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Adrian Russi
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Exchanging touch and weight - in a generous and careful/conscious/mindful way.
The base of Contact Improvisation is an ongoing interplay and exchange between the dancers, it’s a constant situation of giving and taking. This happens on a purely physical level but also as a meeting between human beings. By that a contact dance immediately includes many different layers and becomes at the same time complex and extremely interesting. Of course many questions will rise up, e.g.:
- How can we stay light and mobile while exchanging weight?
- What’s the difference between giving and taking in a simple touch?
- Which kind of dances feel nourishing and which are quite tiring?
- And: how can I feed the common dance with my partner or even a whole group?
In this Intensive we will explore some fundamentals of Contact Improvisation and try to find answers to the questions mentioned above. We will work as well on movement principles and contact skills as on perception, bodywork and improvisation. Last but not least the phases of free dancing will offer opportunity to play with the whole range of giving and taking, offering and getting, being in touch and being touched. Sometimes easy and playful, some other times in a more serious and deep way, but always with a sense of humor and acceptance.
Level: Fundamentals for beginners and everybody who wants to investigate this specific aspect of CI.
Adrian Russi is a CI-teacher based in Switzerland and travelling all over Europe to teach and perform Contact and Free Improvisation. He is deeply involved in CI since 1992 and in the meantime he is dedicating the biggest part of his life to this wonderful dance form.
After his studies of New Dance at “bewegungs-art” in Freiburg/Germany he continued his education with many different teachers, among them Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith who have started to develop CI in the early seventies with a group of other movers. Besides this his teaching is also influenced by his studies of different kinds of martial arts and Craniosacral Bodywork.
He offers his work as a free lancer to a wide range of people and also gets regularly invited to teach in schools. In his teaching he focuses on the technical aspects of CI (ease, precision and strength) as well as on matters of perception and communication (body-sensation, connection of inner and outer space, of bottom and top, centre - periphery) and on a creativity coming from a distinct body-awareness. For him the pleasure to play, deep engagement in the dance, and respect for others are the basis for gaining the most possible in dancing CI.
As a performer he works with many different international artists and his performances are primarily based on Free Improvisation incorporating Contact Improvisation, dance, dance-theatre, voice and live music. In 2007 he initiated “Moving Men”, a men’s trio with Charlie Morrissey and Jacky Miredin touring with there performance-work all over Europe.
As an organizer of CI-events he is involved in many festivals, jams and teachers-meetings, among them the “Moscow Contact and Performance Festival” and the “International Berner Jam”.
For more information go to www.adrianrussi.com
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festival program
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July 9-12 - Workshop
for beginners and all levels with
Benno Voorham;
July 9-12 - Workshop
for beginners and all levels with
Manuela Blanchard;
July 16th - Teachers performance and the festival project in Moscow Theatre;
July 17 - 24 - Main part of The Festival
8 days of dancing in the countryside;
July 27 - 31 - Contact-tango Workshop
for all levels with Leilani Weis;
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INTENSIVES
The longest and the most important workshops at the festival. Four teachers do their classes separately during five days. On 19, 20, 23 and 24th of July intensives begin at 9.30, on 21st they start at 1330.
CI CLASSES
On 19, 20 and 23rd of July we have Contact Improvisation workshops/classes. They start at 1430.
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH labs
The performance research laboratories are meant to become a basis and tool for participants who want to take on the opportunity to perform at the two performances that are happening at the festival site. A lab can be the chance to carry out one small project with a constant group of people or to investigate different themes around performance each day. You can participate in laboratories one or more days.
We would like to create the freedom for the participants to develop ideas and find ways to use them in performance. We want to invite everybody, participating in the festival, students as well as teachers, to propose their ideas and questions for a performance research lab. Ideas could contain how improvisational forms and contact improvisation are a performance art. Including possible themes like trio, site specific, spontaneous composition, how do we communicate within an improvised piece, working with props, the use of voice, sound, music, texts/poetry, relationship to choreography...
These labs can happen only once or continue for several days, depending on demand. People, who feel confident about facilitating group work and enjoy it, are welcome to offer themselves as facilitators, even if they don’t have a personal performance research theme that they want to investigate.
Labs will start on the first day of the festival. Themes will be chosen from a pool of ideas and questions about improvisation and performance, proposed to us in advance before the festival. We will create a system (i.e. blackboard) for this pool to be added to, so that ideas that come up during the festival can be included in the labs, by a new timetable each day.
ONE-2-ONE SESSIONS
These are 20 min long individual sessions with teachers. In the begining of the festival there will be list of teachers and time where you can write your name to reserve this time for your lesson.
Underscore
An introduction to the Underscore, a long jamming/contact/improvisation score that Nancy has been developing since 1990. The Underscore guides us through a progression of “changing states” of body and mind—from solo sensitizing to gravity and support, into group circulation and contact improvisation engagements, opening out into whole-room compositional awareness and interaction, and back to rest and reflection.
“The Underscore talk” (required for participation in the practice) will give some background and will outline the structure in detail. After this concentrated instruction on the nature of the Underscore, participants will be ready for the physical practice itself, which will include periods of silence and periods of live music improvised/composed by Mike Vargas.
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