Contemplative Dance Practice
WED 12/3 | 20.00 | SKÅNES DANSTEATER
&
MON 16/3 | 18.00 | ALMA SÖDERBERG STUDIO
Created by dancer and professor Barbara Dilley at Naropa College in New York, integrating Buddhist Practice with dance improvisation CDP is a simple format of 20 min meditation, 20 min solo moving, and 20 min moving through relating. It is a beautiful way of moving mindfully, finding your own physicality and desires in the dance and bringing a grounded awareness into relating. We will offer this every week during the festival as a way of integrating all the information we receive in the workshops.
Contemplative Dance Practice is an embodied approach to movement rooted in awareness, presence, and deep listening. Blending improvisation with meditative attention, it invites dancers to slow down, tune inward, and allow movement to arise from sensation rather than intention.
The practice cultivates sensitivity to breath, gravity, weight, and subtle internal impulses. Rather than focusing on shape or performance, it emphasizes process—how movement emerges, shifts, dissolves, and connects. Silence, stillness, and spaciousness are as valued as action.
Drawing from contemplative traditions and postmodern dance lineages, Contemplative Dance Practice supports clarity of attention, relational awareness, and compositional subtlety. Participants engage with themselves, the environment, and others through attuned presence, allowing each dance to unfold organically.
In a festival context, this offering creates a shared field of quiet exploration—an invitation to experience dance as inquiry, as meditation, and as a living conversation between body, space, and time.
Contact Improvisation Jam
SUN MAR 1 | 18.00
DANSCENTRUM SYD STORA STUDION
&
SUN MAR 15 | 18.00
BARNENS SCEN
A dance jam is like a music jam, but in this situation with Contact Improvisation as the practice. Through class or workshops you learn the form and in the jam you practice it.
A Contact Improvisation Jam is an open, collective space for spontaneous movement exploration rooted in the practice of Contact Improvisation. Dancers gather to move together without set choreography, following shared principles of touch, weight-sharing, momentum, listening, and responsiveness.
Originating in the 1970s through the work of Steve Paxton and others, Contact Improvisation explores how bodies communicate through physical contact—rolling, leaning, lifting, falling, and supporting one another in real time. A jam provides a container for this practice to unfold organically.
There are no assigned partners and no formal audience; participants move in and out of dances as they feel called. The space encourages curiosity, consent, awareness, and mutual care. Music may or may not be present, and periods of quiet observation are welcome.
At this festival, the jam offers a dynamic, inclusive environment for connection and creative discovery—where experienced practitioners and newcomers alike can share in the evolving conversation of movement.
Focused jam
WED MAR 18 | 20.00 | ALMA SÖDERBERG STUDIO
A Focused Contact Improvisation Jam is an open improvisational space guided by a shared theme, question, or compositional framework. While rooted in the core principles of Contact Improvisation—touch, weight-sharing, momentum, and embodied listening—the “focus” offers a subtle container that shapes the collective exploration.
The focus may highlight a particular element such as rolling point of contact, spirals, lifts and counterbalance, use of voice, spatial composition, or states of attention. Rather than directing outcomes, it invites dancers to deepen inquiry and refine perception within a shared field of practice.
Originating from the work of Steve Paxton and the evolving global Contact Improvisation community, this form supports both research and performance awareness. Participants move in and out of dances freely, while staying in relationship to the agreed theme.
At this festival, the Focused Jam offers a space for heightened clarity, intentional play, and collective discovery—where improvisation becomes both study and spontaneous composition.
Community Grief Practice
SUN MAR 22 | 10.00 | DANSCENTRUM SYD STORA STUDION
How do we deal with grief, loss and healing collectively? Can we gather and together relearn how to care in community? Can we have a look at our cultural patterns and together create new ones?
Introduction:
Camille Sapara Barton, author of the book ‘Tending Grief’:
“… I became aware how little space there is in our Western societies for anyone to process feelings that do not support productivity.
[…]
Grief tending is not the answer to all of our social challenges. […] However, I do believe that tending grief, loss, and lament; reconnecting with these cycles of life, love, and death that are present in our waking days, is essential to come back into right relationship with the world we are a part of and the more-than-human kin we share our home with.
[…]
Grief is not the opposite of joy, but the opposite of indifference. Grief and love are different sides of the same coin.
[…]
Let us reclaim our feelings, compost the numbness, and move towards full aliveness.”
Structure:
We will mainly be doing practical exercises of embodiment and rituals through movement and sound. We might also read something out loud from a book, reflect and converse.
In these 2-3 hours I won’t have any answers but questions and longings. I will bring the book ‘Tending Grief’ by Camille Sapara Barton which offers different grief rituals, as well as some other book on Spiritual Activism. Then we’ll together create the courage to tend to our grief in one way or another. Nothing specific is expected from you and has to happen. Showing up is enough.
Who is welcome:
It is important that we all make an effort to create a safe space in gathering to practice. A safe space for women, queers, lgbtqa+, bipoc folks, folks with disability, but also white cis-men are welcome to be here; no one will be turned down unless you are discriminating or overstepping boundaries. However, safety is not the same as comfortability; we might not feel comfortable at all times.
(Also, there will be a dog in the space. Please write to me if you are allergic and I’ll try to figure something out.)
Comment from me, Tuva Hildebrand:
I am both interested in gathering to together face the loss and violence which has happened on the literal earth and soil we stand on (Malmö/Skåne/Sweden); the hurt and violence which is a part of our bodies through our lived life and ancestry; the separation from the more-than-human and other violent relations between us and the other, through colonization, industrialism, the rise of capitalism, patriarchy, the institutional church and the witch processes.
Everyone is holding their own grief, and I wonder if moving through this grief together can be a way to restore and find strength to create a society with less violence in it. As well as access more joy, love and celebration of life. We cannot act or feel the strength to show care for one another or the land that feeds us when we are numb, frozen and repress our grief. To grieve is not to stay in the darkness, but move through and mourn to access life force again. I am within this practice currently interested in the terms Spritual Activism, Political Somatics and Radical Care.
The Underscore
SUN MAR 22 | 17.30 | DANSCENTRUM SYD STORA STUDION
The Underscore is a foundational improvisational structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith as a framework for practicing and performing Contact Improvisation. Both a research tool and a performance score, it offers a detailed progression through distinct states of awareness—beginning with solo attunement and expanding into relational, spatial, and ensemble engagement.
Rather than prescribing fixed choreography, the Underscore invites dancers into a shared field of listening. Through phases such as arrival, kinesphere exploration, engagement, development, and resolution, participants navigate shifting physical and perceptual landscapes. The score cultivates heightened sensitivity to weight, momentum, touch, and the subtle currents of group dynamics.
Used internationally for over four decades, the Underscore supports dancers in deepening compositional awareness while remaining rooted in embodied presence. Each iteration is unique—an emergent performance shaped by attention, risk, and collective intelligence.
At this festival, the Underscore will unfold as a live, open improvisational experience, inviting both performers and witnesses into a dynamic practice of discovery, connection, and shared creativity.
RESHUFFLING RELATIONS 