out of default (conditioning). It is also aimed to give tools, working on agility, balance, orientation/disorientation and technique, which will empower and open new possibilities in our dances.

Description of solo Impro Contemporary Class

My Contemporary Class is based on different modern techniques , for example floor release, limon, weiss-Mann technique.
And I am also inspired by Afro dance and different kinds of Latin styles.
In solo impro we will work with a lot of volume in our movement, while going through different levels.
“The most important thing in my classes …to go with the flow.
So let's come together to seek an atmospheric flow!”

Dancer, performer, teacher of contemporary dance at Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, event organizer, lecturer and video maker. Twice winner of the competition of young choreographers of the festival of contemporary dance theatre Zelyonka fest.

Film project by Ukrainian artists from Ukraine during the festival

Three filmmakers and dancers from Ukraine (Serhii Semichev, Tamara Maksymenko and Yuliia Hryshina) will lead a series of workshops with a creative focus - filmography of movements - during the festival. As a result of this project, two/three short dance films with the participants of the festival.
The theme of the dance research on which the participants will improvise is: ASYLUM. What does it mean if you have never experienced real danger, and vice versa: how would the body react to such a harsh experience as war?
The result of these three short films will be presented at dance film festivals in 2025.

De-constructing inclusion: Contact improvisation in diverse contexts

Contact improvisation has spread around the world and is practiced as part of the syllabus of many professional dance programs internationally. In a globalized context where the aesthetics of contemporary dance are in dialogue with local understandings of dance and movement, the notion of touch can be controversial. In this interactive talk, we will open a dialogue as a safe space with participants about the multiple meanings that are related to touch. By acknowledging the singular experiences of our own identities that navigate tough political contexts as well as colonial inheritances, we will share the strategies that help us to express our boundaries and desires for connection in the contact practice.

Eppur si muove: A historical overview of contact improvisation

Contact improvisation emerged at a particular time and place. At that moment, dance historians described how a particular group of dancers at the Judson Church challenged the current conventions of stage dance at the time and proposed new aesthetics of movement. Movement that highlighted stillness and quietness. What are we challenging now? what are we moving now? In this participatory lecture, we will explore how bodily aesthetics and the sense of touch are related to cultural values. Following the work of Cynthia Novack, we will revisit the historical motivations for contact improvisation to emerge within movement ideas that enabled an anti-hierarchical conception of dancing. We will reflect on how we can creatively address the history of CI by manifesting our shared interpretation of the key ideas that continue to move us toward a collectively challenging and nourishing practice.