The initiative cares about keeping our relations to our lineage, international colleagues and elder pioneers alive and strong. We are curious in how we can allow more in-depth knowledge within somatic to reach Sweden, how we can strengthen our local communities and create spaces where both practitioners and participants experience somatic dance practice on a high quality level, as well as with social critical awareness.

Through classes, workshops, performances, lectures, festivals, and collective practices, we cultivate spaces where embodied knowledge, artistic experimentation, and community can flourish. We support movement as a way of learning, creating, relating, and imagining new possibilities for living together.

By engaging with historical and contemporary practices within somatic movement practices and improvisation, we contribute to the ongoing evolution of these fields while acknowledging those who came before us.

The people in our lineage that have inspired us to create this organisation are the founders of Movement Research (NYC), Independent Dance (London), Ponderosa (outside Berlin) and directly our teachers Eva Karczag, K.J. Holmes, Stephanie Skura, Charlotte Darbyshire, Tony Thatcher, Nina Martin, Jeanine Durning among others – and the practitioners they are shaped by such as Trisha Brown, Marjorie Barstow, Pytt Geddes, André Bernard, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Joan Skinner, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, and more.

Through attention to sensation, perception, touch, breath, and movement, we cultivate a deeper relationship with ourselves, others, and our environments. Somatic practices offer tools for inquiry, creativity, learning, health and care, inviting us to experience the body as a source of knowledge and transformation in relation to the world.

The term somatics was introduced by Thomas Hanna in the 1970s to describe practices that study the body as it is experienced from within. Hanna used the word soma—from the Greek meaning “the living body”—to distinguish embodied, first-person experience from the body viewed solely as an object of scientific observation. The field emerged through the work of pioneering practitioners including F. Matthias Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Elsa Gindler, Charlotte Selver, Gerda Alexander, and Ida Rolf, whose approaches explored awareness, movement, perception, touch, and the relationship between body and environment. Today, somatic practice encompasses a diverse range of movement, therapeutic, artistic, and educational traditions that support embodied learning and inquiry.

Improvisation is a rigorous artistic discipline that includes ideas within philosophy, psychology, ecology and poetry among other themes. Improvisation develops attentiveness, trust, imagination, non-verbal communication and the capacity to meet the unknown with curiosity and presence.

We want to create space for professional artists and non-professional artists to develop performative practices in a safe environment where they dare to take risks. We invite artists that works through improvisational structures and somatic practices as methods within choreographic inquiry. Choreography as a process of organizing attention, movement, space, and relationships, where performance becomes a site for encounter, critical reflection, investigation, communication, ritual and shared experience.

Through artistic, somatic and improvisational practices, one can cultivate awareness of our interconnection to landscapes, materials, seasons, and the living environments that sustain us. How we touch and are touched by the world we inhabit; how we form and are formed by the world we inhabit.

We want this platform to hold conversations and practices of care, inclusion, collective responsibility, and the ongoing questioning of dominant structures and assumptions. As somatic practices easily becomes a privilege to experience, we want to find ways to share it with a broad audience. We want to create environments where marginalised groups such as queers, differently abled people, traumatised bodies, people from the global majority and economically disadvantaged people feel safety and belonging.

from contemporary research into embodiment, nervous-system regulation, rehabilitation, and preventive care, to older traditions that view movement, breath, attention, and awareness as essential dimensions of wellbeingWe understand health as a dynamic process of relationship—between body and mind, self and environment, individual and community. Our approach is informed by somatic traditions that recognize the body not only as a biological system but also as a source of perception, meaning, resilience, and lived experience.

We are inspired by practitioners such as Miranda Tufnell, whose pioneering work within the NHS explored how movement, imagination, touch, and creative expression can complement medical care by supporting people’s capacity to connect with themselves, others, and the challenges of illness, recovery, and change. Her work points toward a more holistic understanding of health—one that values subjective experience alongside clinical knowledge.

For us, health is not simply the absence of disease. It is the cultivation of awareness, adaptability, vitality, and meaningful connection. Through movement, improvisation, and collective practice, we create spaces where people can deepen their relationship to themselves and participate in cultures of care that support both individual and collective wellbeing.

Through shared practice, conversation, and collective experience, we nurture environments of mutual learning, support, and belonging. We believe that knowledge, wellbeing, and social political transformatiom is created not only individually but through the relationships we build with one another.