Contact-impro-tango - Of Lightness and Ground
weekend 12 – 13 April 2025
Movement and dance workshop and an unrepeatable experience on different levels of perception. Return to the body that is created for movement, passion and diversity.
A workshop where we will get to the essence of contact improvisation and tango. A workshop where you are not bound by steps, shapes or effort to adapt to your partner. A workshop where you will discover a dynamic changing relationship with the ground. You will learn how to draw strength from it and allow it to flow freely through your body and lift it into movement. You will discover lightness that grows the better you can direct yourself towards the ground. You will learn to perceive gravity through touch and arrange your body so that each interaction with the ground brings new energy into your or your partner’s movement.
You will discover that movements and figures don’t need to be known or learned, that they arise from natural simple impulses and soon you find yourself in the flow of dance that returns to your nature everything that you have been missing so far. We will create a richer and liberating way of dance: open physical expression that activates natural movement possibilities and is freed from superficial rules.
Contact improvisation and tango is a range of diverse movements that are neither routine nor monotonous and are vital for our wellbeing. They also provide an opportunity to use touch as a tool of communication. They expand perception of oneself and the other. They allow us to be creative, playful and grounded and search for a path to harmony.
We will rediscover our own body that has been shaped by movement and created for movement for millennia. A body that longs for constant changes and finds new energy in movement that nourishes it. We will gain a different view of the body: let’s start perceiving its shapes and movements as a result of relationships to gravity, space and partner and as a result of our movement intentions. In such a concept of movement, we can develop while enjoying freedom. Instead of control, we focus on sensory perception that guides us precisely and infallibly, allows us to adapt and evokes pleasure from movement.
Workshop for everyone who sees movement and movement creation as a path of knowledge, healing, communication and enrichment of their life experience. Work that seems movement-based and physical has a much broader scope. It allows understanding of one’s physical self, physical relationship with society and nature. Knowledge of biomechanics, somatics and ecology connect in it into the concept of Ecological Body.
No experience is needed with these techniques and no partner is needed. We will get to know dance as organic effective movement. We will nourish the flow of movement between us and our partners. Create together a movement composition that transcends each of us while belonging to both of us. We both influence it at first chaotically and only gradually arrive at harmony.
Javier Cura (Argentina)
Javier Cura is a teacher, visual artist, theater director and movement trainer who has remarkably made his mark in many people’s awareness in the area of movement and dance. He has created many performances in Argentina, Colombia, USA, Italy, Germany and Indonesia. He teaches contact tango, physical theater and contact improvisation internationally. He is an excellent dancer who awakens an irresistible desire to move, dance and express oneself through movement fully.
As a visionary and movement activist, he encourages everyone willing to listen to him to take care of their own vital movement needs. He believes that versatile diverse movement that we reintegrate into our lives has a huge impact on our emotional, physical and mental health as well as on the planet’s ecology. He is currently working on the „Ecological Body“ project together with a UN ecology researcher.
„The main goal of my work is to encourage the student to find connections between: the objective view of the body; (physical elements, body schema: axis, force lines, center of gravity, anatomy etc.) Subjective understanding of the body; (emotional, expressive, creative consciousness and self-perceived body image) and Body in relation to another; (its community, social and spiritual nature). In each workshop, participants are able to connect learned movement activities with their personal creative expression and reclaim them. Anything that participants perceive and experience in the ephemeral context of the workshop can be and often is transferred to the outside world, to their personal social context. This enriches the dance of everyday life.“
The workshop takes place in Prague.
Most participants register individually, it is not necessary to register as a couple.
The workshop is intensive: Saturday and Sunday 9:30 – 17:30, it is open to everyone regardless of age or movement experience.
Price 175 EUR. To reserve a place the deposit of 55 EUR must be paid in advance.
