TUNING BODIES Intensive
with Irene Sposetti
Jan 17-19+20 2025

I am so glad to again be meeting the DC dance community and have the chance after the Interfusion Festival to explore in greater depth the technical and creative aspects of the dance.

I look forward to sourcing from your curiosity and interests during this weekend, exploring together core themes of Contact Improvisation and its expressive relational embodiments.

Tuning Bodies

Join me for an intensive workshop where we'll explore, learn, and grow together in Contact Improvisation. Whether you're new to this dance form or looking to deepen your skills, this meeting will offer a supportive space for discovery and development.

We’ll focus on the improvisational, physical, and relational skills essential to the practice for authentic and in-depth exploratory processes, cultivating a greater sense of ease and openness in our movements and the way we participate in the dance. 

We'll explore ways to expand our presence and refine our attunement skills: learning to listen before speaking, to adapt before defining, to receive while expressing, to be with before seeking to communicate.

The practice of tuning creates a spacious canvas of shared awareness, shared silence, and stillness – laying the foundation of our collective being, participating, and collaborating. Tuning facilitates embodied self-regulation and mutuality, it supports accessing nuances and subtler information within and without, non-verbal communication and choice-making. Attunement can facilitate synchronizing and combining in the emergence of creative improvisational dancing.

Each day will include focused jams where we’ll explore ensemble dynamics, individual creativity, and partnering as interconnected layers of our Contact Improvisation practice. 

Through somatic explorations, we’ll delve into the biomechanics that underlie CI dancing, aiming at safe, clear, and effortless movements. We’ll pay attention to organizing around our core and central axis to support fluid transitions between levels and easeful navigation across spaces.

We’ll practice sharing trajectories and rides, combining our bodies in motion with a sense of dynamic flow and responsiveness cultivating shared balance, through nuanced and continuous weight distribution and core alignment.

Key Tools and Approaches:

I invite all to cultivate a space filled with curiosity devoid of judgment and expectations — a shared container that embraces diverse expressions, body types, and levels of experience. Together we’ll nurture individual agency, responsibility, authenticity, and consensual interactions. 

Bring your questions, your willingness to be challenged, and your spirit of adventure as we journey together toward greater presence, exploratory creative embodiment, play, and dance.

Monday Jan 20 Deepening

We invite you to extend the journey by joining us for an additional day, dedicated to delving deeper into more advanced techniques and improvisation skills. Building on the themes explored over the weekend, this extended session is designed for those with more experience, offering an opportunity to refine and question your practice and engage in more complex and nuanced explorations.

Jan 17, 6:30 pm to 9:00pm

Jan 18 and 19, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm

     +

Jan 20 Deep Dive (optional): 9:30 am to 3:00 pm

Firm CI experience for Monday Deep Dive day Jan 20.


      Up to 35 participants Jan 17-19, up to 25 Jan 20

Jan 17-19: University of Maryland Studio 2, College Park MD

Jan 20: The Movement Studios, Springfield VA

See Getting to Tuning Bodies Workshop for directions

Core Workshop (Jan 17-19):

Monday deep dive (Jan 20): Sliding scale from $70 to $120

The deep dive cost is in addition to that of the core workshop, and it is the same whenever you apply. You must attend the core to participate in the deep dive.

* If you have financial limitations that would prevent you from attending at these rates let us know on the registration form.

This workshop is part of the InContact DC Jan 2025 program.

IRENE SPOSETTI

https://beingmotion.com

Irene is a versatile performing artist, facilitator, and dancemaker with a multidisciplinary background. Although originally from Italy, Irene has spent more than two decades living and traveling as an independent freelancer across Europe, Asia, and North America. Her artistic path has been shaped by diverse cultural influences and deeply rooted in self-inquiry investigations and practices.

Irene specializes in offering and producing dance training, events, and performances across esteemed institutions such as universities, companies, cultural institutes, festivals, and independent platforms. Her work has reached audiences across the globe and reflects her distinctive and diverse experiences as a passionate explorer and artist.

In 2011 she created BEING MOTION, a platform for collaborating and sharing her artistic practice, to promote independent educational and artistic projects.

Through her dance, she aims to facilitate a heightened state of presence, enabling more conscious, functional, and effortless movement, broadening the technical, creative, and compositional skills of the movers.

She has a particular interest in researching and refining the embodiment of movement biomechanics through the understanding of principles and explorative learning processes. 

She is interested in the “synergy of togetherness”,
the relational, communicative and creative aspects of contact improvisation, partnering and group dancing.  

Furthermore, Irene delves into the somatic, psychological, and relational transformative impacts of dance. Her exploration extends to understanding how the practice heightens self-awareness, breaks down conditioning, instill a sense of empowerment, and contributes to overall well-being. 

Live music and voice are part of her performing and teachings, exploring the link to body and movement and the evocative imaginary power of word, sound and music with dancing. 

To know more and stay in touch visit: