Angelica Doni (RUS)
Anjelika Doniy is a dance improviser, choreographer and teacher focused on contact.
After 5 years of formal studies of choreography, ballet dance and other stage disciplines at the Higher School of Culture (St-Petersburg), she worked for 10 Years as a theater choreographer. Until…
In 1997, I was at the Impulse Dance Festival in Vienna. There, I saw a wonder of CI, watched Steve Paxton on stage, flew into Andrew Harwood workshop where some 70 dancers were rolling over each other. This was unbelievable, the earth was becoming alive. I saw a realization of my dream of the world growing from connection, interaction, harmony between one and many.
It was love from the first sight. From 2002 I started facilitating first jams and CI workshops in Russia and initiated International Contact Improvisation and Performance Festival in Moscow in 2006–2010.
My path in CI as a teacher began as long journey of workshops for beginners. I love to guide people into the dance, inspire them with their own body, and awaken to what is already there. I love to surprise long-time dancers with secrets of the body as little keys opening a familiar dance into new spaces. This year, I am following a program of the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy to go deeper into the body and its anatomy, to touch the cells, to breathe through the navel, and to use this resource in my practice.
My special interest in contact improvisation is clarity. Clarity towards the practice. Honesty towards how I move my weight in the space of Gravity. Attention towards clearing the dance from the personal. Letting things happen as they go.
I am grateful to have met and studied with such teachers as Regine Chopinot, Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Danny Lepkoff, Benno Voorham, Lisa Nelson, Esther Gal, Yaniv Mintzer, Martin Keo and many others.
Anjelica taught over 200 workshops all over the world for all levels from complete beginners to professional dancers. Her teaching is rooted in many years of work of acquiring and transmitting technical skills and equally long path of meditation and mindfulness practice. She blends them into a life dance, contact improvisation.
Elastic attention
For complete beginners
For beginners
For those who continue
To dance contact improvisation.
Anjelika tells:
I am inspired to run a CI workshop-lab, and will create the conditions:
- Material that grows from the basics and moves participants to jam safely, with a reliance on technique.
- Jam secrets that will blossom like seeds and support your jam experience in the evenings.
- CI labs. I will create structures and let in the lab spirit that will allow not only my experience as a facilitator to manifest but allow teachers and advanced participants to unfold the beauty of their dance path.
- A variety of transitions from beginning level to advanced and back again, so that we forget how small or big we are while remaining innocent, light and friendly in the dance.
What do you need to be ready for?
There will be a lot about efficiency and intuitive following of what is happening right now.
Work with the body in pairs, trios, in the form of bodywork.
Exercises with alternating roles of leading, following and releasing that lead into the dance.
There will be fairytale-like, imaginative invitations with precise, physically understandable instructions.
We will learn to move from the state of student training skills to losing these skills for the sake of poetry that does not require the sense of completeness.
Through all of which we will try to meet Contact Improvisation.
Exercises are important, but they cannot be more important than contact, flow, interaction of forces, inertia, that is already happening right now.
By practicing "Small Dance" we will learn to focus our attention on the inner space of the body.
We will meet with moving, rolling, sliding of the point of contact, when contact of two bodies gives importance to the search for mutual spatial trajectories.
The secrets of dance are revealed in space. Pauses, back space, entry into and exit from the dance, beginning and end, emptiness and fullness. We will learn to change states. And those states will be many.
Touching the source of movement.
Feeling compassion that is disarming.
Recognition of your fire.
Courage to accept yourself dancing.
Ability to adapt physical touch.
Gifts and losses as we surrender to the movement.
Expedition for the secret that is on the other side of the dance.