Anya Cloud (she/they). I am originally from Alaska, and currently live between Berlin and Colorado.
As a queer white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Intersectional collaboration is central to my work. I have been practicing contact improvisation for over 20 years and regularly teach, research, and perform internationally. Recent teaching includes ImPulsTanz, The Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Tanzfabrik, BeingTouch, Italy Contact Festival, Warsaw Flow, Kontakt Land, Wainsgate Dances, WCCI Jam, What You See Festival, The Field Center, and more. I orient with contact improvisation as a fundamentally queer form.
I am devoted to practicing, researching, teaching, and performing experimental contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and somatics through anti-oppression methodologies. I co-direct The Love Makers Company, a project-based experimental dance company, with Makisig Akin. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Eric Geiger, Karen Schaffman, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark-Smith, and Karen Nelson among others. I hold an MFA in Dance Theatre, trained in the Feldenkrais Method®, and am training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I am currently Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Colorado Boulder.
All of this, in relationship with who I love and the times I live in, informs every aspect of my work.
Contact Improvisation Festival - Intensive
HOW WE SURVIVE OURSELVES
This contact improvisation workshop is a highly physical queer love-centered survival practice that is rooted in the physics and politics of we. We will consider the conditions of our bodies in relationship with the conditions of the current world
as we train skills (practical and fantastical) for surviving and thriving within a dance and beyond. 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 with skill, care, artistry, and accountability. We will use those skills to aim toward tenderness, wildness, and joy and see what happens. We will create spherical readiness to open pathways for multiple options in every moment. We will work with re-training the reflexes, falling and failing together, disorientation, specificity and subtlety of touch, tethering, endurance and duration, queering, impact, and more. We will sweat and we will listen – both more profusely than we
thought was possible. We will radically orient, disorient, and re-orient through the we and notice what emerges.
We will work in shifting constellations of we: solo, duet, trio, small group, whole group. This is a focused research space for people who are committed to questioning through the body and who are hungry to be in the unknown. We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with one another.