- CONTACT MEETS TANGO -
BEING DANCED BY ANOTHER
Workshops series conducted by Dr Raffaele Rufo
Tirol Solo and Contact Improvisation Festival
9-15 August 2021, Oberndorf in Tirol
WHAT IS CONTACTANGO?
Contactango is a growing international field of dance practices that explore the interchange between tango and contact improvisation. Contactango practices play with the creative tensions between tango’s two-legged vertical relation with gravity and clear roles of lead and follow and contact improvisation’s open-ended negotiation between partners and more friendly relation with falling and horizontal movements. Some of the pioneers of Contactango in Europe are: Edwine Fournier (FR), Leilani Weis (SP), Adriana Pegorer (UK) and Javier Cura (GER). Check them out! I propose Contactango as a personal and collective door to the enchantment, the subtle feeling of being the witness of a dance that is more powerful than the individual dancers and of the established form of the dance. This door opens up a space for nurturing and sharing empathy, generosity and responsibility. These qualities are essential for our individual well-being and for our survival as a species.
As a movement artist I have learned to dance tango first and then I have approached contact improvisation to develop my movement inquiry, expand my vocabulary and find pathways to destabilise the conventions of the Argentine tango tradition. For several years I have worked on letting go of the idea that there is a right way of dancing tango and a right form of the dance. In particular, I have developed pathways for destabilising the gender-based division of roles between leading and following and playing with the music as a dance partner. In my experience, dancing tango with a focus on bodily listening and improvisation is conducive to an intimate state of feeling together and to be reached and changed by the impulses, sensations and feelings of others. The embodied knowledge of contact improvisation is a key to become aware and express this perceptual shift in fulfilling and original ways.
WORKSHOPS METHODOLOGY
These workshops are designed for contact improvisers and tango dancers and for dancers and movers more in general. The aim is to guide and support the shift to a state of heightened perceptiveness while extending your movement vocabulary and discovering new possibilities in your dance. By leveraging the movement tools and the spirit of freedom and emancipation typical of contact improvisation, we will engage the fundamentals of tango not as given techniques or assumptions but as ‘enabling constraints’ to find a deeper sense of freedom and sharing in the dance. The workshops engage touch as a medium to access the unique kinesthetic-affective space of intimacy and playfulness emerging in tango without having to replicate the external form and the gendered-based lead and follow roles of the traditional form of the tango duet. In particular, this is an opportunity to re-engage the ways in which you feel and relate with parts of your and your partner’s body that constitute the heart of the experience of dancing tango: the chest, the legs and the feet.
PROGRAM:
Day 1 - Giving and receiving the impulse of movement (Monday 9 Aug h16:30-18:30)
Day 2 - Moving with a shared center of gravity (Tuesday 10 Aug h16:30-18:30)
Day 3 - Playful legs and feet in the duet (Wednesday 11 Aug h16:30-18:30)
Day 4 - Music as a dance partner (Friday 13 Aug h16:30-18:30)
Day 5 - Tango spirals (Saturday 14 Aug h16:30-18:30)
Day 6 - Trios and other dance formations (Sunday 15 Aug h11:00-13:00)
FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS:
“Bellissimo, amoroso, distruttivo, contraegemonico e con tanto sentimento e amore, grazie!” (Marco, Barcelona)
“A nice way to bring me/us into the feeling of tango.” (Elke, Innsbruck)
“C’est incroyable de partager ces moments tous ensembles en ta presence! Love.” (Charel, Geneve)
TEACHER’S BIO:
In the last decade Raffaele has been teaching, performing and researching tango, contact and contemporary modes of dance improvisation in Europe and Australia. His recent experiences include teaching at the International Festival of Contact Improvisation and Tango in Wuppertal (Germany) and at the international Contact Tango Summer Camp in Arezzo (Italy), leading movement and creativity workshops for Melbourne University’s Master of Entrepreneurship, and performing ‘The Tango Touch’ at La Mama Theatre and the Melbourne Fringe Festival. In 2020 Raffaele was awarded a Ph.D. by Deakin University (Melbourne) for positioning tango in the field of dance improvisation through the study of touch as a somatic experience of listening between the dancer’s inside and outside worlds. His research was published in the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practice, the Journal of Embodied Research and the book collection Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation. Raffaele is currently based in Rome. His evolving creative and pedagogical projects interweave improvisational dance and somatic movement education with performance, phenomenology and ecology to explore embodiment as a somatic-imaginative experience of reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world.
E-mail: raffaele.rufo@gmail.com
Web address: www.raffaelerufo.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/rufo.raffaele