GRAVITY DANCES WORKSHOP
Shining a light on the queer side of the body
11-6 - Saturday 31 January - £40
We move through the questions that Contact Improvisation continues to raise more than fifty years after its birth:
What does it mean to meet?
To fall?
To touch?
To share weight?
To research instability in an unstable world?
We draw from Steve Paxton’s legacy, from the small dance, from material for the spine —
We’ll look at CI not as an aesthetic, but as a political practice: a way to study care, consent, solidarity, empathy and interdependence.
– because everything is political — every weight shared, every hand released, every floor we trust again.
We invite you into this dance — a field of gravity, resistance, tenderness, and revolution(s)
About the teachers...
Nica Portavia, born in Fano, Italy to an Italian father and a Lebanese mother, is a queer dancer, activist, teacher, and researcher working in Contact Improvisation and its political dimensions.
After early professional training in contemporary dance in Italy and Barcelona, they discovered CI and have been deeply engaged with it ever since.
Nica has trained internationally with teachers including Steve Paxton, Daniel Lepkoff, Charlie Morrissey, KJ Holmes, Anya Cloud, and Karen Nelson, and completed Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine training. Together with Karen Nelson, they co-teach Faking it with Gravity and perform the research work Smaller internationally.
Nica has taught across Europe, the Americas, and the US, organizes major CI events including ItalyContactFest and Being Touch Festival, and explores CI as a political practice through community work, public space performances, and research on impact and documentation.
Charlie Morrissey is a queer choreographer, performer, teacher, and curator working across dance, performance, and visual arts. For over 30 years, he has created theatre, gallery, and site-based works rooted in improvisation and curiosity about perception and movement.
Collaboration is central to his practice, with collaborators including Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Siobhan Davies, and Kirstie Simson.
Charlie also co-curates and organises Wainsgate Dances in Yorkshire, an artist-led program of residencies, workshops, and performances in a former chapel turned community gathering space.
His work spans making, teaching, and producing/curating, grounded in practice and imagination as physical acts, and in dance as a way to actively question, reshape, and transgress how we live.