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A Queer High-Risk Love Practice (AQHRLP)
August 7, 2024 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
A QUEER HIGH RIST LOVE PRACTICE
The core of this contact improvisation workshop is a queer love centered survival practice of time travel/communion/habitat/performance/ritual where everything deserves to breathe. Drawing from our individual and collective identities, CI research, and choreographic research we dive into the possibilities of what rigorous and playful contact improvisation can be. We will work with different qualities/types of touch, intention and impact, technical skill building, falling and falling together, bonding/grappling/napping/fainting, soul shaking practices, professing love, failure, and hot sweaty dancing. We will work in different constellations including solo, duet, trio, small group, and whole group. We will take on contact improvisation as a generous and high-risk practice. We will build skills for navigating around that which has potential to be fatal. We will work with a kind of bonding that is only possible through bathing in one another’s sweat. We will keep re-inventing ways to be wet and pleased. The central questions of our research are: What can we do together that we cannot do alone? How many ways can we move – move with – be moved by – each other? What is possible when love is stronger than fear?
We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with one another. This will be a queer, trans, and BIPoC centered space.
ANYA CLOUD + MAKISIG AKIN
Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; collaboration is central. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics nationally and internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Schule, ImPuls Tanz, Freiburg Contact Festival, Israeli Contact Improvisation Festival, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Italy Contact Festival, The Field Center, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among other. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder and am trained in the Feldenkrais® Method. www.anyacloud.com
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I have been practicing Contact Improvisation for 13 years and have taught in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, Being Touch Festival and The Field Center among others. My orientation to CI is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. www.makisigakin.com
Photo by Tim Richards.