This year classes with Julija Melnik (France), Kristaps Ditke (Latvia) and others. More info soon!
Essential Touch. Contact improvisation allows us to become sensitive again in our touch. This is the sense that most people have to develop more, because it is atrophied. We have to learn to touch again. Because the skin is what connects us to others. It is the organ of the relationship par excellence, beyond all the others.
In this class we will awaken our skin and mind and become more attentive to the quality of our touch, in order to develop it. We will also seek for what is beyond the touch.
We will be surprised by the dance that is born from this approach.
Julija Melnik lives in France, grew up in Vilnius, is a researcher of various dance worlds and has a master’s degree in education. Since 2006 teaches contact improvisation (CI), giving the impuls and acting as a driving force to the formation of CI communities in the Baltic States, especially in Lithuania. She studied CI with many international-level teachers, including CI pioneers in the USA.
Julia also transmits the sacred dances of G. I. Gurdjieff, Samara Yoga, the principles of Argentine tango. She is a constellator based on I. Lahore method, a specialist in energy techniques, meditation and body work, and is currently learning to teach the basics of healthy and vegetarian cooking. Julia is an educator, traveler, gardener and seeker of truth.
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The game of opposite qualities. The class will aim to discover spaces offered by opposite qualities in a multi-layered human experience interface – lightness and weight fullness, focus and playfulness, trust and responsibility, listening and expressing. Enhancing activity of the mind during the process of movement by giving the meaning and interpretation for the improvisation process. Bringing in the mind as a tool to be taken into the play, as a partner and another floor to spring from. First of all finding the conversation within yourself and then finding out what happens with the message under influence of weather from outer.
Kristaps Ditke (Latvia). Since 2007 Kristaps has started his embodiment awareness journey through learning and teaching Yoga and breathing techniques under one of the world’s largest volunteer-based non profit The Art Of Living. In 2015 thanks to meeting with Antonio Cargnello he found Contact Improvisation. Since then the intentional dance discovery of Kristaps has been touched by somatics, contemporary dance, aerial silks, acrobatics, martial arts, dance improvisation and nature based learning approaches as well as many teachers from them few the most impactful – Antonio Cargnello, Julia Melnik, Charlie Morrissey, Inese Upe, Asaf Bachrach. He has found dance and particularly CI as an essential and complementary tool for spreading human values and joy.
– The values that movement and dance most clearly reveal for me are clarity in communication, playfulness and celebration of being alive, awareness of our borders and limits, interconnectedness and spirituality, education about our physicality and wellbeing.-
Vilnius Contact Improvisation & Performance Minifestival 