Kaisa Kukkonen (1986) is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Finland. She works with the poetry of movement, politics of touch, and somatic practices. Her background is in dance, words, and performance. Her interests are movement and voice improvisation, Contact Improvisation, work around consent, pleasure activism, boundaries and touch as well as work with words in the form of poetry or academic writing. Kaisa´s work changes shape and spirals between multiple forms: she makes performances; teaches workshops and classes in movement, touch and boundaries; organises festivals and events; writes and composes; improvises.
Kaisa has been dancing CI since 2005, and teaching since 2010 in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Iceland. Her CI home is Berlin, where she learned from Joerg Hassmann, Daniel Werner, Christine Mauch, and Gesine Daniels among others. Later her teachers and/or co-dancers have been for example Katja Mustonen, Anya Cloud, Iiris Raipala, Terhi Rasilo, and Nita Little. She dances and teaches currently in Helsinki.
Kaisa finished her studies at Iceland University of Arts in the MFA of Performing Arts programme (2021-2022) in September 2022 with a performance project “Take This Touch Inside Your Body”. She graduated from MACoDE program at HfMDK in Frankfurt with a master thesis “Noticing Power Relations in Teaching Touch in Contact Improvisation” (2021). For the thesis she interviewed fourteen Contact Improvisation teachers, collected their strategies and thoughts on how to teach touch.
https://kaisakukkonen.wordpress.com/
INTENSIVE DESCRIPTION
Dance as a Song – Body as a Poem
CI Intensive on relationships of dance and music
In this intensive, we will work on finding the song of your dance that changes through each moment. We will find ease and comfort through working from the floor up and using familiar CI exercises with music-related twists.
How are weight shifts music? How can we find the support of the rhythm into momentum and lifts? How does music dance and communicate? How is my dance singing?
We will be listening to music and noticing how we can move with it, as it, against it, towards it. We listen. We will learn how to make choices in dance in relation to sounds and music. We will be composing in the moment like the dance would be a song. What does thinking about dance as music bring to my contact dance?
This workshop is based on classes on the same topic with Terhi Rasilo and Sakari Savola in Helsinki, spring 2023 and is inspired by the work of Mike Vargas, Barnaby Tree, and other musicians that I have contact improvised with.