International Contact Improvisation and Performance Festival / Международный Фестиваль Контактной импровизации и перформанса

Русский / English

International Contact Improvisation and Performace Festival

Benno Voorham

Master-class: «Improvising Contact Improvisation»

Contact Improvisation will be the common ground to continue and deepen our skills to come into a physical and kinaesthetic dialogue with others. From there we will enter the realm of improvisation in relation to performing. We will play with different scores for improvisation to challenge and sharpen our compositional and spatial awareness. Articulation and playfulness are two keywords for this workshop in which we will dance a lot 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 ones own direction in improvising.
This workshop will provide a playground for those who are interested in exploring territories in which we use our creative potential in dances that are created in the here and now, the present moment of an improvisation.

This workshop is for people with a solid basis in Contact Improvisation.

Benno Voorham

Benno Voorham is a 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. He was a member of the Greek dance-theatre company ‘Wrong Movement’ (1993-2007) and has worked as a dancer/actor at the City Theatre of Stockholm (2005–2007). In recent years he has choreographed several works for children and youth.
In both his teaching and performance work, he is interested in exploring the creative and narrative potentials of the human body through movement. He has won a distinctive reputation for his original brand of teaching and performing.
Benno has been a major force in introducing CI to many of the Eastern European countries. In both 1998 and 2002 he organized the ECITE conference (European Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchange) in Sweden together with Sybrig Dokter, with whom he founded LAVA- Dansproduktion in 1997.

www.bennovoorham.com

Intensive teachers	CI classes teachers	Special Workshops teachers

Adrian Russi	Alexandra Bezrodnova	Alfiya Rakhmanova
Benno Voorham	Danya Elraz (class 1)	Benno Voorham
Natanja Den Beoft	Danya Elraz (class 2)	Leilani Weis
Scott Wells	Debora Sbaiz (class 1)	Manuela Blanchard
	Debora Sbaiz (class 2)
	Ekaterina Velichko
	Ilona Kenova & Yaniv Mintzer
	Itay Yatuv (class 1)
	Itay Yatuv (class 2)
	Leilani Weis (class 1)
	Leilani Weis (class 2)
	Maria Grudskaya

festival program

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;

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 21^st they start at 13³⁰.

CI CLASSES

On 19, 20 and 23^rd 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.

Design by Eugeniy Doniy