Contact Improv

Workshop with Irina Hortin

How does dance arise from encounters?
Contact Improvisation invites you to create movement in the moment - through perception, touch, weight and playing with gravity. In this open workshop we explore basic principles of contact improvisation: listening to your own body, coming into contact, sharing weight, finding balance and moving together.
With simple exercises, improvisations and playful partner work, we create a space for curiosity, encounters and dance discovery. Both people with no prior knowledge and experienced dancers are welcome.
Following the workshop, there will be an open mini-jam to try out and continue what you have explored in dance together.
Every body welcome.
No previous knowledge required.

Portrait photo: Irina Hortin

Irina Hortin

Show courses (25)

Irina Hortin first studied linguistics and literature in Germany, France and Argentina before going on to study contemporary dance in Cologne and Munich. She performs internationally, regularly choreographs for Schalktheater in Zurich, heads youth dance theatre projects and teaches contemporary dance, contact improvisation as well as tango at international festivals. The encounter with Frey Faust, an important figure within French contemporary dance and editor of movement dictionary Axis Syllabus, was of special importance for Irina’s vocational biography, and Irina, as a certified Axis Syllabus (AS) teacher, references the dictionary. The interdisciplinary AS research network surveys the functions of the human body in motion. In the process, information from biomechanics, anatomy, physics and medicine come into use to analyse our motion apparatus and to have it start to move in a functional and caring way. The focus always lies on a respectful contact with oneself and others – and, of course, on the fun in dancing!