A Reflective Report on the CI & Co-Working Residency in Ljubljana, 31st January – 14th

February 2025

 

Shifting Grounds, Shifting Selves

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What is the shape of a shared experience? A collective breath? A fleeting moment of weight,

balance, and surrender?

In the quiet hum of a studio, nestled between wooden beams and shifting light, a group of dancers

gathered—not only to move but to witness, to listen, to be moved. The Contact Improvisation

residency unfolded like a living organism, shifting, morphing, and redefining itself daily. From the

first jam to the final sharing circle, it was a landscape of spontaneity and deep-rooted inquiry, where

the body became both the question and the answer.

Spaciousness, fluidity, the warmth of the sun on the terrace. The presence of a child, eyes wide,

absorbing space. A mother departing. A dancer arriving. An open library of movement and study,

each body a book, pages turned in the silence between gestures. The floor creaked as weight met

wood, hands climbing on the beams made gravity momentarily reduced. The city below remained

distant, irrelevant—inside, a world expanded.

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How do we balance? What is stability but a passing illusion? To dance is to meet one’s own shifting

ground, to recognize that change is constant and terrifyingly beautiful. The studio became a

microcosm, an ever-evolving exploration of being support, of being supported, of leaning into the

unknown. Some days, the dance felt light, effortless. Other days, it felt like standing at the edge of

oneself, peering into the abyss of the unspoken, the unsettled.

Meditation of the bones. A sea creature curling through the spine. A ginkgo leaf unfolding in the

torso. Dancing from color to black-and-white, from day into dusk. A parliament of bodies, a

dialogue without words. Watching dance, becoming dance, realizing there is no distinction. To see

is to move. To move is to reveal what is already there.

And then, there were the moments of rupture. Restless nights, the exhaustion, the weight of deep

reflection pressing against the body’s limits. Contact Improvisation is not only about grace but also

about exposure—of finding oneself vulnerable, trembling, raw. It is a practice of presence, of

surrendering to the unexpected, of trusting that even in falling, there is flight.

What does it mean to choose? And what if, in dance, we are not choosing, but being chosen—by

gravity, by momentum, by the spaces we inhabit? Perhaps Contact Improvisation is less about

defining and more about questioning, about allowing contradictions to exist in motion, about

recognizing that freedom is not the absence of boundaries but the constant negotiation of them.

 

As the residency drew to a close, the dance lingered—not in the visible steps but in the unseen

shifts, the subtle reorganizations of self. The echoes of shared movement reverberated in dreams, in

tired limbs, in the quiet recognition that something had moved within. And though the floors had

emptied, the dance continued.

​Because CI is not a destination. It is a journey of ‘never the same.’ A practice of wonder, of edges

met and crossed, of falling and finding new ways to land. It is the art of letting go, of embracing

paradox, of allowing movement to reshape us—again, and again, and again.
 

Written and edited by Živa Jerman, with precious contributions from Nea – Chiara Maria Carpi

Participants and guest visitors: Georgi Petkov, Chiara Maria Carpi, Vladimira Šančić, Pavel

Šančić, Serhii Semichev, Lilia Rainivska, Nina Radovanovic, Tina Benko, Ema Križič, Sabina

Vilhelm.

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Organized by: Nayeli Špela Peterlin, Ema Weixler, Živa Jerman

Funded by: JSKD – Slovenian public fund for cultural activities

With the support of: Contact Improvisation Slovenia