Festival Program
Intensivy
Morning practice
FREE EVENTS
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Jams
Intensives
LISTENING: body – space – encounter
Adrian Russi
When immersing oneself in Contact Improvisation, it is revealed very quickly and with great clarity how multifaceted and complex this dance form is. The most different layers of the human being are addressed and accordingly diverse are the skills that are required from the dancers. This can sometimes lead to overwhelming demands, but most of the time one feels deeply and entirely nourished after a contact jam – physically, emotionally and also socially.
For me, the physicality of the body-to-body encounter forms the basis of the entire happening. This includes sensing one’s own body beforehand, being in contact with the floor and the space, and finally the differentiated listening to the other body. The word “listening” emphasizes that the dancers take an observing distance to what they sense and thus have more freedom in finding their own movements. The dancers’ own history and any possible preconceptions recede into the background and new and often surprising pathways open up for their encounters with the others. The basis for the perception is decidedly physical – but as all layers of humanity are always in resonance, the dances turn into something so fulfilling, rich and personal.
This workshop is all about perception and the resulting movement qualities and encounters. Dynamics and powerfulness should also come into play. It may therefore be an intention to go beyond the slow, mindful encounters to create wild and technically challenging dances that emerge from a differentiated listening maintained over the entire duration. In the phases of free jamming, the participants have the opportunity to follow the quality of the moment and to find their way into dances full of grace and liveliness.
JUST BEFORE
Inna Falkova
It’s a laboratory for movement practitioners inviting to explore together what’s next. To explore the potential of community, civilization and collective intelligence. One that can become an act of intentional action.
War and peace. Life and death. Polarization.
When we actively research, we gain awareness and can shape experience. But when experience happens to us, realizations emerge beyond our control.
Throughout history, rituals and initiations prepared people for life’s challenges—offering a step ahead, just before real experience took hold.
War brings fear, death, and battle. But also internal strength, resilience, and compassion. How can we engage with these forces without unconsciously stepping into war itself?
The world is small. War lives in our bodies. Can we create a future where life is not shaped by its patterns? A society where nonviolence isn’t utopian but a real possibility?
Aggression and power struggles are part of human nature. Can we integrate them without recreating war? Can we consciously cultivate peace—not as something we stumble into, but as an embodied practice?
In daily life, we take existence for granted. It’s only on the edge of loss that life’s value becomes clear. Can we create conditions to stay aware, to act intentionally?
GRAVITY MOVES: Feldenkrais and Contact Improvisation
Thomas Kampe
In this workshop, we integrate principles from the Feldenkrais Method® with Contact Improvisation, using movement experiments and detailed partner work to develop awareness, spontaneity and ease in our CI dancing. Through Feldenkrais-based explorations, we will deepen our self-awareness, refine our sensitivity to touch and weight and discover new pathways of movement and complexity in coordination in order to support creativity and connection in partnership.
We will focus on developing a fluid coordination of our core and on fine-tuning our ability to relate creatively to gravity and our living environment. Using ‘Awareness Through Movement’® lessons and guided touch-based explorations, we will cultivate a clearer sense of our core, our relationship with gravity and our ability to move with efficiency and freedom.
The Feldenkrais Method®, developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984), is a somatic learning process that enhances mobility, self-discovery, and well-being. It invites us to listen to ourselves and to explore the world of our internal sensation. It activates our organic intelligence and relational partnering skills. It invites gentle, sensorial, and exhilarating dancing by supporting somatic communication through touch, a readiness for being-with, and re-orientation to gravity.
MORNING PRACTICE
Paulina Święcańka, Kamila Zięba
An hour to wake up your body and your senses. Energetic start to the day. We promise it’s better than a second coffee!
Pilates | Yoga Vinyasa | Animal Flow
FREE EVENTS
Warsaw CI FLOW | Plays and tumbles
Pawel Konior
Saturday and Sunday, 12-13.07.2025
13:00-14:00 children, 4-8 years old with caregivers
14:00-15:00 children, 9+ years old with caregivers
‘Plays and tumbles’ is a space where two or more people practice communicating on a physical level. It’s a place where sharing resources and exchanging information are essential. We will connect, share, cooperate, and collaborate, but we will also protect, disconnect, and compete. In doing so, we will learn a palette of colours, more freedom and opportunities to grow together. We will learn to be gentle and firm. We will learn how to fight in a fun way in twos and groups, blurring the lines between fighting and cooperating, seeking flow and space for movement and dance.
Clear your practice space, empty your mind, bow to the unknown and let’s begin!
ECITE 2025 | Holding the unknown
Monday, 14.07.2025, 5:30 pm
On the program:
Sensitive exploration – about group process in dance
Hanna Jurczak
Join us for a meeting combining lecture, experience, movement and the senses.
We will look at the phases of the group process, including the one that is often overlooked or suppressed: the conflict phase. We will consider what it brings to dance, coexistence, and creation. And how an awareness of group dynamics can support our solo dance, our role in the group, decision-making and improvisation.
We will offer collaborative inquiry through observation, listening, movement (for those willing), perhaps also through the sense of proprioception.
The formula we adopt is based on neuroaesthetics and adult learning principles – that is, we learn more effectively when something moves not only our minds, but also our bodies, senses, and emotions. Elements of knowledge about the group process will be the starting point for personal and group reflection. We do not have ready answers. We have questions, and we are present and open to experience together.
See you in a joint exploration!
Panel discussion: Holding the unknown – contact improvisation as a practice of resilience and being together
Panellists: Inna Falkova, Adrian Russi, Thomas Kampe
Moderator: Klara Łucznik
We will invite special guests of ECITE 2025 to reflect together:
What does contact improvisation teach us – in movement and in life – about trust, adaptation and being present? What does it teach us about conflict? How, as improvisers, do we support others (and ourselves) to stay with the unknown, listen more carefully and embrace complexity with sensitivity?
We will touch on pedagogical, spiritual and communal themes in CI practice, asking such questions as:
– How does CI help us encounter uncertainty in the body, relationship, and the group?
– How can this practice respond to contemporary challenges without losing subtlety and attentiveness?
– What is resilience from the perspective of contact practices?
– Where does dance meet healing, social action or a spiritual path – and where can it resist overly easy narratives?
This meeting will be a conversation, with possible moments of stopping, getting into the body, and simple scores (if the situation allows).
We invite you with questions, body and curiosity.
ECITE 2025 | Open jam
Monday, 14.07.2025, 19:15
We invite the Warsaw Contact Improvisation community to visit the European Meeting of CI Teachers, ECITE 2025. To move, listen and improvise together – without pressure, with curiosity. Come and dance with us.
And before the jam, we invite you to an event filled with reflections on contact improvisation, resilience and related topics, ECITE 2025 | Holding the unknown.
ECITE 2025 | Performative mode
Thursday, 17.07.2025, 7:00 pm
On Thursday, we invite you to a performance held by the participants of the ECITE 2025. Contact Improvisation began with performative experiments – offering a unique approach to corporeality, structure, content and relationship with the audience. What does CI performance look like today, or CI in performance?
Although we increasingly know with whom, we still don’t know in what shape. What will be our starting point? How open will the structure turn out to be? How do we see ourselves in relation to performance and to CI? And what about the relationship with the viewer? Where will there be a place for you? Do we need to know this before we begin?
Perhaps, this description will still change….
Perhaps, we will simply turn on the light, and the rest will happen.
We invite you and ourselves into the unknown with the technique of contact improvisation.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
CI SKILLS: GROUNDING AND FLOWING
Marta Iucci
During this class, we want to explore our supports and play with the various possibilities our four limbs offer us in relation to the floor. And then in between the floor, the space and a partner. How can we feel powerful in receiving weight? How to clarify to ourselves our support and those of our partner while allowing the dance to flow, in small and large imbalances? And how can this generate momentum and the possibility of small falls and flights? We will literally move through these questions, creating the space for exciting but soft moves.
BLENDING FORCES
Paweł Kubiak and Daniel Rojasanta
How to unify forces?
How to land safely?
How to rise together?
How to save energy?
How to find smooth gradual transitions?
How to be ready for the unexpected?
How to support each other while moving?
Through the exploration of lifts while dancing we sense the possibility of accessing a territory in which the interactions between the movers are not necessarily framed as what is up and what is down, who is supporting and who is supported, but instead, they create a mutual interdependency in which the forces blend constantly, and to support and being supported are not different separate identities but simultaneous qualities required in each movement. We will investigate communication through movement, including lifts, approaching them not as repetitions of a sequence but as a collective process of improvisation and co-creation, finding space for playfulness, safety and curiosity, while aiming to be ready for the unexpected.
We will research Contact Improvisation from slow somatic tuning to acrobatic movement, blending contemplative and dynamic qualities.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
FINDING COMMON GROUND
Christina Dohr
An exploration of conflict and collaboration through the lens of Contact Improvisation & Aikido
How do we meet another person? How do we find common ground when forces oppose, direction shifts, or momentum builds? In both dance and life, we are constantly navigating connection — sometimes with ease, other times with tension. This session explores how principles from Contact Improvisation and Aikido can support us in harmonising with others while staying grounded in ourselves.
Through guided exercises, solo explorations, and partner work, we’ll look at:
- Listening through touch: How can we sense and respond rather than react?
- Shared balance: Finding stability in motion, both physically and relationally.
- Moving with, not against: Redirecting opposing forces into creative possibilities.
- Clear boundaries & soft edges: Staying true to ourselves while staying connected.
In Aikido, practitioners learn to meet incoming energy without resistance, blending with an attack and redirecting its path. Contact Improvisation offers a similar approach — instead of fighting momentum, we move with it, finding mutual pathways for shared balance and creative flow. Both practices reveal that common ground isn’t about agreement but about attunement — listening, adapting, and creating together.
No prior experience is necessary. This session welcomes movers of all backgrounds who are curious about how physical practice can illuminate relational skills.
SOFT EDGES
Maja Miśta
Smooth, hard and slippery surfaces; unyielding, oppressive sharpness and roughness; grooves and recesses. I soften all these qualities of matter around me, settling into my body, and stretching movement in time. I sink into the floor and walls, dive into fabrics, under the skin, swim in the body and soften my body up. I adjust the pace of movement to the tone of the tissues and discover the absorbing structure of the skeleton. I gradually pour the weight in dialogue with gravity, space and another body.
At this workshop, we will explore the potential of movement in the gravitational field, in the compression and decompression of tissues, in the elasticity of fascia, and in the embrace of another body. Using the elements of Thai bodywork and taking advantage of the body’s tensegrity structures, among others, we will soften and slow down our falls and lifts, our encounters with the floor and with other bodies. We will investigate the soft quality of touch and paths of movement resulting from the interwoven forms and shapes of our bodies.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
CI & Performance: HOW TO COMPOSE FALLING MASSES?
Natascha Golubtsova
This class is a tribute to Steve Paxton’s initial question: What if we were not humans, but just masses? What if we simply fell, drawn by gravity to the Earth—just like this bottle, this stone, this wall? How can I connect to this continuous falling, knowing that gravity is a force deeper than my personal, one that connects every human and non-human being on this planet?
We begin with our solo bodies, allowing our heads, ribcages, pelvises, arms, and legs to fall—just as our water bottles do. We play with different objects, connecting with their weight and integrating them into the mass of our own bodies. Through duet and trio experiments with various scores, we hold each other’s weight and let it fall, exploring the nuances of muscle tone and its infinite variations.
In the end, we compose small, playful, wild, and touching contact dance pieces, where objects become both our environment and our dance partners. We co-create with and for each other. Can we fall together into the support which is everywhere?
Come as you are and bring one or more objects with a tangible weight of 0.3–4.0 kg (a book, bag, stone, grapefruit, etc.).
POETRY IN MOTION
Rosa Valentina Martino
Dancing from the Center, Dancing from the Heart
Dance is a conversation—a river that flows, bends, and reshapes with each moment. By stepping beyond habitual patterns, we embrace the grace of letting go.
This workshop serves as a living laboratory to unlock fluidity in movement, filling the body with softness and adaptability. We’ll explore the dialogue between the gross and subtle bodies, opening the backspace, expanding in all directions, and finding resilience through bouncing, yielding, and releasing.
Inspired by Tai Chi and Qi Gong, we’ll work with breath and intention to awaken energy flow, allowing movement to arise naturally.
Beginning with meditation and slow, intentional exercises, we’ll cultivate ease and receptivity. Through Contact Improvisation, our partners’ touch will guide us to deepen our connection with our own energy centres, enhancing our internal awareness and unlocking new movement possibilities.
What does it mean to dance from the centre? How does it feel to dance from the heart? We will explore these questions, allowing our partners’ presence to support our expansion while we respond with openness and sensitivity.
Poetry in Motion invites you to move beyond structure, rediscover the poetry within every gesture, and trust that the body when given space, will find its own expression.
JAM TUNINGS – Presence and Performance
A series of jam-opening scores informed by a practice of deep presence and embodied performance. These scores or “tunings” work as a way to bring together a quality of being in the space with deep awareness of both our inner experience and the state of the collective.
This is an invitation for the festival community to join in an exploration of how we as a group shape the space in the jams, cultivating bodymind through somatic and physical training and by caring about our inner spaces in interdependence with others and with the space around us.
Musical improvisation is proposed as a complement to support the practice, though of equal value is silence. We welcome the spaces in between. Emptiness is a necessity that allows movement and improvisation to unfold.
These tunings guide the group during the beginning of jams, and once a collective state has been attained, the jam is allowed to unfold freely. The goal is to accentuate the artistic and performative potential of Contact Improvisation and to honor the roots of the practice.
