“You been swimming in gravity since the day you were born. Every cell knows where down is. Easily forgotten. Your mass and the earths mass calling to each other.”  (Steve Paxton)

As a dancer, artist, researcher and educator I am interested in our body ́s innate ability to respond physically to the environment, and the surprisingly ways we create relational matrices by composing our bodies in and with space.

I wish to propose a practice of Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity. Caring with in the attendance to others, with asymmetry of touch, friction, senses, and smells, caring with inside the unequal, messy and troubled situations. Caring with as deep listening.

“The practice of care creates the condition of being vulnerable to others. A vulnerability that creates space for unpredictable encounters: we are not in control, not even of ourselves… we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others.” (Anna Tsing)

Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity is about proposing an embodied multisensory affectively and politically targeted way of knowing, grounded in sensitizing oneself to each other and the “more than human” sentience, by asking: what modes of attention and practices of attunement can bring us into responsible relationships?

Gravity is our constant companion, and it is a force we all have in common as humans and non-human on this planet earth. Through playful and challenging guided explorations, we will work with sensing where the direction for down is by: letting gravity inform our bodies. You will get tools to move on your own, and tools for being in physical contact with others. We will practice the art of falling and failing, catching our self and each other, flying, rolling, sliding, balancing, disorientation, awkwardness, spiraling, weight sharing, counterbalance, being in the unknown and much more.

DORTE BJERRE JENSEN, Denmark

As an art worker and educator, Dorte Bjerre Jensens work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through movement, manifested as performance, participatory performative scores, live art installations, lectures, classes and workshops, and writing. Dorte have been practicing, teaching and performing contact improvisation for more than 20 years.

From 2019-2022, she was a part of the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. As part of EER, she performed the piece Sharing Perspectives (SP) at Tate Modern London. SP that is grounded within the practice of contact improvisation and score design, gave a rare insight into the world of the other by embodying another person’s perspective. As ways to navigate the pandemic, she developed the performative scores, Greeting Cards (2020), which questioned and redefined the choreographed gesture greeting; and INviteME Online (2021), which invited participants to reconnect to their private spaces, plants, and each other. She publishes these collaborations in both artistic and scientific books and journals.

Her latest work Cluster of Forces, a hybrid between interactive installation and performance investigates everything is in flux, including our ability to survive! We are always already deeply connected to each other and the more-than-human through touch, fragrances and frequencies. It messes with the genius solo-artist and the interdependency of life and work, a feminist-materialist aesthetics of production.

Fotos: Patrick Beelaert

More info:

Article Sharing Perspectives

www.dortebjerrejensen.dk

www.eer.info

www.touchy-subjects.com

This contact improvisation workshop dives into the nature of spirals and spheres that surround us and are within us. We study spirals as internal and external pathways into our solo and contact dancing.

Spirals are curved patterns and circular shapes that help us to soften our bodies and create more tangible connections while moving. Spirals and spheres are curving in their nature that can assist us in reading the directions for common pathways in weight share and flight. They can also function as a tool for finding more lightness and momentum for our dancing.

Through the palette of hands on practices, exercises and scores for dancing, we inspire and generate action for improvisations. We pay attention to the dynamics of listening and use simplicity as a ground from where complexity can sprout.

KATJA MUSTONEN, Finnland

Katja is a Finnish dance maker and teacher. She graduated as a dancer 2004, and holds MA degree in "Contemporary Dance Education"(MACoDE, HfMDK,Frankfurt 2010). Since 2008, she’s been teaching Contemporary Dance, Improvisation and Contact Improvisation internationally in institutions, festivals and other venues for dance. Artistically, she keeps being interested about the states of presence and body’s ability to transform, embody, and transmit images into knowledge, emotions, language and atmospheres. Merging photography, video, sound and text together with objects continues fascinating her creating the larger body of her artistic work.

Fotos by: Jussi Ulkuniemi, Portrait: Katja Mustonen, Foto at the Top: Taina Koistinen

JOHAN NILSSON, Sweden
Johan is an explorer of natural sciences and art. He’s a trained gardener and teacher in Biodynamic farming, gardening and Permaculturdesign These are a great source of inspiration for him due to its deep relationship with the natural world, alternative methods and plant forces. In dance and improvisation, he experiences the same fascination as when he was a child playing in the forest - in
contact with nature - a world full of imagination and playfulness! His movement background includes Capoeira, African Dance, World Dance and fire spinning, but his interest deepened when he first discovered Contact Improvisation in 2004, with his main inspiration coming from Måns Erlandsson and Malin Anclair, Stockholm/Sweden. Since then, Johan has been participating as a teacher and performer in several projects, festivals and
dance events throughout Europe, India and China. He is regularly teaching classes in different dance institutions and is organising CI events in Sweden. For a few years he was part of organizing METAMORPHOSIS Improvisation Festival, where he is the co-founder.

Since a few years his work in dance and gardening tends to blend more and more into the practice of Ecosomatics, a normative way of moving through life. A way to work with the dignity of human kind and the future of the living earth. Learning more about your own systems through studying the large ecosystems, and training your empathy for the large systems based on your own somatic system. In his teaching, Johan likes to use the imaginary and a fascination for small details as tools to create one’s own dance. With fire-spinning he developed a fascination with continuously traveling weight. In contact improvisation he likes to relate to weight shifts, big movements through space and he definitely loves a certain amount of risk!

Recently his work in dance institutions has a focus on maintaining ones’ own solo, the improvised part of contact improvisation, featherlight lifts and verbal reflections.

Fotos: Move Copenhagen, Portrait: Lasse Lychnell