Being Touch Festival - Third / GAP Edition
a Radical Journey into Contact Improvisation
with Anya Cloud
October 31st - November 3rd, 2024
Cascina Martelli - Reano (Turin, Italy)
While we are preparing our next sparkling edition of the full Being Touch Festival in Summer 2025, we wanted to meet the many people who asked us for a possibility to continue the research with Anya Cloud, so we created this GAP edition in Autumn 2024.
Our point of interest is Contact Improvisation as a radical approach to the change, as a revolution. A revolution of the senses, of presence and of relational dynamics with others and with the world around. A social and personal change, a space that generates questions and offers time to research together.
The approach of the Being Touch Festival is to offer the best conditions to enjoy the rich and challenging material offered by the teacher, without overloading the participants with other classes and concepts, but leaving all the time and space needed to make it their own, develop it, integrate it with exchanges and discussions, and of course lots of dancing.
We wholeheartedly rely on the invaluable, inspired and original work of Anya Cloud to continue our radical journey into Contact Improvisation that has been guiding us for 3 years now.
Practical Infos
DATES: From October 31st to November 3rd 2024, arriving on 31st afternoon and leaving on 3rd after lunch
WHERE: in a beautiful farmhouse called Cascina Martelli in Reano (Turin, northern Italy)
PROGRAM: 16 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: vegan with vegetarian options
COST: Sleeping on floor mats on a parquet floor: 280€ - Sleeping in bed in shared rooms for 4-6 people: 320€ - Costs all included (workshop, meals, accomodation)
We are willing to support a maximum of 5 Ukrainians and BIPOC/Queer/Trans dancers, write us to
REGISTRATION: registration page
CONTACT:
ANYA CLOUD
Softly Hardcore
This Contact Improvisation workshop will research strategies for cultivating queer wildness in our dancing bodies.
We will research power sources, power centers, and power systems. We will work with Contact Improvisation as a queer ant-racist high-risk practice that can activate bravery, collective care, chaos, transformation, specificity, accountability, and more.
I will offer Contact Improvisation skills and approaches that can go in many directions toward magnificent and unwieldy dancing. We will insist on queering what we think we know. Material from Feldenkrais® and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu will support and complicate our research of Contact Improvisation.
We will modulate states of being from very quiet things to roaringly exhausting things. We will sweat in order to become more tender and we will get curious about what is possible together through tenderness.
How can we be specific, astute, complex, and visceral? What can we do together that we cannot do alone?
We will work with clarity of anatomical/energetic connectivity to form, state, and agency. We will question and we will play.
There will be tangible practical material and ridiculous intangible material. Clarity of consent, boundaries, and communication will be key.
We will be all in all the time in ways that always facilitate having options.
Let’s deeply sensitize and activate our dancing capacities as humans from many different orientations.
Let’s keep finding strategies to be softly hardcore.
We will DANCE.
Bio Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am originally from Alaska, and currently living between Berlin and Colorado. As a queer white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Intersectional collaboration is central to my work.
I have been practicing contact improvisation for over 20 years and regularly teach, practice, and perform internationally in festivals, communities, and institutions.
I orient with contact improvisation as a fundamentally queer form. As an experimental dance artist, I am devoted to practicing, researching, teaching, and performing experimental contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and somatics through anti-oppression methodologies.
My work has been produced/supported by Movement Research at the Judson, Tanzfabrik, Dock 11, Workshop Foundation, ImPulsTanz, freeskewl, La MaMa, Los Angeles Performance Practice, REDCAT, Tanzquartier, SFD+I, WCCI Jam, The Field Center, What You See Festival, and Guatemala Department of Culture among others.
I co-direct The Love Makers Company, a project-based experimental dance company, with Makisig Akin. I have worked with and/or performed for Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark Smith, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Karen Nelson, 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
