Stutgart Contact Improvisation Festival

In Stuttgart, Germany from 2 August to 4 August 2024

If you are looking for an intimate experience, focused on community building and connection, Isabelle Guidi’s Contact Improvisation Festival is the event for you. Split into two sections; an intensive week and the festival weekend, you will build bodywork skills, connect with other creatives, and enjoy peaceful jams in a calm and nurturing setting.

The festival organisers say:

“There are many ways to “arrive” – in this case at the festival, in the dance room, in the community of fellow dancers and then also on the floor. “Rocking and shaking” might sound (pretty) wild at first. Shaking myself standing up and then being gently rocked by a partner while lying down is very pleasant, loosens muscles and joints and supports contact with the FLOOR. Once there, we enjoy each other with careful touches as we arrive. If you don’t know rocking and shaking yet, you can be curious and look forward to it.”

“Conversing Weight is an invitation to understand and refine a conscious distribution of weight at all times while moving, aiming to reach a greater openness to physical possibilities, while attending to the limits and potentials of our bodies in motion.

Awakening and enhancing a vivid curiosity in organizing efficiently and precisely the physical structure in improvised dances and dialogues, while articulating and playing with creative and compositional skills.

We will explore how anchoring our attention in somatic awareness, being available and adaptive to the present moment and what surrounds us, aiming at skilfully and safely combining with one another while dancing, subtly creating non-verbal agreements to off-balance and interdependent movement.

Thus will explore how to enjoy creativity in solo, partnering and group improvisations, being at ease in the unknown, making choices, welcoming questions and enabling poetics and narratives to arise from our dances.”

“Quality, speed and physical effort determine the way in which we can come into contact with others. But the other person’s signals also count, whether she/he is at all ready for touch, and if so, for how much weight or at what speed (e.g. jump)?

Sending and receiving body signals, making contact and leaving it, surrendering and withdrawing, in short: saying “YES” and “NO” wants to receive equal attention and recognition in improvisation so that an enjoyable dance can develop.
“hin&weg” is a playful workshop about the different facets of touching and being touched, as well as understanding our axes, focal points, surfaces and deep-seated structures. Since these alignments and structures flow into non-verbal communication, but are not necessarily used consciously as such, but they are also very helpful for all lifts, slights, roll-overs, jumps, etc., I would like the technical focus, alongside the Playful, focus on that in this workshop.”