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.
BODY TONE AND BLESSING – workshop description
Contact improvisation and more
Tone of the body is not tension.
It is the movement of Life between birth and death. From 0 to 100.
It is not tension between life and death.
A baby makes no effort. It is life itself. It is sleeping, waking up, crying, laughing, relaxed, trying to lift the head. Life is moving it through the body, emotions, seeing, hearing. But the body, emotions, eyesight, hearing – all this is not what makes the moves, this is what is moving.
Tone is what we want to explore.
We’ve lost the innocence of a baby who lives in freedom, simply in WHAT IS PRESENT.
An adult lives through HOW? WHY? WHERE?
What if we keep the intention to live and act as an expression in tone – from relaxation to unfolding of the spirit in all its power?
TA DA!
We are exploring relaxation shifting from the concepts “tired” and “lazy” to “I express myself without judgments, with love and appreciation.”
This is a process. It cannot be learned. We can only go through it from moment to moment.
Where thinking about myself ends. Where starts: I am what is true, alive and sensitive to changing surroundings, smelling the air of changes, able to trust intuition.
Where it does not matter anymore how others see me. Who are the others and whether they exist. Or there is only me – all including and accepting.
If we honestly look at the life of nature, everything lives, giving birth and letting go.
How is this survival happening? Life is in-tense but not in tension.
We will study our tensions. Maybe this will help us realize something through this vision. To start letting go of what hinders life from flowing freely.
Body and mind become an adventure, riffles, waterfalls, geysers, or peaceful lakes in the flow of dance.
If we are lucky, we’ll feel the emptiness, the space in which all this soma soup is cooking.
I promise to create conditions for the process.
Place, time, consciousness, and feedback.
Fine thread of informal communication between what is and what we are becoming.
Description of the workshop is not meant to be clear.
That what becomes clarity –
is the Blessing.
This is what our meeting is about.