WE ARE VERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THE FIRST CONTACT IMPROVISATION FESTIVAL IN SLOVAKIA 🩵
COME AND JOIN US IN WATER AND LAND DANCING IN THE BEAUTIFUL VENUE SURROUNDED BY NATURE
OUR VISION
Float~in contact improvisation festival is a pilot project in Slovakia. Our wish is to place our country on the European map of contact improvisation and create another space where people from different backgrounds can study CI together on the many levels that this dance form could offer. Our intention is to connect the international CI community with the forming and growing CI community in Slovakia.
Our main vision is to offer an inclusive space for all dancers with different experience, different levels (including newbies) or different gifts and thus provide a safe space in which we are all equal. We would like to offer a festival which is like a vivid organism that needs its every part to make a whole, where every part is as valuable as the most visible one. We also make it a point to support teachers that we consider to be of a high quality although less known in the international field of CI. Our wish for us all is to support equality, non judgmental approach and inclusivity. We warmly welcome all those who are only at the beginning of their journey with CI as well as those who have already come a long way with this form of dance. May we together co-create a safe space where we can share, explore, sense and feel.
An important part of this vision is also to connect with nature and restore the touch with the elements and this is something our beautiful country can offer. Therefore, we are very happy to create conditions for researching CI on land and in water. On land which helps us to find our ground and anchor ourselves, and in water which helps us to release, let go and so float~in the world where we would be not afraid to touch, where we recognize and communicate our boundaries, where the perception of the wisdom of our bodies is a priority, where we are open to unexpected, where we share respect, practice support and care for each other.
FLOAT~IN is kids and pets friendly festival :)
ARE YOU NEW TO CONTACT IMPOVISATION?
"Through Contact Improvisation, we discover the poetry of touch and the power of presence." - Karen Nelson
In the early 1970s, Steve Paxton and his group of fellow dancers began experimenting with weight giving, falling, rolling and jumping in dance improvisation, combining elements of martial arts, acrobatics, dance and yoga to create a postmodern dance called contact improvisation. It is an improvised dance of two or more dancers trying to maintain a point of physical contact between their bodies, dancing fast or slow, using rolls and weight sharing, often accompanied by so-called lifts. The music is seen as an additional partner rather than setting the driving rhythm. It is often danced without it or the music is created by the movement of the dancers. What is interesting and very valuable about contact improvisation is that it forces you to be present in the moment. The reward is an intense inspiration of your movement vocabulary and enabling movements you could not achieve without a partner. Sometimes contact improvisation is performed to an audience, however, the mutual touch has a very wide range of intensity and precise shape that is not apparent from the outside, which is why the magic of contact improvisation often remains between the dancers.
"In Contact Improvisation, we trust our body's intelligence to guide us through movement exploration." - Steve Paxton