Workshops - Unplugged Dance

Captured Body

Captured Body workshop invites participants to engage in collective and critical choreographic research on the concept of the Captured Body. Rooted in colonial practices of control—biometrics, occupation but also dance notations—the image of the captured body reemerges in contemporary systems of digital regulation such as surveillance, logistics, and social media. Together, we will explore how these systems shape our understanding of the body and its movement.

Building on Andre Lepecki’s expanded notion of choreography as a “technique designed to capture actions,” we will examine choreography as a medium that abstracts movement into data. This perspective allows us to interrogate the tension between body parts that are captured, tracked, or disciplined by external systems, and those that escape such control. Dance will be approached not just as an art form, but as a critical and creative practice that can reveal and resist mechanisms of capture.

The workshop creates a space for artistic and critical interaction with various systems designed to capture or track the body. We will explore an alternative history of choreography as an expanded practice—a method of sensing, tracking, and recording movement. Participants will delve into traditions of movement notation in dance, labour efficiency manuals, biometrics, and surveillance technologies to uncover what these systems are tuned to detect—and what they are designed to miss.

Through embodied practice, we will investigate how scores, systems, and notations shape, constrain, or direct movement, while also revealing embedded power dynamics. By engaging with movement notation systems, rehearsing or re-enacting scores, and creating personal methods of notation, participants will discover how practices of embodiment can highlight the forces acting on their bodies.

Finally, the workshop will ask how these systems of body capture can inform personal choreographic creativity. How can we decipher, reinterpret, and reimagine notational methods to create our own approaches to tracking and documenting movement? Together, we will explore the ways choreography can serve as a tool for both critical reflection and a practice of creative resistance.

Daria Iuriichuk (she/her) is a dance artist based in Berlin. In her works informed by visual and performance studies, she explores political dimensions of performativity, labour politics in arts and body politics within the various economic regimes.

The Nature Within us

Connecting movement, healing, and creativity through the five elements theory.

This workshop invites participants to explore the moving body through the integration of dance and Shiatsu (Japanese pressure-point bodywork), promoting the natural flow of energy and uncovering new creative pathways. By engaging with the healing principles of Shiatsu and improvisational practices inspired by the Five Elements Theory—Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire—we will awaken our dancing bodies and expand our creative potential.

In Eastern philosophy, the flow of energy, or qi, is fundamental to maintaining balance and health. This energy travels through pathways called meridians, each associated with one of the five elements. These elements reflect qualities we encounter in daily life: for example, our need for warmth and connection relates to the fire element, symbolizing compassion and vitality.

Participants will learn to locate and explore the meridians physically, practicing self-bodywork and partnering techniques rooted in Shiatsu to balance energy. Building on this, we will use improvisational tasks and imagery to embody the qualities of each element—grounding, fluidity, adaptability, compassion, and more—transforming this awareness into movement. This practice not only fosters physical and emotional harmony but also serves as a foundation for discovering choreographic ideas, individually and collaboratively.

Through these explorations, dancers will deepen their understanding of how energy and movement intertwine. They will gain tools to access balance, creativity, and inspiration within their own bodies, connecting their physical and emotional selves to their artistic practice.

Ori’s teaching emphasizes dialogue, encouraging dancers to connect personally with the material and find their unique voices. Using humor and vivid imagery, he creates a supportive environment where participants can explore, experiment, and discover freely.

Ori Flomin is a NYC-based dance artist, shiatsu and yoga practitioner.

Embodied Voice Flow

Embodied Voice Flow is a vocal-physical process that invites you to rediscover an intimate relationship with your original voice and its sensitivity. Each session opens a space to connect with the joy of creating music with breath, voice, mouth, body and with the innate instinct for expression through sound. Core somatic practices include Deep Listening, experiential anatomy of the breathing/vocal body, embodied vocality, pulsing/tuning and Collaborative Vocal Improvisation. We combine these practices to create different forms of vocal improvisation whilst grounding within presence and awareness, expressing our vital creativity through sound and movement, and listening with the whole body at the same time we start to cultivate the art of living in the present moment.

The workshop is open to artists, movers, sounders, and anyone who feels called to reconnect with their expressive voice and the body’s intelligence through gentle and playful somatic practices.

Alessio Castellacci (ΙΤ) is a vocal dancer, teacher, sound composer, coach/therapist.

Voice Somatics

Voice Somatics shares a somatic approach to voice as a deeply physical, expressive, and connective practice. In the workshop, participants explore the interplay between voice, perhaps even spoken word, and movement — to connect with their bodies as instruments that can be finely tuned at the intersection between sound and movement. This approach invites participants to discover the body as the source of voice, the voice as an extension of movement, and the spoken word as a bridge between inner sensations and external expression.

Participants embark on an embodied journey from Feldenkrais into the dynamic nature of vocal expression — discovering how sound and movement arise together, shaping and amplifying one another. Through guided explorations, they uncover how voice resonates in the body, and how spoken word emerges naturally from physical impulses and emotional landscapes. Voice and movement are deeply interconnected; every sound made stems from breath, vibration, and motion. By engaging with this connection, participants learn to navigate the balance between control and release — letting go of unnecessary tension while embracing the raw, authentic textures of their voices. Spoken word becomes a somatic dialogue, linking inner experience to outer communication. Through movement, breath, and vocal techniques, participants can unlock new possibilities for sound-making, physical presence, and using words as a physical playground. The workshop fosters awareness of how voice, movement, and words combine to create rich, multidimensional expressions of self, both as individuals and in connection with others.

Antoinette Helbing (she/her) is a German dance artist, Feldenkrais® practitioner and member of the artist-run platform Dance CooperativE in Copenhagen (DK).

The Feldenkrais Method® was developed by Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) as a gentle and intricate embodied educational process concerned with self-awareness and improved capacity. It uses movement, sensation and reflective experience as coherent learning modes to support the ability to interact with the world in new ways with comfort, ease and curiosity. As a somatic movement practice it expands the ability to rediscover and retune. The method invites to slow down and to listen and to playfully explore the world of internal sensation. Supporting the nervous system to form new pathways beyond its habitual capacities. The Feldenkrais Method® is taught in ‘Awareness Through Movement’® group lessons, guided through verbal instruction, and one-to-one touch-based ‘Functional Integration’® lessons as dialogues between learner and practitioner.

Sculpting Body-Images

During this morning class, we will awaken the body through experimentation and game-like movement situations. We will focus on the moving body and work both alone as well as in groups, in order to test our bodily structure, gain resilience and agility, while having fun and reconnecting with the child within.

We will observe, embody and exchange knowledge through physical contact, while stimulating our nervous system, developing our motor skills and improving our coordination, rhythm and elastic footwork skills.

It is a practice that creates a safe, family-like learning space, where the participants are guided to support and motivate each other· freed from prerequisites of age, backgrounds and disciplines, all stories matter: they nourish our interaction with others and our connection with ourselves.

Sculpting Body-Images is a movement workshop of intense physicality, shaped to challenge the known bodily patternsof each practitioner and to bring awareness to the conscious act of seeing and perceiving the body in relation to interchangeable elements. Whether in real life or on stage, whether through the bare eye or through the lens of the camera, our body is a dynamic instrument in constant transformation. However, in order to sculpt the form, we need to play and provoke its limits.

Through the use of spatial, temporal and physical constraints, as well as game-like situations inspired by Fighting Monkey Practice (founded by Linda Kapetanea & Jozef Frucek) we will engage into constant movement and test our bodily structure.

Within a safe-learning space and based upon each participant’s personal physical abilities, we will focus on stimulating the nervous system, increasing stamina and developing motor skills that improve agility through coordination, rhythm and elastic footwork skills.

Sculpting Body-Images is about approaching the body from a 360° view and consciously choosing the perspective we want to present, based upon what we want to communicate with the world.

All stories matter: they nourish our interaction with others and our connection with ourselves.

This physical practice invites the participants to keep the body in the center of attention and explore movement tasks through improvisation, collaboration and integration of various tools.

Penelope Morout (GR) is an interdisciplinary dance artist interested in creating hybrid projects through the fusion of various mediums.

11 – 18 AUGUST 2024 | The Body The Player The Journey

The Body The Player The Journey set the ground for the interplay of people, moving what pulses within and between each other, an invitation to co-create with every single (multiple) participant a space for potential, inspiration, exchange, and support.

The Body The Player The Journey stimulates practitioners to dance their authenticity—an invitation to modulate the dancing through mechanisms of perception, approximating each individual to their personal and collective landscapes. Charting the multidimensional anatomy of desires and tuning to its particularities, we cultivate an authorial, negotiable, collective, and physically sustainable process.

The Body The Player The Journey is dedicated to movement practices that access and expand a repertoire of senses linked to cognitive, subjective, and imagetic layers in each individual’s learning process.

The exploration of movement begins by delving into the sources of our living body and its intricate interrelational systems (at this moment, expect lots of images!). Within this dynamic sensorimotor network, we orchestrate the body and its relationships by scanning information from inner and outer connections, accessing the available resources to play with from personal bodily experiences.

The work focuses on the body’s mobility from the perspective of biotensegrity, aiming to expand awareness of the body as an integrated living ancestor network. Through mediums such as improvisation, scores, games, and procedures rooted in the fields of perception, people will be exposed to and experience the following principles:

(1) sensitive & systemic mapping of the body, (2) gravity & body axis, (3) distribution of tension & modulations of tone, (4) the folds of the body, (5) the fabulous universe of spirals, (6) multidimensionality, (7) asymmetry, (8) body pulsations.

Decoding the body’s geography by hacking information from the present, the individuals, and the contextual space around us – we witness, hold space, and charge a large spectrum of shape-shifting sensations within ever-evolving decision-making instances.

What to Expect

• An immersive playground of movement exploration

• Investigation of the term interconnection in extended layers

• Expanding & deepening sensory awareness

• References, anatomical images, texts, and tactile experiences

• Co-creating a space for inspiration, exchange, and support

• A playful yet profound journey through movement and the environment

• Opening many doors to revisit our bias and interact with different perspectives

• Exploring potentials, desires, questions while creating new memories

Rafaela Sahyoun (BR) is a Latin American from São Paulo, working in the field of arts as a dancer, choreographer, and educator. She spirals through these roles within the ever-evolving landscape of performative practices, community, and context.

All Unplugged Dance workshops are open to everyone who wants to meet, share, dance and self-explore through movement and creative process. There is no need for previous experience in dance classes, although if there is one, it is welcome.

“The Body The Player The Journey” workshop shares the week with “espaciopropio.augenblick” workshop

BOOK YOUR SPOT

Incognito Body

Workshop Laboratory for Body Exploration and Creative Practices on Improvisation departing from practices of espaciopropio.augenblick, towards a skeleton dance.

In this workshop, we propose a creative laboratory inviting you to dive through possible cartographies of the body-space where we can reveal misty potentialities that are born and move us beyond the margins of the usual.

The meetings begin with practices of espaciopropio.augenblick, with the purpose of bringing our attention to the body-space, and ways of aligning ourselves in contact with our submerged geology: the bones that support us and their multiple deep interconnections.

We will propose concrete experiences of exploration and improvisation based on possible maps that offer a certain orientation for listening, wandering, and being in subtle contact with the question of how the unknown can be embodied, as a stranger, becoming other, fully entering into creative processes where the body and what happens between bodies becomes an access to the terra incognita that we are.

As sensitive explorers, we will navigate through the creative experience, opening ourselves to singular and shared territories where questioning is never exhausted, where our changing perception is always at play, and where the use of improvisation as a resource and procedure unfolds multiple spaces and lets go of the moving imagination to weave common worlds.

From the unknown body to the world as an unknown.

Explore, re_map, investigate without conquering, enter into terrains for elusive experiences, follow the flows, slopes, and channels of movement, smell and intuit, rest in the shadow, approach what is revealed, blur the edges, and immerse ourselves in the worlds that dance as an original practice to recognize ourselves.

Carlos Osatinsky & Fernando Nicolás Pelliccioli are contemporary dancers, performers, choreographers, explorers and facilitators of movement.

They have been developing a long research into movement as a way of developing processes in life and artistic practice for more than 20 years. They are guided by their interest in the reflexive interrelation between body and environment. In their work, they investigate and combine practices based on the principles of Klein Technique and Alexander Technique with their own search to address integral creation and learning processes. They offer a praxis that transcends the specificity of the scene towards a full and transformative inhabitation of the body in everyday life.

Somatic Art Practice®

Somatic and Arts based research methods

SAP® is about inter and transdisciplinary, personal and interpersonal embodiment of what we consist of. Explorations and discoveries through somatic and creative journeys of the world inside in relation to the world outside our skin and self: the others, the space and the natural world as a continuum.

The embodiment tools come from the somatic practice of Body-Mind Centering®, fine arts and visual arts (drawing, sculpture/installation, creative writing, photography and videodance).

The methodology of SAP® is inter and transdisciplinary, somatic, and arts research based. The pedagogy is experiential, inquiry-based, relational and integrative.

Experiential Anatomy and Somatic Movement (BMC®), Fine Arts, Visual Arts and creative writing interweave and layer offering consciousness and expansion from our individual somatic depths and meanings into collective connections and meanings. From the microworld of the cell to the macroworld we live, grow and relate in.

Connection with nature, personal and collective research processes, reflections and sharings will be basic parts of this art-life week.

Marina Tsartsara is a Dance and Visual Artist & educator (MSc), a Body-Mind Centering® Teacher in the official Body-Mind Centering® trainings in the UK, Spain & Greece. She is also the Administrative Director of the Greek BMC® program ISTOS.

MELT : Moving Waterscapes

This experiential workshop proposes a relational exploration of the body and water.

Looking at the human body as a water body, we will investigate fluid ways to move, as well as fluid ways to be.

Through embodied explorations of body fluids, we will play with the perception of a liquid body.

We will study water as a kinetic force, practicing movement patterns like pulsing, waves, and spirals.

We will play with a liquid sense of gravity, moving with the weight of water.

We will engage in a process of generating liquid, fluid representations of the body, and in doing so, encounter the transformative attributes of fluids.

Finally, we will play with embodied imagery and scores in processes of dreaming of water with our bodies and dreaming our bodies as water.

The Moving Waterscapes workshop will involve studio practice as well as field study sessions in the land surrounding Paleohori.

We will work in ways of embodied listening and attentive movement with nearby streams, springs, and the sea. We will nourish the kinaesthetic dialogue between water and our bodies.

Through these sessions, we will actively engage with the local ecosystem, and we will acknowledge and build relationships with the local water subjects.

Moving Waterscapes is a workshop that wishes to create and hold a space that is responsive to the environmental crisis and climate change. It becomes articulated in the context of a world that deals with multiple imminent and current water crises, whether that means drought, floods, or pollution. Through the Moving Waterscapes practice, we suggest an experiential and somatic engagement with the possibility of adaptation to a climate-changed world—an adaptation that challenges consumerism and colonialism and invites us to a state of sentience, discovering again the sacredness of water as well as the deep affiliation of bodies of water to our own human bodies.

Moving Waterscapes is growing out of the MELT pedagogy, a pedagogy that is oriented towards granting agency to the more-than-human in dance and movement education.

MELT melts and molds together different influences and practices. The study of permaculture, the Skinner Releasing Technique of Joan Skinner, physical work in farming, and ecosomatic practices are some of the elements that are brought together, along with an intention to play and experiment.

Could we approach the pedagogy of dance through a sense of humbleness?

Could dance e-merge from the ground and spread beyond individuality?

Dance liquefies and becomes recomposed as a place of intimacy and, at the same time, discourse.

MELT has been developing through research and practice since 2023 in workshops, residencies, retreats, and festivals.

Vasiliki Tsagkari has been working on her own dance pedagogy, MELT, since 2022. She is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique (introductory) since 2017.

Losing Ground™

a tangible approach to Otherness

a partnering, moving and sensing practice, for those that want to explore a shifting togetherness through listening and being listened

an occasion to listen with your skin, what exists beyond it

Losing Ground™ is the result of long movement research into improvisation, co-movement, touch, empathy and consent. An original practice in couples with the basic working condition of the closed eyes of one body and the feeling of touch as a moving stimulus.

Our practice’s research has been driven by a deep curiosity to what consensual movement is and how that reflects on partnering practices, co-decisioning and togetherness. In this practice the roles have joint responsibility but also freedom of choice and the goal is not to manipulate, puppeteer or imitate, but to co-move while co-decisioning.

As a result we access a movement exploration that contains all the dynamics of our bodily memory without us being trapped in it, while enriching our moving experience through the encounter with our partner and the new system of two.

Being part of this togetherness, and while practicing trust and receptivity, the two bodies have the opportunity to explore different movement qualities and speeds, to experience space differently, to move their main axis off balance and in positions that without each other would not be possible to reach.

Our approach is based on questions in the form of scores, active observation and deep listening through which we want to inspire a unique communication code for each pare that will allow it to gradually co-move more and more complexly, freely and joyfully.

The more one delves into the practice the more can trust their self and others, transmute and transcend unnecessary movement patterns and mind habits into useful ones, and enjoy a mindful dance that is not overanalyzing things.

What to expect . . .

• exercises in pairs with eyes closed

• verbal, non-intrusive instructions adapted to each case

• physical contact only between participants with discreet guidance and supervision

• movement improvisation and exploration

• games that activate proprioception and kinesthesia

• sharing circles in a non-judgmental environment

Ideal for anyone who wants to . . .

• share a unique dance practice and experience

• explore and develop their communication on a non-verbal level

• explore a different way of dance communication

• to be fed back from an internal information system while working alongside a partner

• try a safe framework of self-expression and exploration through contact with another person

Kyveli Kouvatsi & Yorgos Sioras Deligiannis are movement educators and dance artists, based in Athens and Lefkada, Greece. They have been working together on Losing Ground™ since 2020.