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About me
My profession and passion is to dance and to share the dance with others. That’s what I do through teaching, performing, writing and organizing. In the beginning I was mainly driven by creating dance and theatre pieces, bringing improvisation on stage. A while back teaching CI has become my main field of exploration, which I began in 1995 – and now it lets me travel the whole world. Developmental movement patterns, an anatomical focus on the skeleton and the fascia system, Capoeira, Release Techniques and many kinds of sports have guided my understanding of the moving body.
Originally I am from Germany but now based in Australia. I regularly return to Europe to dance, teach and research.
About my teaching
I am driven by curiosity and discovery and intend to infect my students with this spark.
My aim is to create alive spaces, where people find enough trust to manoeuvre themselves towards the unknown, where the learning and the growing happens in a safe environment, partly with a smell of disorientation, discomfort and excitement.
I foster the polarity of detailed and precise work that brings us to the edge of what we can perceive and on the other hand rather open frames where the new information can unfold by letting it go.
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Why Contact Improvisation?
Practicing Contact Improvisation gives me pleasure, physical delight, deep connections to myself, my dance partners and potentially to the whole group, that is sharing a space. It gives me insights into basic principles of life and inspires me far beyond the dance. It gives me food to grow and the very real experience of being alive.
I find Contact Improvisation surprisingly holistic. All movement forms that look for the potential of the human body while respecting its limits will leave beneficial traces in this dance form. Contact Improvisation is a highly integrative practice. The desire of research is an inherent part, from its historical beginning in the early 70s onwards up to now. Contact Improvisation relies on healthy communication in every moment and can nurture this aspect also in practices outside the dance.
And what is Contact Improvisation?
I call it a social dance form that arose from a performance experiment with Steve Paxton in 1972. Contact Improvisation is based on the research of how two people can move together while being in physical touch, sharing weight. It is a movement technique, that benefits from empathic listening, generosity and clarity. It is an improvisational form, where we practice to let go off expectations, allow repetition and receive the new as a refreshing byproduct. Its main practice happens in Jams, a frame with very basic rules, where a general compositional awareness can create a sense of dancing together as a whole group.
Quotes from my blog posts
