CI50 The Festival happened from 29th December 2022 until 3rd January 2023 at Quinta Ten Chi, Sintra, Portugal.
Picts by Movana Chen and Irene Álvarez
A large celebration of 50 years dancing Contact Improvisation, with almost 100 movers that spend together all these days, transitioning from 2022 to 2023. Dancing, cooking, cleaning, inhabiting nature and sharing conversations, moments around the fire, singing, laughing, celebrating. This was a crazy idea, that came right after the weekend marathon we celebrated in the springtime: to organize a festival where everybody gets involved in making things work, to co-live together while dancing and investigating Contact Improvisation. It really became crazy when registrations came up of 50, 60, 70 people. . . and we start making the shopping list to feed all these people during 6 days!! What happened there was simply Magic. So much love, so much gratitude, happy faces.
Starting around the fire, we set a 52 hours marathon, until the end of 2022, when everything became more wild with the enthusiasm of a new year starting and a parallel Ecstatic Dance happening just near building.
A day of resting and integration, body care and movie night on the 1st January, to dive then on the next 2 days into different intensives offered by the facilitators group: Alexa Papa, André Soares |No'An|, Francisco Borges, Irene Alvarez, Joel da Silva, Marina Sans, Pipaluk, Rita Vilhena, Viktoria Makra and Rita Venturini, our host, sharing the Social Presenting Theatre practice, included in the program. Nico Capogna and Dagma were recording some images and interviewing people to create a documentary that is a great gift for the whole CI community, and also for those who are curious about this practice.
So grateful to all that trusted and came to be part of this experience.