Liquid Love (Oil Action)

Liquid Love is a collective experience exploring the sensuality of flowing skin to skin contact using warm organic oil.

The concept is simple: we will pour warm, fine, neutral oil on to your skin, from where it will spread out over your whole body and form a lubricious substance, which allows you to float in a sea together with other oily bodies.

Everyone is invited to respect their own rhythm and limits to touch and nudity.

We invite you to move and allow yourself to be moved without intentions or sexual orientation. Releasing our usual desire to take action on erotic sensations and thoughts we invite you to be present with them and to relax into the energetic flow of the bodies around you. This is a place where you can love and be loved in an impersonal and unbound manner and above all a place to super charge your soul.

Daniel Hayes is a Medical Doctor, public health scientist, eco-anarchist and practical idealist. He’s been playing, dancing, meditating and conversing CI for over a decade and actively sharing his curiosity and knowledge and doubts for the past eight years.. He is the founder of the Touch&Play Project, which explores the edges of Contact Improvisation by inviting our (al)chemical bodies into the dance. Through artistic and academic research he hopes to highlight the potential of CI as a tool to create authentic connections with oneself and the other by bringing it into play, communication, BDSM, therapy, education, sexuality, somatic mindfulness and more.

Nature Play

An invitation to let yourself lusciously blend with other beings around you, exploring the magical environment of earthdance through movement, touch, play, pleasure.

Béu Tornaghi
Born in BraSil, citizen of the world, Béu has been traveling between the USA, BraSil, and Europe for several years, dancing, offering Somatic Movement Therapy & Education, as well as Translation & Interpreting (Portuguese, English, and Spanish primarily, though she also speaks Italian and French). Dancing on land and water since childhood, everything she does feeds back into her Eco-Somatic research; she is always curious about how movement/dance can help us reconnect with many other ways of thinking and perceiving, allowing our human experience to find and create bridges within the many languages of nature. Nature nurtures. Nurture nature.

Moti Zemelman, MFA, began practicing Contact Improv 28 years ago. Over the past 20 years he has taught and performed across USA, Canada, Central America, Mexico, Europe and Israel. In 2008-09 he taught as Professor of Dance at the Instituto Naciónal de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Over the last 10 years in his desire to integrate communication and intimacy skills in his life and teaching he has studied Non-violent Communication, Tantra, Butoh, and Byron Katie’s “The Work”. Moti has been a teacher and a board member at Earthdance Retreat Center.  As a musician Moti plays vocal-electronic music for Contact Jams and in 2007 released his debut CD, Doorwaves. He also designs and moderates the international Contact Improv resource website www.contactimprov.com.

Sightless Sensations Jam

We will be guided through Contact Improvisation Principals of connecting with ourselves, the space, and other movers through tapping deeply into our sensations.  You will be invited to wear blindfolds or close your eyes for the entire duration.  Sometimes we label what we come in contact with: an elbow, a man, a fragile body… It is an opportunity to observe what comes up in your mind/body: sensations, emotions, thoughts, wishes, repulsions, judgements…   We will explore scores that push us to observe & maybe reduce our patterns to identify what we experience.  The Jam will be an open and safe container in which to improvise, play and challenge ourselves without sight.

Alyssa Lynes is a dancer and teacher interested in how communication and creative expression play out in partner dance forms. Alyssa grew up in MA, dancing many performative dance styles (Jazz, musical theater dance, Horton, Limon, Ballet). She received a BA in Contemporary dance and a MS in education in New York City where she worked as a freelance dancer and bilingual (Eng/Span) elementary school teacher. In 2010, her Contact Improvisation training with Nancy Stark Smith catapulted her off on a CI devoted trip to Europe where she has lived ever since. She has added Salsa and Tango to her Partner dance repertoire. Alyssa explores the overlaps of movement forms through her choreography and performance work (most recently in “You Have To” (E-werk Kammertheater ) and with the koreografenkollektiv (Freiburg, DE), in her co-directing film collaboration (“5 Ways In”: a documentary based in the Freiburg CI festival 2012), and in her CI teaching. She recently has taught at CI festivals such as Contact Meets Contemporary (DE), Earthdance New Years Jam (US), The Isreal CI festivals, Touch & Play (SP), and Bread & Jam (UK).