TUNING BODIES Intensive
with Irene Sposetti
Jan 17-19+20 2025

I am so glad to again be meeting the DC dance community and have the chance after the Interfusion Festival to explore in greater depth the technical and creative aspects of the dance.

I look forward to sourcing from your curiosity and interests during this weekend, exploring together core themes of Contact Improvisation and its expressive relational embodiments.

(This workshop is part of the InContact DC Jan 2025 program.)

Tuning Bodies

Join me for an intensive workshop where we'll explore, learn, and grow together in Contact Improvisation. Whether you're new to this dance form or looking to deepen your skills, this meeting will offer a supportive space for discovery and development.

We’ll focus on the improvisational, physical, and relational skills essential to the practice for authentic and in-depth exploratory processes, cultivating a greater sense of ease and openness in our movements and the way we participate in the dance. 

We'll explore ways to expand our presence and refine our attunement skills: learning to listen before speaking, to adapt before defining, to receive while expressing, to be with before seeking to communicate.

The practice of tuning creates a spacious canvas of shared awareness, shared silence, and stillness – laying the foundation of our collective being, participating, and collaborating. Tuning facilitates embodied self-regulation and mutuality, it supports accessing nuances and subtler information within and without, non-verbal communication and choice-making. Attunement can facilitate synchronizing and combining in the emergence of creative improvisational dancing.

Each day will include focused jams where we’ll explore ensemble dynamics, individual creativity, and partnering as interconnected layers of our Contact Improvisation practice. 

Through somatic explorations, we’ll delve into the biomechanics that underlie CI dancing, aiming at safe, clear, and effortless movements. We’ll pay attention to organizing around our core and central axis to support fluid transitions between levels and easeful navigation across spaces.

We’ll practice sharing trajectories and rides, combining our bodies in motion with a sense of dynamic flow and responsiveness cultivating shared balance, through nuanced and continuous weight distribution and core alignment.

Key Tools and Approaches:

• being and moving through multiple planes and directions, fully inhabiting spherical space

• differentiating and modulating body tones

• core-balancing and alignment in contact

• inhabiting shifting structural and responsive geometries

• expanding the practice beyond dropping, collapsing, lifting, or giving weight, to include subtler layers of connection and choice

• using visual orientation to enrich spatial awareness and relational dynamics.

I invite all to cultivate a space filled with curiosity devoid of judgment and expectations — a shared container that embraces diverse expressions, body types, and levels of experience. Together we’ll nurture individual agency, responsibility, authenticity, and consensual interactions. 

Bring your questions, your willingness to be challenged, and your spirit of adventure as we journey together toward greater presence, exploratory creative embodiment, play, and dance.

Monday Jan 20 Deepening

We invite you to extend the journey by joining us for an additional day, dedicated to delving deeper into more advanced techniques and improvisation skills. Building on the themes explored over the weekend, this extended session is designed for those with more experience, offering an opportunity to refine and question your practice and engage in more complex and nuanced explorations.