In this workshop the focus will be on the instant compositional side of improvisation. Developing skills and viewpoints that help us to navigate and make choices in the here and now. Contact improvisation will be a common ground to interact and play with each other.

Articulation and playfulness are two keywords for this workshop in which we will dance for and with each other. Dances in which we can expect to be in physical contact at any moment and at the same time keeping an awareness of one’s own choices and directions in improvising.

In my work as a dance maker and improviser I am interested to explore the crossroads between dance, contact improvisation and theatre. Using the potential of the human body to tell stories through movement in a non-literal way. In this workshop we will play with different scores to create dances in which we use our imagination and creative potential. We will spend time to tune our bodies in movement, to develop a sense for ‘being in the moment’ from where we will dive into the realm of improvisation.

Benno Voorham (Sweden) is an international performer, choreographer and teacher from Holland, living in Stockholm since 1995. Since his graduation in 1986 from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam he has worked internationally as an independent dance-artist, directing his own work as well as collaborating with others in both set and improvised pieces.

Together with Sybrig Dokter he started LAVA-Dansproduktion, an international operating association for dance, based in Stockholm. In recent years he has choreographed several works for and with children and youth. In 2012/2013 the project HOME with children from children homes in Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus and in 2014/2015 with internal refugees inside Georgia. Most recently he made the performance project Tomorrow’s Witnesses with elderly survivors of WW2 and young refugees in Norway, Sweden and Finland.

He is an acclaimed international teacher of Contact Improvisation and Compositional Improvisation. In both his teaching and performance work, he is interested in exploring the creative and narrative potentials of the human body. During the last years he has worked with integrating the use of video in performance.

— gently getting back to touch, reclaiming contact with care

After a long, precarious period of witnessing our own inner movements and surviving small, confined spaces for moving, maybe witnessing others via online platforms we will now meet in opening bodies in open spaces!

As always, we will all be coming from different places and shades of sensitivity. Maybe some of us already moved in open spaces and in festivals during the summer. But now, more than ever, calls for more attention to our differences and deeper study of what touch entails. Therefore, we will be inviting us all to find calm and focus, and delicately touch —physically, mentally, emotionally, politically— upon issues relating to touch in our CI dancing.

Are you willing to move with us inquiring through some of these questions:

Can we seriously study the sliding scale between a “yes” and a “no”? Can we inquire: “how we know”, “how, when, why our answers change”, “when we are able to answer, when we are confused and/or unable to communicate clearly”, “when we are able or unable to read others”, “how can we develop physical and verbal language to express our ever changing choices”?

In other words, “How can we develop skills to be aware and able to sense our physical states and how they are informed of our mental, emotional and chemical states; how they take shape in and around our dances? How can we become the masters and not the victims of our own choices and our partner's choices in any given moment?

How can we move towards developing instant, multi-layered compositions with each other that let us stay in the dance for the dance? Are we ready to fail and repair?

All for co-creating a brave safe space in and around our dance floors!

Seriously joyful, joyfully serious…

DEFNE ERDUR (TR/FR) is trained in Contemporary Dance (PhD), Sociology (MA), Intermodel Expressive Art Therapy, Body Therapies (Deep Tissue Release, Trigger Point & Movement, Integrative Craniosacral Therapy), Meditation, and Trauma Healing (Somatic Experiencing, Integral Somatic Psychology, Full Embodiment—Healing Sexual Trauma).

In 2016 she completed her PhD thesis in Turkey (DANCE EDUCATION ON THE TRANSITIVE LINE BETWEEN LIFE AND ART: Contributions of the Technique, Methodology and Pedagogy of Contact Improvisation to the Physical, Artistic and Psycho-social Development of Amateur Dancers). In 2017 she co-published A Guide/Movement to Document Contemporary Dance/ Movement Teaching, as an outcome of the REFLEX Europe Project

Besides her private practice, she has been regularly teaching at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, MSGSU Istanbul State Conservatory, CI-Turkey, ElimSende and ÇATI Associations. She also gives her workshops (Hunting Gathering Cultivating, Every Body Knows, Embodying Time, and Consent Improvisation) around the world (Tanzhaus Zurich, Konservatorium Wien, Mandala İstanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Vienna, Berlin, Theseloniki, Prague and Freiburg CI Festivals…), working with different populations (professional and amateur movers, therapists, women, and migrant children and youth).

Her movement teaching practice is mostly informed by her intensive trainings with Simone Forti, Julyen Hamilton, John Britton, Nancy Stark Smith, Daniel Lepkoff, Kirstie Simson, Nita Little, Frey Faust, Keith Hennessy, Aydın Teker, Marcia Plevin and Julia Buckroyd.