The Netherlands
11-16 July 2023
4th Contact Improvisation Festival
Elske Seidel
based in Berlin, is a passionate CI dancer & teacher, deeply committed to CI and its community internationally. She has been teaching dance full time and wholeheartedly since the early nineties, CI since 2004.
Her boundless fascination and joy exploring and researching Contact Improvisation in all its depth and subtleties, inspires her workshops, privates, ongoing classes, and each of the projects she creates.
She holds a master's degree in Sport Science, Education and English from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her main research question 'the essence of dance and its teaching' motivates the heart of her work from her early days at University until the present day.
Her work recognizes nature, improvisation and teaching itself as core sources for knowledge and understanding.
Meeting the moment, she offers organic support for the individual and the instant community as it emerges, allowing each to feel, find and follow what they need to learn and dance.
As part of her work she has been traveling extensively, teaching CI in Europe, Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Israel, Russia and Japan.
She is the artistic director of the Annual Contact Festival Fuerteventura/ Spain and co-creates Dance Your Question: CI Research Week for Experienced Contact Dancers, CI Training Program Hamburg/ Germany, CI Workshop Series BASICS in Hamburg and Berlin/ Germany and co-organized among many other projects ECITE - European Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchange in Ponderosa/ Germany in 2014.
www.elskedance.de
The Responsive Body
In this intensive, we will work with essential physical states and core movement principles, looking at what supports us in arriving into the experience of a body that is relaxed and ready to respond. We will meet our Responsive Body as a vital state available and known to us, deeply rooted in our early movement development. As an integral part of ourselves it is our source and doorway to improvisation.
Going further, we will look at useful technical aspects of Contact Improvisation that support us in finding ease and flow in our mutual dance with gravity. Key ingredients as we move and discover will be The Falling Body, Following Through, Riding the Fall, Movement Efficiency, Lightness, Quality, Support.
Going deeper, we will work somatically, sensing and understanding movement from within. Moving individually and being supported through hands-on work, we can experience the layers under the skin and the interrelation of our anatomy in movement. Researching, finding, refining, as we plunge into the experience of specific movement qualities essential for Contact Improvisation, we can arrive into a state of awareness, understanding and deep learning.
In our journey, I am particularly interested, in looking at what is needed in order to follow through in both, low and high flying with a relaxed and responsive body. How do we adapt our body tone as the dance changes from moment to moment? How to organize our awareness and our body in the air with fluidity and ease while dancing with the constant possibility of disorientation? How do we actually land and allow the falling weight to continue through our bodies and into our improvisation?
In this intensive, I would like to offer inspiration as well as tools in order to ease, stimulate and support the individual growth and development in each of us as we improvise and play together in this festival and beyond.
