Festival Program
Pre-festival workshops in MIK
Imperfect Practices
Klara Łucznik
“The whole truth” about partnering
Michał Ratajski
Festival in MIK
Morning Intensives
Afternoon Labs
Community gatherings
JAMS
Long Jam in Pavilion of Dance
Intro
Research in Practice
Performance
Underscore
Pre-festival workshops in MIK
Imperfect Practices – towards the performative dimension of CI
Klara Łucznik
This 3-session 3-hour workshop explores Contact Improvisation as a space of performance – where decisions, attention, and presence shape what unfolds.
We will move through three core questions:
How and where to begin? How and where to end?
Entering a space, stepping into visibility, leaving – these are simple acts, yet often the most charged. We will explore how to recognise the right moment, how to trust timing, and how space, duration, and the unfolding dance can support clear and grounded choices.
How to stay in surprise?
Improvisation invites the unknown, yet we often rely on structures and scores that both support and limit us. We will investigate the tension between form and freedom – how to build something together without closing the door to the unexpected.
How to keep it together?
Between individual voice and collective coherence lies a shifting balance. Too many impulses create chaos; too much unity obscures the beauty of diversity. We will explore how to move between these extremes, allowing both clarity and complexity to emerge.
Performance research is as much about watching as doing. Throughout the workshop, we will cultivate attentive witnessing, language for what we perceive, and ways of offering feedback that support the work. We will move, observe, reflect, and return – again and again.*
Imperfectly. Together.
*and without excessive talking, I hope, I promise.
“The whole truth” about partnering in Contact Improvisation
Michał Ratajski
When I say, “Please take seven steps” – you’re unlikely to see it as a challenge, because you know how to do it, don’t you?
But what if we suddenly add 70 kg to your body? Will those same 7 steps come just as easily?
Body structure, weight and the biomechanics of the human body are crucial in Contact Improvisation partnering. How does conscious management of your own body architecture translate into the ability to work with another person’s weight?
During the workshop, we’ll explore the properties of the body, the laws of physics, and the extent to which our mind supports – or limits – the discovery of movement possibilities in dance.
Contrary to appearances, partnering is not complicated. Difficulties most often arise from a lack of understanding of the body’s mechanisms, a lack of practice, and insufficient physical preparation to be able to ‘take on’ more than usual. The emotions accompanying partnering are also significant – as are the narratives our mind constructs around working with another person’s weight.
In line with the I_GO_SYSTEM methodology, we will examine the trio of resources: Body – Mind – Emotions. At the same time, the workshop will be grounded in physics and an attempt to practically harness it through specific movement tasks.
The practice will develop progressively: from understanding the body’s personal biomechanics and managing it in space, to partner work close to the ground (level 1), through structures based on multiple points of support (level 2), up to partner work in a standing position (level 3). If the group’s level and time allow, we will also explore forms of work involving lifting the partner’s weight slightly higher into the air. An essential part of the preparation will also be learning and practicing safe falling and rolling techniques.
We have three three-hour workshops ahead of us. Nine hours is not enough to fully master partnering – but it is enough to change your mindset and discover a path of practice which, with regular training, leads to steady progress.
Level: open level for those with at least basic experience in contact improvisation.
Festival in MIK
Morning Intensives
Faking it With Gravity – Contact Improvisation Realness
Karen Nelson and Nica Portavia
In Contact Improvisation, a dynamic and ever-evolving dance form, we dance with gravity. Faking it creates a space of inquiry to explore presence in our Contact Improvisation dancing. The sensation of gravity, our first felt-touch with the earth, dances us through its field for our whole lifetime. When we turn our attention to it, what happens?
The spirit of inquiry fuels the dancing research. We ask ourselves, what is presence? How do I experience the falling part of falling? Am I still improvising in this present moment? And former participants inquire: When do I know I am faking? Is faking bringing me into realness? When I fake caring for someone else’s safety, it quickly becomes actual caring. I have been faking myself (identity) all my life.
In Faking it With Gravity, we will distinguish between our concept of ourselves including our goals, and our actual felt experience in dancing. We will practice falling, rolling, and softening tissues to receive sensation. We will surrender to the earth as a loving, supportive, constant partner. We will practice “small dance and standing” and include human partners in our dancing, learning to both respect and take risks simultaneously. Risks like: touching, allowing another to support you, to “not know” where you are going next, to be present in the moment of the dance.
As co-facilitators Nica and Karen teach together, each supporting the other’s voice. The material shifts through numerous somatic and physical approaches applying essential instructions in solo, duet and ensemble improvisation scores.
Reframing Flow
Rick Nodine
Interrogating the meaning of an often-used term, we will be unpacking the word ‘flow’, examining what flow means in our dancing, its importance and its problematic side.
Some times flow is an exquisite state of ease and pleasure, but it can also lead to the status quo, habits and agreeing to pathways we do not really want to go down.
How we access positive flow, how we claim the agency to break flow and the exhilaration of reversing flow will all contribute to wide awake dancing.
Moving me, moving you – Axis Syllabus into CI
Zuzanna Bukowski
In this 5-day intensive we will explore principles from the Axis Syllabus and bring them into the practice of Contact Improvisation. The Axis Syllabus offers a rich body of research on human movement, anatomy, and physics, opening new perspectives on how we move, fall, and share weight with others.
Through guided research, solo explorations, patterning, and partner work, we will explore how a clearer relationship to our own movement supports sensitivity, ease, and creativity when dancing with others.
Exploring concepts such as landing pads, areas of the body designed to meet the floor, discovering how falling, rolling, and landing can become soft and supportive experiences that translate into contact improvisation. We will also investigate the sequential movement of motorical body masses and the area around T12, supporting rotation, redirection, and moments of suspension that can feel like flying.
Through these principles we cultivate listening through touch, responsive weight sharing, and a living dialogue between bodies and space.
Afternoon Labs
Single labs and classes exploring different facets of CI and other practices supporting CI dancing. Open to all participants, you can just come as you are. The list will be updated by 8th of April.
Community gatherings
A space for coming together in dialogue—conversations, listening, and sharing experiences. Every year, we create a circle for those new to the practice and the festival, initiate conversations on topics important to our community, and invite everyone to participate in simple ways of being together, such as singing.
Jams
Evening jams with various flavours, including focus jam, live music evenings, blind jam. Primarily, it is a time to celebrate the diversity and resilience of the CI community. Time to meet in dance.
Long Jam in Pavilion of Dance
Long Jam | Introductory Workshop
Long Jam is a space based on open facilitation, rather than workshops or lessons. We come together in dance without a predetermined plan, with the intention of sharing practice and experience and being in a relationship based on equality. This is one of the important traditions of contact improvisation—a shared space where dancers, guests, and facilitators spend time together, exploring dance, form, and the group aspects of practice.
The jam is dedicated to people who already have experience in contact improvisation and want to deepen its relational, performative, and community dimensions. We do not focus here on technique, but on the encounter, mindfulness, and shared responsibility for the space—its safety, quality, and creative energy. What this time becomes will emerge from our shared presence.
The introductory workshop will focus on co-creation, shared responsibility, and a culture of consent and dialogue in dance, including through a conversation about what we do and how we do it. It will be a space to examine the jam guidelines and to reflect together on how we want to spend these three days, so that they become a place for creative expression and self-discovery – in connection, in community, and within broader contexts.
Long Jam | Research in Motion
A morning laboratory of group scores—compositional structures that support us in building a shared language within the co-creative improvisational process of dancing CI. We will test various scores, explore their performative qualities, and examine how they organise relationships in dance. Selected structures may serve as the starting point for an evening open event—an improvised performance.
Long Jam | Performance
Contact improvisation stems from performative experiments—and continually reexamines the relationship between the body, structure, content, and the audience. What does performance look like today at CI, or CI in performance?
Not everything is set in stone here. We’re searching for form, starting points, and ways of being together in the performative space. We’re interested in the openness of the structure, the relationship with the audience, and our own place in this encounter. Maybe you don’t need to know this beforehand—maybe it’s enough just to start.
The performance will be co-created by participants in a long jam (for those interested) and will be open to the public. This is an invitation to share practice and let others into the world of embodied experience.
Long Jam | Underscore
The Underscore is a dance map—fluid, spacious, quietly i surprisingly wild at times. It was shaped over many years by Nancy Stark Smith, one of the originators of Contact Improvisation. Today, it invites us into a shared field of attention, where we move alone and together through stillness, sensation, curiosity, and sometimes highly joyful energy.
Listen to Nancy describing this practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOGLMZdm2uA
The structure supports a wide range of experience—from subtle, internal landscapes to high-energy group dances. It is alive in the moment, unfolding each time differently.
We will begin with a 45-minute introduction, offering a gentle dive into the language, symbols, and phases of the Underscore. This “talk-through” helps us land together, whether you are new to the practice or returning with fresh eyes.
This event is open to guests from outside of the long jam.
