Teachers (2014 edition)
Aaron Brandes
Brando (Aaron Brandes) teaches CI internationally. He serves on the Board of Directors for Earthdance and has worked with CI programing there since 2005. Brando has been instrumental in creating CI Ground Research, which encourages the ongoing research of contact improvisation by dancers from around the world. He trained with Tom Myers at the KMI Institute and is a certified Fascial Bodywork/Structural Integration practitioner.
[ read more ]
Gabriel Greca
I’m an osteopath, dancer, performer and human being, interested in the interest and how this moves, how it touches the body, the mind, and the space and creates dances; any kind of dance of the attention and perception intrigues me. Influenced mostly by the improvisation and the osteopathy, CI has always been my main practice. The Argentinean scene and the spontaneity of it are one of my biggest influences, the dancers and the long jams there is where my dance emerged; the technique, composition and improvisation classes it’s where I transform myself and massage my brain.
[ read more ]
Heike Pourian
Having taugt CI for more than twenty years, again and again I find it interesting to investigate into new ways of approaching it and making it accessible to all sorts of people. I’ve worked with Ballet companies and pregnant women, with children and adolescents, with people of mixed abilities, for the stage and “just for fun”, in universities and parks – and I’m curious what and who will come next.
[ read more ]
Irene Sposetti & Johan Nilsson
Irene and Johan are two artists in dance and music together teaching, performing and organizing artistic events.
They created Being Motion in 2011, meeting point of their experiences, visions and artistic paths; Being Motion is a platform for research, co-creation and diffusion of their dance practice-www.beingmotion.org
They regularly offer workshops in schools, dance studios, yoga centers and cultural institutes in Sweden, India, China, Italy and Germany.
Matan Levkowich
Matan Levkowich is a dancer, choreographer and graphic designer.
His approach to movement is based on the study of the body’s intuition. The study of intuition enables to navigate through instability and develops trust in the body’s capacities. His choreographic works explore narratives of body/relations. His main interest lays in utilizing coincidence into stable, communicative scenarios.
As a teacher, Matan’s focus lays in contact improvisation and movement research. He started giving regular classes in Israel in 2008. Since then, he had the chance to teach in different circumstances and to different audiences; from professional dancers to amateurs and teenagers, in open workshops, festivals and closed intimate groups. Currently he lives in Vienna and teaches in Austria and around.
Georgia Petrali
was born in the island of Crete, Greece. She is a dancer, performer, choreographer, director, teacher of movement and dance, the founder of Fysalida Dance (www.fysalidance.com) and the International Contact Improvisation Crete Festival (www.contactimprocrete.com). She studied dance in England and Holland, has collaborated with several dance companies in Greece and abroad, and has also been teaching around the world since 1997. In 2007 Georgia moved back to Crete in order to stir an awareness of dance as an art form. Ever since, she has being creating and presenting art in several places in Crete, Greece and abroad as well as fulfilling artistic activist actions through movement and dance in theatres, art venues and public spaces by using the ‘active-thinking’ body in order to touch upon social issues relating to man, nature and the planet.
[ read more ]
Simonetta Alessandri
Italian dance artist based in London. She was one of the few dance practitioner in Italy who began working with CI in the 90’s. She kept Contact Improvisation alive in Rome for more than 10 years with her classes and jams. She was the inspirer/founder of the organization RomaContact. Her work is informed by more than 30 years of dancing, teaching and choreographing. Her choreography has been for dance and theatre companies, opera, site specific, she creates student pieces and directed improvised performance. Her work has been shown in Italy, UK, Germany, Colombia, Turkey and Japan. She obtained the Post Graduated Diploma in Choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, the Teacher Certificate at R.A.D. and she is qualified Teacher of the Feldenkrais Method. Simonetta teaches Contact Improvisation, Choreography and Improvisation at Trinity Laban, Birkbeck University
[ read more ]
Hugo Leonardo
The dancer Hugo Leonardo is founder and organizer of the EmComTato Contact Improvisation Festival of Bahia, where he has been teaching for the last 10 years, besides of participating and collaborating in the brazilian network of events related to Contact Improvisation. PhD in Performing Arts and Master in Dance at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), author of the books (only in portuguese) “Poetics of Opportunity: choreographic structures open to improvisation” and “Shared Dishabituation: contact improvisation, a game of dance and vertigo”. In the present, dedicated to the outset of an Institute devoted to the creative investigation under the concept of “art and autonomy”, to be located in a mountain rural area nearby Chapada Diamantina National Park, in Bahia, Brazil.
[ read more ]
Benno Voorham
Benno Voorham is an international performer, choreographer and teacher from Holland, living in Stockholm since 1995. Since his graduation in 1986 from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam he has worked internationally as an independent dance-artist, directing his own work as well as collaborating with others in both set and improvised pieces. Together with Sybrig Dokter he started LAVA-Dansproduktion, an international operating association for dance, based in Stockholm.
[ read more ]
Mirva Mäkinen
Mirva Mäkinen graduated (MA) from the Dance Department of the Theatre Academy of Finland in 2000, before that she did masters of Physical Education from University of Jyväskylä. 2010 she start to do PHD studies in Theatre Academy in Helsinki, her research is about Somaesthetics of Contact Improvisation.
[ read more ]
Rik Nodine
After completing a degree in biology, Rick Nodine went on to study contact improvisation with the pioneers of the form. He began a performing career in the early 90s, and In 2001, he became a member of staff at London Contemporary Dance School where he teaches composition and improvisation.
As a guest teacher Rick has been invited to teach in 10 countries and more than 30 cities and this year he has been selected as a Key Teacher to represent the UK in the international IDOCDE project, a Contemporary dance education documentation project.