2025 TEACHERS

We're proud to present an incredible lineup of talented teachers who will guide you through this journey:

Intensive Teachers:
🔸 Sergio Palomares (Spain)
🔸 Vega Luukkonen (Berlin/Finland)

Additional Teachers:
🔸 Anna Wilhelmine Wallin ("Pippi Popp") (Sweden)
🔸 Iiris Raipala (Finland)
🔸 And more to be announced!

Our teachers come from diverse backgrounds and bring with them extensive experience in Contact Improvisation. Together, they offer unique perspectives, inviting you to explore, grow, and experience CI on new levels. 

Vega Luukkonen 

Vega Luukkonen is a dancer, dance teacher, performance artist, and bodyworker from Finland. She studied dance and theatre pedagogy at the Theatre Academy of Finland in Helsinki, earning her Master's degree in 2008. However, she considers the Finnish contact improvisation community her true high school and university in Contact Improvisation. Over the past 20 years, she has learned immensely from colleagues, friends, and fellow dancers, sharing the dance and the rolling point together.

Contact Improvisation has been Vega's passion since her teenage years, and she has experienced many different phases with this practice. Lately, she has been focusing more on details, fine-tuning, listening, and presence, all while deepening her understanding of the underlying principles of Contact Improvisation. Vega is interested in making dance sustainable for the body by exploring efficient, fluid, and effortless movement. She emphasizes elasticity in the three-dimensional body, allowing it to spiral in all directions.

Breath plays a central role in Vega's dance, guiding her naturally through moments of momentum, falling, flying, swinging, and bouncing. Her movement is also inspired by aikido, capoeira, and developmental movement patterns. She strives for precision in transitions, curiosity in details, and a balance between technique and poetry, structure and freedom—all encapsulated in the playful beings in motion.

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Transitions, Precision & Lightness - Intensive Workshop

In this intensive workshop, Vega shares her curiosities and interests in movement and dance. As the name suggests, "Transitions, Precision & Lightness" reflects her exploration of dance as a playful dialogue that breathes freely in time and space. Participants will flow in and out of contact, compose their dances, and work between contact and solo tasks, eventually moving towards trios and group scores.

The workshop involves a variety of methods, including exploratory exercises, experiential anatomy, and specific technical material. Movement principles are informed by developmental movement patterns, release techniques, and floorwork. The focus will be on understanding the physical principles of Contact Improvisation, such as sharing weight, rolling point, and under- and over-dancing. Participants will explore momentum, falling, and suspension to create an effortless flow in movement.

Vega also emphasizes the mechanics of 'small dance,' using momentum and body spirals to lift one another through falling and catching a ride. The workshop explores using arms as an extension of the spine, finding entrances into lifts, and creating space and time in dances. The focus on arm structure provides ways to connect to space, find counterbalance, and lift or be lifted with ease.

Details and technique are central, as Vega helps participants find lightness in being lifted, efficiency in lifting, and increased awareness and presence. The workshop encourages conscious listening, breathing, and giving and receiving weight, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of how our bodies function—bones, joints, muscles, and fascia—so that we can dance with greater precision, lightness, and sustainability.

Technique and Poetry. Structure and Freedom. Playful Beings in Motion.

Sergio Palomares

Sergio is a multidisciplinary artist and passionate of arts of movement interested in the integration of different languages like acrobatics, dance and Contact Improvisation.

He's background is in martial arts, gymnastics, circus and contemporary dance. He has been teaching circus acrobatics since 2012 and Contact Improvisation since 2015.

In 2019 he taught at the Contemporary Circus School of Guadalajara (Elcirca), Mexico, mixing CI and different circus disciplines. He was part of the program of studies of Contact Improvisation in Enestudio (Barcelona) from 2020 to 2022 teaching "Acrobatics into CI". In January of 2020 he participated at the "January Workshop" by Nancy Stark Smith.

In 2022 he obtains a postgraduate degree in performing arts and education, Institut del Teatre, Barcelona.

He lives in Madrid now studying Osteopathy, which is being a great inspiration in his dance and in his pedagogy. He is interested in the exploration and research about movement patterns with the goal of efficiency and health, especially in the most intense physical dynamics.

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"Technical and somatic explorations for CI"

In this intensive we will explore from the perspective of the experiential anatomy, in which we will study the different anatomical centers and axis of the body, their relationships and the possibilities it brings for the practice of Contact Improvisation (CI).

We will work on each center (pelvis, rib cage and skull) developing sensitivity in relation to our movement and the connection with other bodies, discovering and going deep in different technical principles of the CI, going through all levels, from the ground to lifting and flights.

The goal will be to discover new paths and possibilities in our movement, expanding the awareness of our dance in solo, and listening to the others, gaining confidence and creative and expressive capacity.

The proposals will create a multilevel experience in which improvisation is enriched with what actually happens, with what each body brings and proposes at every moment, establishing dialogues, learning to communicate and understand each other, and allowing the dance to be born from listening the present.

Anna Vilhelmine Wallin

Anna Vilhelmine Wallin is a movement artist based in Malmö, south of Sweden.

Her work is experienced through performances, writings, classes/trainings and workshops. By using improvisation and composition her research identifies the fragile as the solid. She teaches, curates and organises spaces for movement as a form of art and practise with a focus on C.I, somatic practises and instant composition for performative spaces.

Today she works with dancetheatre companies, corporates, art institutions and festivals around the world. Through her movement practice she is driven to hold less, sense more and explore what we can be and build together.

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Falling in Love with our feet

A class to deepen our relationship to our feet, exploring how we dance with and without them.

We investigate their structure, layers, landscape and fantastic functions - discovering various ways how to melt, fiber, root and release through our feet. Mapping our patterns, we experiment with ways how to meet and leave the floor, uncovering new options. Recognising the fundamental force our feet generate, examining how they guide direction and shape qualities in our movement. Observing how their actions are connected and ripple through the rest of the body, we let our feet float and flourish in our dance, listening and attuning to their wisdom, care and grounding presence.

Through embodied inquiry, we establish a safe foundation for practising falling, catching, rolling, spiralling, spinning and navigating the unknown through our feet. Moving from solo, into duets, trios and the collective group, we engage our imaginary muscles bringing awareness to how our feet meet beyond the dialogue with the floor and interact with surfaces, space and temporality.

This workshop is an invitation to navigate and disorientate, to find new possibilities and qualities by greeting undiscovered edges in our dance, we let our feet lead our bodies towards untapped potential in our dance.

Iiris Raipala

Anna Vilhelmine Wallin is a movement artist based in Malmö, south of Sweden.

Her work is experienced through performances, writings, classes/trainings and workshops. By using improvisation and composition her research identifies the fragile as the solid. She teaches, curates and organises spaces for movement as a form of art and practise with a focus on C.I, somatic practises and instant composition for performative spaces.

Today she works with dancetheatre companies, corporates, art institutions and festivals around the world. Through her movement practice she is driven to hold less, sense more and explore what we can be and build together.

.....

Falling in Love with our feet

A class to deepen our relationship to our feet, exploring how we dance with and without them.

We investigate their structure, layers, landscape and fantastic functions - discovering various ways how to melt, fiber, root and release through our feet. Mapping our patterns, we experiment with ways how to meet and leave the floor, uncovering new options. Recognising the fundamental force our feet generate, examining how they guide direction and shape qualities in our movement. Observing how their actions are connected and ripple through the rest of the body, we let our feet float and flourish in our dance, listening and attuning to their wisdom, care and grounding presence.

Through embodied inquiry, we establish a safe foundation for practising falling, catching, rolling, spiralling, spinning and navigating the unknown through our feet. Moving from solo, into duets, trios and the collective group, we engage our imaginary muscles bringing awareness to how our feet meet beyond the dialogue with the floor and interact with surfaces, space and temporality.

This workshop is an invitation to navigate and disorientate, to find new possibilities and qualities by greeting undiscovered edges in our dance, we let our feet lead our bodies towards untapped potential in our dance.

Hub Feenix, Raasepori

Nestled in the heart of nature, Hub Feenix is a non-profit center for well-being, creativity, and art. With spacious dance halls, cozy gathering areas, and beautiful accommodation options, it's the perfect setting for our festival. 

he course center offers a beautiful dance hall with two dancefloors (wooden + dance mat), lot of cozy hang out areas, restaurant area and café as well as spacious and colourful dormitories and beautiful private suites.

Accomodation options / prices in Hub Feenix (coming soon!) 

FOOD 

We'll be pampered with delicious vegan/vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner, yummy evening snacks, sauna by the lake, and a big garden for hanging out. 

In the registration form you can let us know of any possible allergies. All food is vegan with some vegetarian accompaniment options.  

Festival Venue Address: Högbenintie 30, 10350 Meltola

(1h from Helsinki, easily accessible by train / public transport, also shared rides will  be arranged, check our Facebook page/event for this info)