15 – 21 September 2025
Participants: Max 35 per shift
This retreat is designed for people with experience in contact improvisation who are familiar with the dynamics of the jam, and for those who wish to discover how silence and meditation can enrich and deepen their experience of dance.
Silence, The Contact Improvisation Jam, Meditation, the Talking Circle
Intensive workshop Teacher
Anjelika Doniy
Anjelika Doniy is a dance improviser, choreographer and teacher focused on contact. After 5 years of formal studies of choreography, ballet dance and other stage disciplines at the Higher School of Culture (St-Petersburg), she worked for 10 Years as a theater choreographer. Until… In 1997, I was at the Impulse Dance Festival in Vienna. There, I saw a wonder of CI, watched Steve Paxton on stage, flew into Andrew Harwood workshop where some 70 dancers were rolling over each other. This was unbelievable, the earth was becoming alive. I saw a realization of my dream of the world growing from connection, interaction, harmony between one and many. It was love from the first sight. From 2002 I started facilitating first jams and CI workshops in Russia and initiated International Contact Improvisation and Performance Festival in Moscow in 2006–2010. My path in CI as a teacher began as long journey of workshops for beginners. I love to guide people into the dance, inspire them with their own body, and awaken to what is already there. I love to surprise long-time dancers with secrets of the body as little keys opening a familiar dance into new spaces. This year, I am following a program of the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy to go deeper into the body and its anatomy, to touch the cells, to breathe through the navel, and to use this resource in my practice. My special interest in contact improvisation is clarity. Clarity towards the practice. Honesty towards how I move my weight in the space of Gravity. Attention towards clearing the dance from the personal. Letting things happen as they go. I am grateful to have met and studied with such teachers as Regine Chopinot, Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Danny Lepkoff, Benno Voorham, Lisa Nelson, Esther Gal, Yaniv Mintzer, Martin Keo and many others. Anjelica taught over 200 workshops all over the world for all levels from complete beginners to professional dancers. Her teaching is rooted in many years of work of acquiring and transmitting technical skills and equally long path of meditation and mindfulness practice. She blends them into a life dance, contact improvisation.
Intensive workshop
Elastic Attention
Attention is what drives us when we are small, and it is what we create our reality with when we are big.
What is the ecological transition from one role to another and back again? It’s the student/teacher relationship within ourselves.
In this intensive we will explore ourselves as a process of multi-faceted learning:
– discipleship and transfer of knowledge,
– leading and following,
– letting go of roles, “grazing”, “fluttering”, experiencing ourselves as elastic, shifting attention,
– telescopic awareness,
– attention to big and small details.
I plan to teach this festival intensive as a CI laboratory.
For teachers, for those already dancing, and for beginning participants. I am unaware of how contact improvisation seeps into our bodies, but I do know that it does happen in some non-linear way.
And there is another truth in our continued growth of community – we cannot be without each other. Beginners without experienced dancers, teachers without beginners. We need each other to grow, to sniff the paths of dance, to give each other vectors for development. Listening to each other from different corners of the development of dance, intelligence and soulfulness, we can begin to understand our potential, the call to development and catch the path that we want to take at the festival and further in life.
I am inspired to run a CI workshop-lab, and will create the conditions:
– Material that grows from the basics and moves participants to jam safely, with a reliance on technique.
– Jam secrets that will blossom like seeds and support your jam experience in the evenings.
– CI labs. I will create structures and let in the lab spirit that will allow not only my experience as a facilitator to manifest but allow teachers and advanced participants to unfold the beauty of their dance path.
– A variety of transitions from beginning level to advanced and back again, so that we forget how small or big we are while remaining innocent, light and friendly in the dance.
When participants come to the festival with no experience or expectations — it helps them to face the new unawares, to surrender to the flow of information and movement. Their dance happens on its own, frantically, without the involvement of the mind.
When the experience is vast and juicy — one just wants to dance, to exchange tastes and things, to reach out to those who are already comfortable and familiar.
My wish is that everyone meets the dance, touches the miracle of this freedom and puts it in the heart. And the heart knows where to go.
Schedule
🌀 Day 1 – Arrival and Opening
By 15:30 · Arrival and check-in
16:00 – 17:30 · Opening Circle (welcome, orientation, beginning of shared silence)
17:30 – 19:30 · Introductory Class (principles, awareness, foundational practices)
19:30 – 21:00 · Dinner
21:00 – 21:30 · Small Dances Circle
21:30 onward · Opening Silent Jam
🕊️ Shared silence begins after the Opening Circle.
🌞 Days 2, 3 & 4 – Full Practice Days
Morning
08:15 – 09:00 · Meditation
09:00 – 10:00 · Breakfast
10:00 – 10:30 · Silent Circle
10:30 – 13:00 · Silent Jam
Afternoon
13:00 – 14:30 · Lunch
15:00 – 16:00 · Talking Circle
16:00 – 19:00 · Workshop / Intensive Session
Evening
19:30 – 21:00 · Dinner
21:00 – 21:30 · Small Dances Circle
21:30 onward · Silent Jam
💧 Day 5 – Integration Day
Morning
08:15 – 09:00 · Meditation
09:00 – 10:00 · Breakfast
10:00 – 10:30 · Silent Circle
10:30 – 13:00 · Silent Jam
Afternoon
13:00 – 14:30 · Lunch
15:00 – 19:00 · Bodywork in Thermal Water (silent, shared session)
Evening
19:30 – 21:00 · Dinner
21:00 – 21:30 · Small Dances Circle
21:30 – 23:00 · Sound Journey / Music Therapy
🔥 Day 6 – Intensive Day
Morning
08:15 – 09:00 · Meditation
09:00 – 10:00 · Breakfast
10:00 – 10:30 · Silent Circle
10:30 – 13:00 · Intensive Workshop
Afternoon
13:00 – 14:30 · Lunch
15:00 – 16:00 · Talking Circle
16:00 – 19:00 · Intensive Workshop
Evening
19:30 – 21:00 · Dinner
21:00 – 21:30 · Small Dances Circle
21:30 onward · Silent Jam
🌅 Day 7 – Closing and Departure
Morning
08:15 – 09:00 · Meditation
09:00 – 10:00 · Breakfast
10:00 – 12:00 · Final Silent Jam
12:00 – 13:00 · Closing Circle
13:00 · Farewell lunch and departures
🔕 Shared Silence Guidelines
Dance Studio: silence 24 hours a day
All other retreat spaces: silence from 21:00 to 13:00
Retreat Focalizers
Luigi Mattiello
I am a Gestalt counselor trained at the Miriam Polster Institute in Florence and an integrated approach music therapist graduated from the Tuscan Center of Music Therapy. In the social and educational sphere I collaborate with school institutions and mental health centers in prevention and rehabilitation projects with specific Music Therapy resources. As part of the relationship of help, I work with groups of adults through the tools of Counseling, using a Gestalt approach and artistic mediation. I lead groups on the use of voice and song as a vehicle for transforming human potential, an integration path between Gestalt techniques, artistic mediation counseling, vocal music therapy and free singing. In the artistic and personal well-being field I work as a multi-instrumentalist in concert activities called sound rituals / world-music, a path that sees the realization of meditative concerts through evocative sounds from different countries of the world, combined with the ritualistic dimension of the human being that offers the listener the opportunity to create internal landscapes useful for inner growth and the development of his potential. I am an educational teacher at the biennial music therapy course in Florence. Trainer and populariser in the pedagogical and social field with teachers, helpers and parents.
Caterina Gynt
Catherina Gynt (born Caterina Testi) is a multidisciplinary artist and therapist-in-training in the fields of art and aquatic practices. Painter, illustrator, tattoo artist, and bodyworker, she blends visual art, movement, and somatic research into a unified path of expression and healing. Trained in Fine Arts and Performing Arts academies, she has explored Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Watsu, Amnion, and Craniosacral work in water. Her practice is rooted in symbolism, lucid dreaming, and altered states of perception, creating a distinctive language of gesture and image — where silence, story, and transformation meet. At her studio, The Gynthouse, she welcomes every-body and every story, translating lived experience into skin and water. She believes in art as ritual, and in experience as a threshold: each gesture a key, each encounter a narrative.
Boti B. Gaspar
Born and raised in Hungary, where he started his journey in Contact Improvisation, shortly before moving to Italy, to begin studying psychology at the University of Padua. Here quickly integrated in the local CI scene, last year, together with CIP Contact Improvisation Padova, organised and facilitated the project "Emrio" a space dedicated to the study of CI. This year, as part of CIP, is organising several other encounters, and facilitating weekly classes. In the meanwhile he graduated with a thesis deepening Contact Improvisation, and to nurture the intersection between psychology and movement, started collaborating with the Paduan Association of Functional Psychology and Psychotherapy, a center dedicated to a psychosomatic approach with a particular attention to touch in therapeutic settings. Forsees a project of CI in family starting this autumn.
Prices and registration procedures
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How to get there
Plane: Nearest airport: Perugia, Firenze, Roma
Car: Podere Calcinaia, 53019
Castelnuovo Berardenga, Siena
Posizione: https://goo.gl/maps/N4EefPfQuGtFu7eVA
Train: The closest railway station is Castelnuovo Berardenga Stazione 15 min car or Siena 30 min car
By bus: The place is not directly accessible by public transport but we can pick you up in Castelnuovo Berardenga. There are buses from Siena
More detailed information will be provided following registration
Host
The house has a wooden practice room, outdoor dancefloor, nice kitchen, and cozy shared room.
Also camping and van spots are available.
We are on an organic farm surrounded by wood forest, olive fields, and a vineyard Tuscany landscape.
Perfect for chilling, walking, and exploring, of course dancing!!
CSR Team
Anna Bertolotti
Born in Tuscany and based in Liguria, Anna studied set and costume design in Milan and practiced it for 15 years, cultivating many different artistic interests, mainly theater acting. She landed on Contact Improvisation six years ago and it was love at first sight. She then became a managing member of Corpoetica and CSR, organizing CI and dance related events in Italy.
Alessandro Papalini
His journey through travel, contact improvisation, meditation, and social work began twenty-five years ago, bringing deep meaning to his life. A professional educator and pedagogist, he holds degrees in social psychology from the University of Siena, where his theses explored and examined human connections through touch and symbol. As a yoga and meditation teacher trained at FIY, he evolved from a fascination with Kashmir Shaivism and its contemporary interpreters to an appreciation for secular Ancient Buddhism via the practice of Vipassana meditation (AMECO). Founder of the Libera Mente APS association, he coordinates projects for refugees and convicted minors and leads Contact Silence Retreats. He is the father of Litò, a wonderful 9-year-old child, and he promised her he will never stop dancing.
