Breathing Attention
In this Intensive, the provocation is to shift away from acquiring technical integrations as tools of control, and instead to situate attention and intention as integrations as primary guides toward moving together — and, in fact, toward losing control. We will draw on established frameworks such as developmental movement patterns, not as a fixed toolkit, but as pathways into relationality: processes of responsiveness that reveal an intention to connect.
Contact Improvisation, at its core, invites this practice of responsiveness. The deeper we go, the more it asks us to surrender control — to cultivate trust in co-creation, and to discover the pleasure of collective agency.
In that shift, from control to responsiveness, dancing begins; not by holding on, but by sensing what is and how your intention towards a certain kind of connection defines our shared experience. Weaving solo explorations with contact work, we will inquire how awareness and
intentional listening allow us to navigate touch and shared weight for an inclusive and consensual practice where partners, space, and our own desires and capacities to move are incorporated.
Breath will be a central integration. It moves us fundamentally and shapes every dance yet so often slips from awareness. As Nancy Stark Smith said, “I don’t fly, I breathe”. We are not defying gravity but yielding and breathing into space, becoming more spacious ourselves. It is
the ground of responsiveness that facilitates weight awareness, spatial sense making, tone and our own energy to move.
Teacher Bio
Laura Doehler began her Contact Improvisation practice in 2004 with Kirstie Simson and soon connected to the wider international CI community, learning with pioneers such as Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark-Smith, Karen Nelson and many others who expanded the form into poetic, political, and somatic inquiries. She is a London-based dance artist having studied dance and performance making at Trinity Laban (2004) and Goldsmiths University (2012) and she is a recipient of the Trinity Laban scholarship.
Her work as dance artist and director of Exit Map is firmly rooted in CI and improvisation. Her work is collaborative and participatory in nature and explores collective agency, scores of co-existence and care and proposes new socio-environmental relational practices such as outdoor dance events, rituals and embodied co-working spaces. In 2012 she co-founded Shared Practice with Anne-Gaelle Thiriot and Tania Soubry, which is an ongoing improvisation research project that she facilitates besides teaching in Higher Education at NCCA and independent workshops across Europe.
Over the past years she connected to community organisations more that work with CI and involve rural land practices. Recent residencies include Radical Inclusion and Architectures of Togetherness with Ponderosa e.V. in Germany, Catalysing Collective Action at The Place in London 2024 and soon with Larret En Mouvement as part of Larretude a research around Agentic Assemblages (FR).
Intensive for beginning dancers
Breathing Attention
Laura Doehler (UK)