Sweden Contact Fest

10 - 15 JULY 2025

Photos in color by Alexandra Ruth Bergman

Photos in black and white by Sergey Semichev

We invite you who share our commitment and fascination for Contact Improvisation, as a movement practice, somatic research and art form.

Together we wish to create space to research questions and answers to refine and deepen our practice and perception of CI.

During six days, we host a frame of intensives, afternoon classes, labs, Underscore, silent jam, color jam, performative jam, Gaga classes and more. We invite international and local dancers and teachers with backgrounds in CI, contemporary dance, improvisation, martial arts and performance to share your collective knowledge.

The Festival will take place 10-15 of July 2025 at Solvikskolan, a Waldorf School and Anthroposophic Center in Ytterjärna, Sweden, 50km south of Stockholm near the sea. We will dance in beautiful unique studios and be surrounded by Swedish idyllic summer surroundings. Besides dance, bodywork, nature and sea dips we will share three beautiful organic meals a day, snacks and tea in the evenings.

𝟔𝟎 𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐬.

𝐅𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡

𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨𝐬

𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞

𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐛

𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬

𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐢𝐩𝐬

Farm 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐝

𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐬

JOIN US

ESSENTIAL INFORMATION

DATES

Thursday July 10th - Tuesday July 15th 2025

LOCATION

Solvikskolan, Ytterjärna (south of Stockholm), Sweden.

Upcoming year there will be the option to camp by brining your own tent or sleep in the beautiful classrooms of the Anthroposophic Waldorf school. We kindly ask everyone to bring your own sleeping mat and sleeping bag.

If you live close to Järna/Stockholm area and drive with a car to the event, and have the possibility to bring an extra tent, mat and/or sleeping bag, we would be amazed! It would mean that everyone who travels from far away, that might have difficulties to bring sleeping equipment, can still sleep comfortably. Let us know if you have the possibility to support the sleeping situation in one way or another, Thank You!

FAMILIES

Information regarding kids at the festival!

Kids are warmly welcome and the venue is a beautiful space for families. However, the studio spaces are limited and since we wish to welcome as many dancers as possible it will not be suitable for kids to join the dance spaces, jams, classes or intensives. We wish these spaces to be focused for dancing. There will at times be free smaller dance spaces where we can open up for kids jam with parents and other adults who wish to join. There is a lot of space for parents to self organize activities for children coming to the festival. A lot of nature and the sea close by that can be wonder to play in, with other kids coming to the festival.

To create a smooth sleeping situation for everyone families are welcome to camp with your own tents or campers to create a little Kids zone. If you wish to receive other solution opptions as a hostel, please write us an email. Let us know if you are coming with your family and have any further questions about this.

INVESTMENT

Early bird until 31st of December 2024

SEK 4900 ~ € 420 * confirmed payment by 2nd of January 2025

From 2025

Regular SEK 6800 ~ € 595

Budget SEK 5700 ~ € 495

Including intensives, classes, research labs, accommodation and food.

We offer a limited amount of participants with economical difficulties to apply for low admission fee SEK 4500 ~ € 390 in exchange of some support prior/during the festival. Beyond that there is the possibility to apply for a helpers role by writing us before 1st of January.

Kids SEK 900 ~ € 80
Family SEK 2500 ~ € 220

* Kids needs concerning food and play is self organised.

CANCELATION POLICY

The fee is non refundable, but you can always find someone else to take your place.

HOW TO APPLY

To register we invite you to share a little bit about yourself, your practice and your interest in joining the fest through an application form.

Find the application form here

For further questions, please send an email to

swedencontactimprofest@gmail.com

We hope to move with you this summer!

With love,

Kristina and Pippi

Team 2025

Dorte Bjerre Jensen (DK)

Intensive

Caring with - sensitizing oneself towards gravity

“You been swimming in gravity since the day you were born. Every cell knows where down is. Easily forgotten. Your mass and the earths mass calling to each other.”

As a dancer, artist, researcher and educator I am interested in our body ́s innate ability to respond physically to the environment, and the surprisingly ways we create relational matrices by composing our bodies in and with space.I wish to propose a practice of Caring with- sensitizing oneself towards gravity. Caring with in the attendance to others, with asymmetry of touch, friction, senses, and smells, caring with inside the unequal, messy and troubled situations. Caring with as deep listening.

Steve Paxton

Mirva Mäkinen (FI)

Intensive

Horizontal falling

Contact improvisation is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their movement; gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to feel these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. This workshop will include rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner. We will aim towards movable support and gentle flying technique. This could be also called as horizontal falling.

Bio

Mirva Mäkinen graduated as a Doctor of Dance from...

Photo by Borys Boryshenko

Cristina Crippa (IT)

Class / Lab

ROOTING AND RISING

In this workshop, we want to explore the dual forces that are always present in our bodies: the downward pull of gravity, which allows us to feel rooted, while the other is the upward force that lifts us.

Can we be both grounded and able to move? When do we reach a state of suspension? Can we recognize it, experience it, stretch it, and ride it?

Through curiosity and exploration, we will seek a way to tune into our experiences, ground ourselves in the present moment.

My aim is to create an alive and safe space where we can work solo or with partners/groups and communicate through presence, touch, and weight.

Måns Erlandsson (SE)

Class / Lab

ROTATION and SPIRALING as tools and support

Discover your moving engines!

Moving in Contact- training of basic principles in playful scoores and labbing. Exploring movement and timing of physical touch.

Combining tools of using surface, weight and lever to find a non-muscular way of taking and giving weight. We can receive a sense of magic touch. This leads into dances where we can move others just by moving our own bodies. Dances where different kinds of touch and spiral work can make your motion fly both in an internal and external way. This workshop means training in different levels, from fish to bird, for moving in and out of contact, playing with weight that moves in a moving flow.

"My aim in teaching and performing Contact Improvisation is also to integrate each situation that appears in the dance, through presence, pleasure and playfulness."

Pipaluk Supernova (DK)

Lab

Dance with the Forest

A dance journey in to nature, exploring terrain and landscapes, connecting to earth, trees, sky and wind. Contact Improvisation offers us amazing tools, to roll, jump, float and connect, to be silent, to become something more. Getting physical, getting dirty, climbing and falling, savouring textures of leaves, trunks and branches, of soil, sand and water. Reminding our bodies that we too, are nature.

We meet in the studio, and dance our way into the surrounding forest. Bring shoes for outdoor dancing along with cloth protecting your skin.

Serhii Semichev (UA)

Class

The illusion of balance

The class will be of interest to participants with any experience. The class is dedicated to balance, losing and finding balance and counterbalance. We will find balance in any position with minimal use of muscle effort. We will explore how changing the position of different parts of the body changes the position of the body's center of gravity and loss of balance.
We will explore how the body organizes itself without unnecessary muscle effort in search of balance when the center of gravity changes position in space. We will explore how the partner's influence affects the position of the center of gravity in space. We will explore how the body organizes itself to find balance when the partner's influence. We will explore how the position of the partner's body changes the position of the partners' center of gravity and leads to loss of balance for both partners. We will explore how our bodies organize themselves in contact when losing and finding balance. We will explore the intensity and range of movement in losing and finding balance together with a partner.
We will explore how joint loss of balance and organization of the body to find balance in contact without unnecessary muscle effort can become a game and one of the resources of movement in dance.