The Netherlands
11-16 July 2023
4th Contact Improvisation Festival
Laura Doehler
Laura Doehler, BA (Dance Theatre) and MA (Performance Making), teaches movement (release, CI, improvisation, composition and movement analysis) in HE at the National School of Circus Arts London. H2dance, Tara’ Darquin, Monsur Ali and Anne-Gaelle Thiriot are artists she is currently working with as performer, collaborator and researcher.
Picking up on impermanence and change Laura choses improvisation and CI to trace and train focus that observes change. She initiates collective processes that disseminate an embodiment of ideas, which circle around social connectivity and manifest via events that people can participate in and witness. The shedding of boundaries of self and other and the integration of performance and practice as part of everyday life are reoccurring themes. The most recent work of Exit Map which Laura is founder of, The Shared Training Practice in SE London, the Free to Move Movement, and Trilogy Twerk a Sonata - projects brought to life in close dialogue with other cross-disciplinary artists that build on collective ownership and are defined by processes; the product being ourselves changing.
Being Moved and Moving With
During this Intensive we involve ourselves with the shedding of boundaries between self and other to find fluidity between people, spaces and social constructs. We aim to integrate ‘being moved and moving with’ to make sense of dancing as a progressive state of togetherness.
We do so by bringing awareness to existing movement in space such as breath, the collective motion, emotional states and desires to allow ourselves to be with what is present. We touch listening, following and witnessing to find the play that emerges as the third event between self and the other. Established tools such as CI fundamentals, Release technique and developmental patterns come into play through explorative and imaginative engagements in order to unravel boundaries and make bodies available to receive and support another.
Through imagery and intension setting we deepen our understanding of our relationship to environment, people and self.
It has always been from importance to me that Contact is found everywhere and that in its conception it can be applied to any environment including ones own body. We create a journey that figures how we relate to one another by translating movement observed within ourselves to then reflect it on and out towards our surroundings. We find ourselves arriving in form and qualities as we learn to see and observe while moving. Both, form and qualities that emerge are functional yet personal, a landscape that continues to shift and expand with every encounter.
We approach our bodies as landscape and ecosystem where one never stands alone; where the social self can be expanded into new forms and togetherness be given a new context. Frames and structures within which we find form and qualities are brought to life through personal investment and commitment. CI technique, as we broadly understand it, can increasingly and reflectively become a personal and subjective matter.
While this workshop is in many ways technical it challenges curiosity and thoughts, the wanting to know what is and asks us to abandon polarities of what is right or wrong in order to become a dancer in dialogue that continuously develop and unfold through ones own sense making.
