Being Touch Festival - Preview Edition

August 12th - 15th, 2022
Cascina Martelli - Reano (TO)

Being Touch Festival is a new proposal for research and study in which somatic disciplines meet with Contact Improvisation: we believe that this imprint can give the body that dances in communication with the other a new and powerful attitude of awareness and proprioception. In this first taste and preview of what the Festival will be, we bring to Italy the beautiful intense work of Anya Cloud:

Cultivating Radical Aliveness:
Showing Up into Feldenkrais® into Contact Improvisation into ?

Utilizing Contact Improvisation, Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement®, self-touch, and conversation we will research ways of showing up, individually and collectively, to cultivate radical aliveness. My invitation is that you come with the body you have as the person you are. What can we do together that we cannot do alone?

Together, we will research the intersections between function, technique, and practice; sensation and pattern; subtlety and wildness; touch and no-touch; intention and impact; embodied activism and dance making; self/other and me/we; and the state the current world in relationship with the futures that we long for. We will practice modulating states of being/responding. We will research states that come out of other states. How does something become something else? How can we be nuanced, astute, complex, visceral, and ready? How that can sensitize us toward curiosity, agency, divergence, connection, accountability, and more? We will take on Contact Improvisation as a high-risk practice. We will invite extreme difference through overlapping proposals. What sustainable ecologies of being might be possible? What if all of this can take us into unknown and unimaginable dancing spaces?

I imagine that this will be generative and circuitous in a multiplicity of ways. Within all of my work I prioritize dancing as an ongoing practice of radical independence and responsible citizenship. Please bring your dancing, histories, questions, values, grit, politics, generosity, and brave dancing/human selves into this research.

Practical Infos

DATES: From 12th to 15th August 2022, arriving on 11th afternoon and leaving on 15th afterlunch
WHERE: Cascina Martelli - Reano (Turin, northern Italy)
PROGRAM: 17 hours of training between mornings and afternoons, and Jams every evening
SLEEPING: floor mats on the dancefloor, or bunk beds in shared rooms 4-6pp
FOOD: Vegetarian

Bio Anya Cloud (she/her)

I am originally from Alaska, and currently living in the land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe people in Colorado, USA. As a queer, cis-gender, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; intersectional collaboration is central to my work. I am devoted to practicing, researching, teaching, and performing experimental contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and somatics through anti-oppression methodologies.
I have been practicing contact improvisation for 20 years and regularly teach, practice, and perform internationally recently in Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Iceland, Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary. I orient with contact improvisation as a fundamentally queer form. My work has been produced/supported by Movement Research, Workshop Foundation, freeskewl, Screen Dance Festival Stockholm, La MaMa, Los Angeles PerformancePractice, REDCAT, Tanzquartier, and Guatemala Department of Culture among others. I have worked with and/or performed for Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark Smith, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karen Schaffman, Karen Nelson, Makisig Akin, Mary Pearson, and Nhu Nguyen among others.
I hold an MFA in Dance Theatre and trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under the direction of Elizabeth Beringer. I am currently Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Colorado Boulder. www.anyacloud.com