"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder": a CI workshop with Anjelika Doniy

Contact Improvisation, Authentic movement, the state of presence.

 

Let's listen to the breath - especially exhalation, and release from action.

What do the exhalation, pause, stop give us?

Let's make the listening our main thing.

Somewhere there a movement is being born...

 

What is this workshop about?

About the possibilities and limitations.

About relationships with the other and others.

About the flow of movement and consciousness.

About contact with yourself, despite the constantly changing circumstances.

 

One of our natural needs is to be visible. This gives us strength, energy, motivation to realize ourselves and to live fully, with taste. In dance, this manifests in the way I look and can see the movement, and how others look at me and give feedback in the form of attention, movement, in words. We can call it presence.

 

And our other need is to be invisible, free and unconditioned by the external environment. Not to check the if we do our tasks correctly—basing our view on the authorities or opinion of elders; to do, to try, to encounter the result ourselves and to choose our own path. Let's call it totality.

 

How to combine these two healthy needs?

By experimenting! Improvisation is a game with the known and the unknown. With rules to be followed or broken. With a degree of freedom that is respected or violated. Improvisation can only be learned through practice and improvisation.

 

By practicing continuity, flow, unpredictability of movement in space.

By adapting the space behind to a spherical, connected, technical and poetic dance.

By experimenting with vision, stretching this possibility from safety to aesthetic pleasure.

By training what can allow you to be spontaneous in the unpredictable world of dance.

 

To be ready for new offers, to play, to tune in.

To allow others to look at you and learn to accept the support of the beholder.

 

For this, we have time and place, music and silence, presence and disappearance.