Thalia Laric
Morning Intensive
for Beginners and experienced dancers
I am a dancer, community leader, and Contact Improvisation (CI) teacher from South Africa. My main focus is nurturing the growth of the CI community in Cape Town, where I have been teaching for over 10 years. I also organize the annual Contact Festival South Africa.
I am a certified teacher of the Skinner Releasing Technique, a profound approach to dance training that I am passionate about sharing.
I have studied Contact Improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith, Kirstie Simson, Lucia Walker, and Jori Snell, among many other wonderful teachers.
I studied Skinner Releasing Technique with Lily Kiara, Kirsty Alexander, Gabi Agis, and Theresa Moriarty.
My approach to dancing is to create space to listen deeply to the innate wisdom of embodied experience: to allow for rest and ease, to respect authenticity and integrity, to observe simplicity and economy, to notice support, to discover alignment and clarity, and to release into dancing with effortless effort while experiencing freedom, connection, and joy.
I studied dance at the University of Cape Town and completed my master’s degree in Choreography at Rhodes University in 2013. I have also danced professionally with various South African theatre companies and founded several dance platforms, including Underground Dance Theatre and MusicDance Cape Town.
Thalia Laric (SA)
In this intensive, we will practice physical techniques as well as states of awareness that support the experience of "incredible lightness" in CI dancing. Physical techniques include softening, exploring alignment and balance, modulating tone and releasing, reading structure and mass, organizing around the point of contact, and engaging the under-skin.
We will also practice being in a state of awareness in which our ambition and expectations soften, allowing us to trust simplicity, listening, ease, and "not-knowing" as our guides to being present. Through noticing the support all around us, we will discover effortless dances.
We will begin by exploring our solo contact dance with the earth, playing with balance, alignment, momentum, and mass, and discovering how we can organize our movement with efficiency and ease.
We will then take this further into contact improvisation duets, noticing how alignment and pathways expand into multidirectional space. This will lead us to gently fall over and under each other, expanding, flying, and landing in dynamic states of balance.