Interfusion Festival X (IFX)

How does your identity influence how you show up in your day-to-day life and at Interfusion Festival? The goal of the Disability Gathering Circle is for participants to share their experiences and their ancestral knowledge, access tools for self-care and heart-to-heart communication, and engage in collective healing. This group is open to individuals who identify as Disabled (Perceptively or Imperceptibly) and are seeking a decolonized therapeutic space.

🌶️  Mild: The workshop does not invite sensuality or sexuality. There will be no facilitator invitations to cuddle or share moving touch, plus no welcoming or invoking of sexual energy. Any partner dancing that occurs will default to or center open position.

Join us for three sessions where we'll explore, learn, and grow together in Contact Improvisation. Whether you're new to this dance form or looking to deepen your skills, these sessions will provide a supportive space for discovery and development.

We'll focus on enhancing our understanding of Contact Improvisation*, aiming to foster a greater sense of openness and ease in our movements, paying attention to the improvisational and relational skills involved in the practice, for authentic and in-depth exploratory processes.

We'll explore the biomechanics underlying Contact Improvisation dancing, through somatic explorations, enhancing our technical proficiency. Furthermore, we'll explore expanding our presence and refining our sensory listening and attention skills. This will establish a spacious canvas of shared awareness, serving as the foundation of our being together, that facilitates new ways of relating, expressing and collaborating safely in a non-verbal way. Before doing and wanting we want to emphasize our ability to be and to participate, connecting and nourishing a common ground, from which the emergence of our creative embodiments and synergy of voices can happen.

We foster a welcoming space, devoid of judgment and expectation, a secure container that embraces diverse expressions and embodiments, enabling agency and consensual interactions, towards presence, creative discovery, and dancing.

Day 1: We will explore the possibility of anchoring our movements in clear yet dynamic “roots”, which allows for the emergence of definition and stability while liberating a wide range of possibilities and effortless motion when improvising with a partner in contact.

Day 2: Our focus will be on aerial alignments that support our body's structure, facilitating weight sharing and enabling graceful suspensions and gentle flights.

Day 3: We will play developing creative dances emphasizing the dynamic interplay between kinaesthetic elements and individual creative expression. Intuitively meeting the others, synchronizing and creatively co-creating embodied dialogues.

To get the full benefit of Irene’s facilitation and support the possibility of an in-depth development of the process we suggest you attend all three sessions.  

* In CONTACT IMPROVISATION we move with one or more partners, relating and understanding each other through sensory listening without adhering to fixed sequences and roles. We learn to physically relate and communicate through fine-tuning and touch, dynamically traveling together through space, and combining our bodies closely, exploring all levels from standing to the floor. This practice encompasses solo, partnering, and group dancing, fostering creative skills through embodied and sensorial connections.

🌶️ 🌶️  Medium: The workshop invites sensuality, moving touch, cuddles, or extended close physical contact with others, but does NOT invite sexuality or nudity.

Brazilian Zouk social dance party