INTENSIVES

Swan Aleon

Truth me not

Welcome to an immersive journey where we fuse applied theatre, embodied mindfulness, and creative imagination to explore what is true and false. Through introspective, interactive, and imaginal exercises, we’ll challenge received ideas and tap into deeper levels of awareness and connection. Drawing on tools from applied theatre and authentic relating, we’ll cultivate empathy and embrace vulnerability to share our stories and experience within a safe, supportive, and caring environment. We’ll explore truths and falsehoods from a variety of nuanced perspectives, seeking honesty more than certainty. Our intention is to widen our felt understanding and poetic sensibility to these concepts and perhaps find a level of authenticity that lies beyond the true/false dichotomy.

Anir Leben

Co-Liberating the Truth of Aliveness – A CI Jam Laboratory

There is no such thing as “the truth”, in my humble evaluation of my thus far lived life.
There’s only always the reality of which it refers to.

If we, as playful, intricate, desire-driven or -avoiding creatures that often lost their sense of aliveness in the wild web of the digital world, try to navigate via our “authenticity”, we often end up choosing one out of many inner truths without ever fully being aware of it. In this LAB we are researching ways to find and navigate from one reference place: the aliveness in the moving me, you and we-space.

What happens if we play and navigate with what we find and come out of the subtlest fight, flight, freeze and fawn tendencies of our Nervous System?Can we liberate each other to dance from this place? To “co-liberate” the truth of aliveness and follow it? Gently, full-heartedly, curious and open? How does our dance and interaction with the world change when we do that?

Be ready to explore Contact Improvisation with Jam-Score inputs that research aliveness in different shapes and forms: texture, speed, sensuality, permission, play and pleasure within different contexts in the me, you and we-realities. My intention is to inspire and contain a pleasurable LAB that’s infused with the fun of questioning, finding and expanding the embodied meaning of attuning to aliveness.

Basic Skills in CI prerequired.

Lian and Andrea with the Pleasure Catalysts

True pleasure, false limits: exploring pain and deeper sensations

We will explore together the conscious use of pain in bodywork and sensual play, and its integration and interplay with pleasure. What is the truth in sensations? How much of what we experience of pain and pleasure is cloaked by culture, education and fear? We will journey together into the emotional, sensorial, and erotic dimensions of touch, from core techniques and safety measures, progressing to advanced methods and integrations. We will learn to evoke specific sensations for relaxation, pleasure, or emotional release.

Sessions blend theory, demonstration, and practice and focus on a different pillar of how we can use pain for exploring our pleasure:

Intro: pain and pleasure manual techniques – we start setting the basis for how to safely, consensually and strategically use our hands as a means to trigger different points on the body.
Deep relaxation – Integrating the learned techniques into a setting that explores pain as a means to induce a state of deep relaxation and nervous system unwinding.
Emotional release- exploring pain as a means to access and possibly transform deeply rooted psychosomatic emotions we store in our bodies. Sensual/Sexual Exploration – creating new connections between pain and sexual pleasure in a consensual, pleasurable and trusting framework so bodies can “melt/tense or use physical impact and pressure towards enhancing sexual pleasure”.

SINGLE CLASSES

Alma∞Omega

Sensing the Hungers, Dancing with Desires

A Open Floor Embodied Dance Lab – Throughout our lives, our needs, hungers and desires for various levels of contact and intimacy are CONSTANTLY changing–and yet!  It is a living art-form to sense and feel what is authentic and true–in this moment–and to move in the direction of this ever-changing, ever-unfolding truth.

We’ll be focusing on the 4 hungers of relational contact: Dancing/moving/sensing the ever unfolding hungers for Solitude, Contact:  focusing on true, Belonging:  to a Community, Group, Culture, wider field, Spirit: the relationship with that which is beyond, the unnameable, whatever that personally reveals itself to be for. In this embodied-dance-lab, we’ll invite these ever-changing hungers to MOVE, DANCE, take up SPACE.

OPEN FLOOR is a somatic and movement meditation practice – physical, sensual, pleasurable and rich in knowledge. It brings self-awareness, mindfulness, and purpose to life. It helps us to reconnect with the wisdom of our body and heart. It deepens the connection to yourself, your relationships and the world around you. Open Floor integrates therapeutic, creative and spiritual approaches with free movement.

Justi Tutti Gusti (Justyna)

Burlesco Wacko- The Shadow Mask

Burlesco Wacko is a sexy & wacky show-off extravaganza! We invite the absurd, queer, exaggerated, and dark, to empower our seductive self-expression through dance, theatre and performance. Within a safe space, you will be guided to discover your seductive wacko and celebrate uniqueness. The performative nature of sexuality becomes a creative playground, from which we can learn about desires and fears. Allowing oneself to be seen and witnessing others, is a powerful experience of acceptance and freedom.

In this session, we will invite our shadows, ghosts and freaks to step forward. We’ll enter a wardrobe of inner mysteries and pull out dusty archetypes. A mask is an invitation to be shamelessly genuine. A clown is permission to expose your wickedness and insecurities. How can we know the wholeness of our authenticity, if we haven’t given a stage to the wild and the wicked? We will meet those inner wackos and peek at how they may shape our understanding of pleasure, intimacy and sexuality. Maybe we’ll even want to spontaneously invite them to perform during T&P? The workshop will culminate with the new DIY genitalia orgy- the desire will reach new levels of absurdity and creativity!

Mona-Bawani Mühlhausen

The moaning experiment

How does your breath sound? How does your heartbeat sound? How does your voice sound? Your movements? Your moaning? Your orgasm?
In this workshop we will explore the erotic of sound. By Using blindfolds we will dive into the erotic world of listening. Is it true or is it fake what we here? Have you ever faked the sound of an orgasm? Fake it till you make it. Here you can softly play with listening and creating physical sounds and discover how you like it.
By guided exercises we will use our breath, our voice and a database of recorded orgasms to create an erotic anonymous soundscape together. We will make it comfortable and listen to each other and ourselves.
In this workshop there will be no sexual contact between participants by Touch but maybe by listening…

Jamus Wood

Where Are We Coming From?  –  The nervous system and rope play

An exploration of listening through touch, rope and breath.

In this workshop we will explore the nervous system inquiries from Body Mind Centering®️, which will soften the nervous system and bring a sense of equilibrium to our bodies. This allows us to dive deeper into our authentic self. From here we will introduce the rope and a sense of playful exploration.

In the festival there can be a lot of experiencing, stretching of ourselves and our nervous systems and, at times, we can become activated. This workshop is designed to bring balance, both to ourselves, and our relationships, and to give some love to our nervous systems. How is it to enter a dance, a play, from a real rested place in the nervous system where curiosity, interest and capacity can direct our flow?

The rope can have the gift of offering a deep sense of trust, safety and holding. So in these two hours of exploring we will take time to move from Body Mind Centering®️ inquiries into rope play. Once again inviting the pause, nuanced movement, and touch.

We look at a chair and think: chair. We look at a person or a group of people, and think: they look like they are interested, she must come from this background, he must be very popular. But, is this really true?

Beata Absalon

Not giving a fuck

One can feel sorry for sex. It could be a refuge for mutual nourishments and wonderfully inefficient craziness – but it has become a cramped project that absolutely has to succeed so that we too can be considered successful. 

In search for de-stressing, we’ll take a culturally and historically informed look at the secluded but only supposed opposite side of sexuality: asexuality, celibacy and “dysfunctions”, which gleefully refuse obedience to sexual duty and open up to luxurious pleasures of queer failure.

In this workshop we will make ourselves super comfy to honestly exchange about our own experiences of feeling pressure in the sex positive scene. Beata will read some translated excerpts from her book about the need  for a feminist revolution, that not only embraces free sexual expression but also a free expression of impotence, listlessness and weariness. We will wrap our discussion up with some embodied play of being mediocre lovers – and that’s good enough!

Manu

How things are, with Social Presencing Theater

We look at a chair and think: chair. We look at a person or a group of people, and think: they look like they are interested, she must come from this background, he must be very popular. But, is this really true? 

This session is a play with simple improvised movements and gestures and an exploration of  our awareness and attention. It’s about the realization of how many layers of reality we can shed by looking at the world with fresh eyes, listening with all our senses. Listening to all that has not been said, to all that can not be heard, but that actually matters.

Social Presencing Theater, a new synthesis between movement, embodied presence, dialogue, and stillness. It is not “theater” in the conventional sense, but it uses simple body postures and movements to dissolve limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition and to make visible both current reality, and the deeper – often invisible – leverage points for creating profound change.

RITUALS

Janina Vivianne

4 Elements Sensual Space

Embark on a journey of sensual exploration in this Sensual Space. This Ritual of Connection begins with connecting games designed to deepen intimacy and explore the qualities of touch associated with the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water, and Air.
Following these interactive activities, six distinct spaces open up for the rest of the ritual.

Alma∞Omega and Christa Cocciole

Embodied-Grief-Temple: Making Sanctuary inside the Cracks

The depths of our grief and our gratitude for this wild-slippery-life are so deeply intertwined–and yet–in most modern cultural landscapes, we are (mostly) left carrying these dynamic forces in isolation…Sandwich that together with the increase in polarity, separation, poly-crisis’ & lack of communal spaces to feel, attune, release, together, and the vacuum becomes almost too much to bear…the raw, tender, complex landscapes of communal grief tending & embodied-ritual-space is calling the broken pieces to the circle & to the cracks: to mend, to move, to honor, to hold, to release, to witness…as an act of embodied-activism & source of Sanctuary for these broken-open times.

Grief is a form of protest.
It refuses to live numb and small.
Francis Weller

In this sacred container of the Grief Temple, we will ignite our communal birthright to gather: honoring the various textures/colors of the grief & deep care that we carry in the marrow of our soul bones. Held by earth-based-ritual, embodied-activation & room for the Unknown, let’s communally build a living shrine to our broken open hearts, give generous soul offerings, and tend these cracks with truth, beauty & care.

DAILY OFFERINGS

Barbara Bess

Placing

In the early morning we will go for a ritualistic walk to (re)visit a specific individual place.
Before walking individually we tune in as a group with somatic practice and awakening touches. Day by day there will be another focus and idea how to treat, approach and heal in relation to the fascia of body and the surrounding structures of the land.
Every day there can be co – creations on the path with plants, elements and animals. In the last session we are sharing our individual altars in a performative ritual walk.