I was one of two dozen people participating in a weekend contact improvisation workshop led by Filip Wencki at Studio 42 in Warsaw’s Twarda. From Friday evening to Sunday evening the lessons kept unfolding and evolving and folding back upon themselves in surprising ways.
Arriving—as a body, then as attention. Retaining the availability to move when when relaxed. Learning what looseness freed from heaviness feelis like from the inside. Touching. Reaching within. Discovering that we are lightest when we are ascending or descending, heaviest when we’re congratulating ourselves for having made it to the top. Making a choice in the matter of the individual versus the shared. The importance of releasing fear. The physics of bodies taking on gravity together. Density as the decisive factor that turns motion into dance. The strange effort of allowing what is to just be. Being, ephemerally, within reach of unity with another person.
Momentum makes things easier. Slow is more interesting than fast. Imagine your hands as instruments for gathering information. And when you don’t know what to do, hug.
But these were mostly not lessons for words. They were lessons of state, possibility, and experience. For many of us, unprecedented things happened, many of them inexplicable. We started with hushed interest and danced our way to alert awareness one moment, mystified amazement the next.
I pick up on a dead-serious intensity about Filip even when he is joking, though of course I’m more attuned to it when he isn’t. As an instructor of the movement arts I think he combines an extraordinary capacity for physical observation with an intellectual approach that borders on the spiritual. I, for one, find Filip’s teaching style to be both illuminating and interesting, as different as his bold yang is from the considerate yin I associate with somatics.
The photos are, like my second paragraph, just a glimpse into our group’s workshop experience. Enjoy the story they tell and feel free to reach between the lines for more information.
All photos taken on Sunday, 2023 04 02, with the Fuji X-T20 and the subtly rose-colored Fujinon XF 56 mm f/1.2.
To see more of my photos from this event, follow this link to my Google Folder. If you want to repost any of the images, (1) make sure you have permission from everyone in the photo and (2) credit me as the author and/or include a link my Instagram or Facebook profile.
