ANJELIKA DONYI

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. 

"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."

All practice in this workshop is about giving care to the body and receiving secrets of movement and self-expression in exchange.

I will take one of my favorite focus: developing the vision of myself as a 3-dimensional moving spiral body.

It is not only the physical body, but also it is about the space around me, that I—consciously or not—rotate, turn, roll out. It is also the body of my partner whom I involve in my play, into my movement, to whom I show the way, from whom I learn the way.

It is also a group, “jamming” involvement into movement taking shapes of acts of nature, such as a vortex, tornado, snail house, grape tendrils grasping support.

We will do a detailed and intentional work to multiply our possibilities in lifts with spiral additions, carefully dosing tone and effort.

Together, we will study compatibility of trajectories with a partner and in a group. We will be finding and losing each other through spirals. We will practice CI in relationship to the composition of the space, time, and place. We’ll work with attention, understanding the principles of movement. We will be developing our capacity to be clear in chaos and spontaneous in a clear framework of a particular form.

I invite you to a laboratory, where we will sculpt, draw and unfold new images of ourselves in dance. The power of life that twists the grape tendril up, can become our teacher.