Contact Improv Fundamentals 1/2 [Nijmegen]

About this event

Weekly Contact Improvation lessons in Nijmegen 🌺 with special attention in the Fundamentals of C.I.

Join us in a dance-full evening, where we remember how to move with trust, and in contact to ourselves and other bodies.

Johanna and Alkis offer the class sometimes together and sometimes apart, offering various perspectives to the rich field that is called Contact Improvisation.

This class is for you if:
- you've just begun with CI
- if you have been wanting to start but kept postponing it
- you're dancing for a while and still feel intimidated to join a jam
- you're comfortable in the practice and want to accompany others experiencing it too.

During the Fundamentals series the focus is to bring together new and experienced practitioners and sense the very essence of the practice. Did we already say "beginners friendly"? 😁

♦️Practical:

Wednesdays 18:00 - 20:00
Studio "upstairs"
Afterwards there's optional potluck and open circus training (5€ additional contribution)
Kneepads are _not_ necessary 😉

Via this platform you can buy loose tickets and seasonal passes for 10 dances, which offers some discount and bonuses. Please choose a price that feels right for you, considering that we already do our best to keep the prices affordable for the value we believe we have to offer 🌹 Attending both Fundamental classes is strongly advised for new dancers, but not mandatory.

♦️About the practice:

Contact improvisation is a dance form developed by various pioneers in the 1960s, in which physical contact is central to the creation of movement. Dance becomes a play with gravity, weight sharing, touch and imagination.

♦️What to expect from a session:

In these weekly classes, we offer tools to achieve movement. We go into technical principles about your body and lifting another body. We give different ways of approaching dance that might change your perception.

We start every session with a warm up of all layers: physical, mental, emotional, etc. The class is built around open tasks that leave enough space for you to fit in, with the energy, and/or limitations that are present on the day.

In the fundamentals series we are lining up some of our most iconic exercises for letting you experience the essence of CI; from somatic sensing, to dancing from within (improvising), and from offering creative resistance, to supporting effortlessly somebody of your own weight and above! We're bringing together new and experienced dancers in the studio not to compare but to share and experience together - that is for us the best way to learn. And after the class we can share more words with each other during our community potluck dinner.

About the facilitators:

♦️Johanna Sauër

Johanna is a dancer, choreographer and educator. She graduated as an artist educator in dance from Artez in 2022. She then did further training in contemporary dance and choreography at La Faktoria, in Spain. Contact improvisation is a great fascination for her, she enjoys the physical play with gravity and the possibilities another body gives her in her dance. Additionally, contact improvisation is for her a learning path in relating to other people.

♦️Alkis Barbas

Alkis grew up as a dancer in the cultural scene of Thessaloniki, Greece and later moved to the Netherlands to follow a bachelor of dance in Arnhem. He's been working as an interdisciplinary performer since the end of the lockdowns in 2021. Alkis has had a rich path in movement through physical theater, martial arts, butoh, folk, classical, urban, and contemporary dance forms. Alongside the dance studies, he has explored various ways of training that maintain and grow avail-abilities of the body and mind, while keeping it healthy. This is what brought him 3 years ago to pick up teaching Contact Improvisation and facilitating jams for dancers of all levels of experience. He has since guided hundreds of people in finding their own dance journey and their authentic way of relating to others.

“In my practice and in my class, I place care highly in my priorities, without compromising the search for excitement and individual limits. I love connection, I love to combine playing with learning, and I love to share my passion for movement.”

🌬️❤️ We are looking forward to see you in one of our coming sessions!