Festival Program
Pre-festival workshops in MIK
Imperfect Practices
Klara Łucznik
“The whole truth” about partnering
Michał Ratajski
Festival in MIK
Morning Intensives
Sunday Labs
Monday Labs
Wednesday Labs
Thursday Labs
Community gatherings
JAMS
Long Jam in Pavilion of Dance
Intro
Research in Motion
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.
Sunday Labs
Playful Contact: from fear to expression
Riccardo Sacilotto
In Contact Improvisation, fear often appears when we meet weight, trust, and the unknown. This lab explores CI through play as a tool to develop trust, support, and authentic expression.
The class is especially oriented toward people approaching CI, offering a safe and accessible entry point into the practice. We will begin with games and guided tasks that use imagination to awaken presence, listening, and group connection. Through these playful structures, participants are invited to soften mental control and access a more intuitive way of moving.
We will focus on the experience of giving and receiving weight. We will gradually build confidence in leaning, sharing weight, and entering physical dialogue with others. Through the experience, participants are encouraged to recognise and communicate their own limits, as well as their desires in movement. This process supports clarity, consent, and relational awareness.
Play creates a space where mistakes are welcome. In CI, what seems like an error often becomes a doorway to new movement, new choices, and a deeper connection with oneself.
Dancing Collective Activism
Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson
We begin from a simple position: each of us is a unique part of the whole. In our practice as improvising dancers we learn to acknowledge our experience, and respect others for theirs. These two labs (Monday & Thursday) research our space together as a political action lab where we practice choice, responsibility and care for the effects our actions have on others. And, we celebrate the outcome.
In the physical dialogue of Contact Improvisation, communicating through sharing weight, trust, and risk, we meet other bodies where the actions of listening through touch, negotiating boundaries, addressing access needs and naming desires becomes a creative act. Through the environmental and physical engagement of Tuning Scores, we enter with sharpened sense perceptions and make known our compositional experiences of measuring time, meaning, and spatial relationships. We make our simple position known through actions and verbal calls or silence and stillness as we collaborate equally with others.
Cultivating the practices of CI and Tuning Scores we aim to discover and personalize: weight is not neutral; how we give it, take it, refuse it, or carry it together matters. How do we survive showing up to ourselves and the world? Our choices create a collective practice of attention and decision-making. The wholeness of the composition becomes a collective practice of participation, and we gain recognition of that in the doing.
Monday Labs
From floorwork to flying
Jaime Caballero Milani
When we dance, we are in a constant dialogue with ourselves, with the space (and the floor), with the time, with other bodies/dancers… By being more aware of how our movement is affected by the space, and how it also affects the space and by enlarging our vocabulary, we can enhance those dialogues, move in a more efficient way and even be more creative.
If we stay curious, we remain free.
In this class, after a guided warm-up, I offer some basic contemporary floor work material, we also practice some improvisation tools, some contact improvisation exercises, and we will learn several lifts focusing on soft lifting and soft landing.
All of this will support us in discovering new ways of connecting and staying connected with ourselves and with the other dancers.
CI & Performance
Alexandra Soshnicova and Serghei Golovnea
This class explores the meeting point between Contact Improvisation and performance practice. We will move from sensing and listening in the body to shaping material that can be witnessed.
Through improvisation scores, partner work, and group exploration, we will investigate presence, attention, and composition in the moment. How does a dance become a performance? What changes when there is a witness? How can we stay authentic while being seen?
We will play with transitions between private and public states, develop sensitivity to space, timing, and relationships, and explore simple compositional tools that support spontaneous creation.
The class is open to dancers with some experience in Contact Improvisation who are curious about bringing their practice into a performative context.
Wednesday Labs
Osmosis | Somatic Bodywork into CI
Aleksandra Rud
We are mostly water.
Before we are dancers, before we are movers, before we have technique or intention — we are fluid. This session begins there.
This is an invitation to rest together. Not to prepare for something, not to warm up — but to arrive, fully, in the body you actually have right now. Through guided somatic exploration, breath, and gentle partner touch, we return to the body’s original intelligence: its weight, its softness, its capacity to be moved from within.
Nervous systems need time. Time to recognise that this place, these people, this moment are safe. Time to stop bracing and begin breathing — slowly, with trust. When we rest near each other, something remarkable happens: our nervous systems begin to attune. Not through effort or intention — but by osmosis. Breath finds breath. The body that was holding starts, almost without noticing, to soften.
We take time to feel water — in our tissues, in our breath, in the slow wave of a spine that has finally stopped holding. The borders between bodies become more permeable. Weight — which we usually grip so tightly — begins to pour freely, to pass through, to be shared without negotiation.
And from that place — unhurried, without agenda — we find our way into contact.
The transition into CI is not a shift in activity. It is a continuation of the same listening, now shared: two bodies, both fluid, meeting without force. Like water moving through a membrane — not by decision, but because the conditions are right. We explore what becomes possible when we arrive from stillness rather than intention — how weight transfers differently, how touch carries more information, how the dance finds its own shape when we stop directing it.
No previous CI experience required. Open to all levels and all bodies. Come as you are.
Does immersing oneself in CI also dissolve responsibility?
Tere Więcko (they/them)
This is a proposal for a “dance floor discussion” inspired by the Kitchen Table Discussion* format, in which the audience witnesses an exchange taking place at the centre of the event between several people. The goal will be to confront what surfaces when a voice enters the space.
At the beginning, we agree to follow common rules, and the people who are present at that moment are given tools to intervene if things get too heated on the dance floor. The main rule is that anyone can speak under the same conditions by lining up in the waiting area, and designated moderators ensure the rules are followed. The rest, just like in contact jams, serve as listeners and witnesses during this time.
The starting point for the discussion will be the question of shared responsibility and its blurring within CI spaces, which (at least at their origin) were meant to be free of hierarchy and were a grassroots initiative that began with a group of dancer friends. What does the situation look like now that you can dance CI on practically every continent, and as the so-called contact community grows? What rules govern it, what are we (un)aware of, and what wants to be voiced and heard? In a space where you’re more likely to be in physical contact with strangers than to exchange a single word with them, what happens to the unsaid? Does it actually dissolve, evaporate, settle at the bottom, or spill out on other occasions? Does being in touch with the body have the potential to change anything in our conversations? Does dance become a space for escapism and the reproduction of social patterns when it remains silent on political issues? By introducing movement and breaking away from standard discussion formats, we will attempt to touch upon potentially contentious topics and not necessarily answer questions, but rather bring to the surface words and thoughts we would never hear on the dance floor.
photo@Aleksandra Ludwinski
Thursday Labs
Movespace
Ania Jurek
As part of MOVESCAPE, I am sharing a movement practice. My teaching focuses on accessibility—not only in understanding disability, but also in building scores and putting them into words to empower the imagination to move. The research is grounded in collective consciousness and somatics, structured with clear physical explanations. The scores are rooted in MOVESCAPE research: creative immersions in natural spaces. I reframe ideas from nature into the studio space taking scores from the outdoor research and from the creative process of writing video descriptions from movement videos.
Dancing Collective Activism
Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson
We begin from a simple position: each of us is a unique part of the whole. In our practice as improvising dancers we learn to acknowledge our experience, and respect others for theirs. These two labs (Monday & Thursday) research our space together as a political action lab where we practice choice, responsibility and care for the effects our actions have on others. And, we celebrate the outcome.
In the physical dialogue of Contact Improvisation, communicating through sharing weight, trust, and risk, we meet other bodies where the actions of listening through touch, negotiating boundaries, addressing access needs and naming desires becomes a creative act. Through the environmental and physical engagement of Tuning Scores, we enter with sharpened sense perceptions and make known our compositional experiences of measuring time, meaning, and spatial relationships. We make our simple position known through actions and verbal calls or silence and stillness as we collaborate equally with others.
Cultivating the practices of CI and Tuning Scores we aim to discover and personalize: weight is not neutral; how we give it, take it, refuse it, or carry it together matters. How do we survive showing up to ourselves and the world? Our choices create a collective practice of attention and decision-making. The wholeness of the composition becomes a collective practice of participation, and we gain recognition of that in the doing.
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 | Introduction
Filip Węcki
A workshop combined with a discussion on the consent culture as an introduction to a long contact improvisation jam. In the consent culture, I am interested in expanding the shared dance space and in catching early signs of freezing in myself and others. We will have the opportunity to explore consent not as a one-time decision, but as a dynamic process that changes over time and in movement. Together, we will look at how to observe our own “yes” and “no,” how to recognize moments of constriction, disorientation, or stalling, and how to respond before the freeze deepens in the dance – in ourselves and in others. We will aim to develop sensitivity to subtle signals coming from the body: changes in tension, breath, tempo, or attention. An important element will be the practice of noticing these signals early and treating them as information, not as a problem. This approach will support regulation, a sense of safeness, and greater freedom to improvise. This introduction will lay the foundation for a jam session based on mindfulness, flexibility, and care for oneself and others, while also, I hope, building a sense of safety as we explore the unknown together.
LONG JAM | Research in Motion
Klara Łucznik, Alexandra Soshnicova, Serghei Golovnea
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
Concept: Klara Łucznik, Alexandra Soshnicova, Serghei Golovnea
Soundscape: Daniel Rojasanta
Production support: Paulina Święcańska
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
Into talk: Ksenia Opria
Soundscape: Olga Skrzypek
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.
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.
