Discover a new world of play and pleasure
drawing from
This intensive will explore the intersection between desires and boundaries, light and shadow, dance and sex, kink and conscious sexuality. We will foster an atmosphere of deeply permissive witness so you may experiment with your desires (however taboo) within a womb of shame-resilient acceptance. We will practice speaking and dancing our fantasies – without expectation – and then practice welcoming the gifts of gratification or rejection that ensue from being heard in our true desires.
Here we will create opportunities to traverse the landscapes of sternness and softness, dominance and submission, punishment and reward, pain and pleasure, power-over and power-under. We will use these kinky avenues to subvert and transmute our shared cultural pain surrounding sexual violence into one of reclaiming our choices and multifaceted lusts.
Throughout this experience we will be dancing – relishing in the subtleties of our dynamic bodies and how we can arouse exciting new pathways though conscious, unadulterated, and un-self-conscious movement. From this focused place we will seek to find greater attunement to the desires of our fellow dancers with whom we might come into contact. Our venture will culminate in a juicy group improvisation followed by a community constellation of integrations, feedback, and appreciations.
No matter your experience with dance or kink or sexuality I strive to clear an accessible path for every participant. This is no competition and no desire too bold nor too tame to explore. We seek to find our edges – experimenting in growthful discomfort – not to rush past them. All bodies, minds, races, backgrounds, orientations, and expressions are welcome here and all boundaries will be heard and respected.
The Touch&Play Project started in 2010 as a platform to challenge the practice of Contact Improvisation (CI) as it existed at that time. Through a first festival in Berlin teachers of CI and a range of other body-based practices were invited to explore the ‘Chemistry in Contact’ by inviting in participants’ emotions, sexuality, aggression, politics and everything else often kept out of our dances.
The event was a success and the material reverberated around the European and North-American contact communities raising discussions on the boundaries of our practice and the perceived (un)safety of our attempts to exclude our chemistry from our dances.
The first Touch&Play project to occur in the US was facilitated July 2016 at Earthdance on the theme of communication. It was a great success. The festival received a large amount of positive feedback.
This is Touch&Play’s second appearance in Canada and we are honored to be a part of this growing movement.
Contact Improvisation continues to evolve. We invite you to be active in its evolution by exploring the ways in which our verbal and non-verbal communication enhances our connections, allowing us to dance more clearly and honestly.
Touch&Play Montreal is taking place on the gorgeous land of Kio-o retreat center.
The center is located in the heart of a 125-acre estate in the beautiful mountains of the Laurentians, about 100 km from Montréal, in Ste-Lucie-des-Laurentides.