The Netherlands
11-16 July 2023
4th Contact Improvisation Festival
Natanja den Boeft
has been practicing and teaching contact improvisation on and off for 32 years, in Holland and abroad. ‘It continues to inspire me. The body is a beautiful animal and its movement and beyond movement its dance, with its poetry, music and story, is for me an ever evolving artwork. Improvisation offers the possibilities of composing in the moment and connecting that composition to one's total being in that moment. Contact-improvisation adds with its base in touch a whole other layer to both composition and being.’
Natanja is also a certified cranio-sacral therapist and holds a black belt in Aikido.
Where the inside meets the outside
A class with lots of skin contact.
The skin is literally the place where our inside meets the outside, where our inner stories and motivations and our very personal movement meets the space around us and comes in contact with whoever and whatever is in that space: other movement, other stories, other possibilities...
It is also the place where we connect through touch and a clear boundary that offers a chance to say ‘no’ when needed.
We will start gentle, listening and sensing and opening to what is rich in this moment of warming up to dancing. What needs attention inside, what part of us longs to move, what desires stillness. After this we will work with the space directly around us and also with the floor which is so directly around us so much of the time when we dance and who is always the third partner in a duet. Then last but not least we will dance with partners. We bring the state of listening, sensing and opening into the duet. We will also practice and go deeper into a sense of keeping our own stories alive while we dance in contact with and are influenced by our partner and the vocabulary of contact-improvisation.