The team
July 27th- August 1st 2024
A retreat to embrace our light and darkness.
Meet the beautiful team
experimental and embodied teaching
Welcome to the Touch&Play community, where the organizers and teachers are not just leaders but fellow journeyers.
We come together with a shared commitment to expansion and collaboration, embodying the principles we each one of us teach.
We are coming together to expand and collaborate.
We are all participants
embracing the mind of the beginner
And we – the participants – are a group of dancers, movers, somatic learners, spiritual magic makers, embodied humans, vulnerable deep-divers, and relational explorers. With curiosity, care, and perhaps a bit of mischief, we call in this community, expanding within and expanding throughout, to gather in a new creation.
All are warmly welcome, to come as your full, unfiltered, beautiful self.
Intensives Teachers
INTENSIVES
An Intensive Class is taught every mornings of the retreat with the same group so you can evolve together and build on whatever you created and learned beforehand. The three Intensive offerings run parallel so you will be part of only one group.
Shiggi Pakter
offers Grounded Movement
Born and partially raised in Kenya, Shiggi is a lifelong martial artist (karate, tae-kwon do, capoeira, BJJ) and movement coach/enthusiast (MovNat, BioFit, Budokon), constantly curious about how we move and exist in the world.
Throughout her time as a personal fitness trainer since 2012, the seriousness around fitness never sat right so all of her coaching focused on encouraging fun and curiosity within her personal and group clients. She also found the permission and space to “play” was separated from the art of “fighting”, thus in 2017, she created the Grounded Movement workshop that specifically cultivates this space of fun in Mixed Movement Arts.
Presently, as a purple belt, she’s been refining this experience with a newer focus around play-fighting with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a movement foundation. Paired with the animal locomotive movement textures from MovNat and Budokon this gives more avenues to explore a key primal movement attribute to being human and uncover what it means for each individual’s experience of their being human.
Asher Levin
offers Moving through Shadowed Realms with Contact Impro
I studied Dance, Drama & Theatre Arts at the Uni. of Birmingham & Physical Theatre at Ecole International du Theatre, Jacques Lecoq, Paris.
I’ve practiced CI for 30 years, taking courses and workshops with several of the world-wide recognised leading practitioners. I’ve been teaching CI internationally since 2008, first teaching regular classes in Berlin. I’ve taught at many international UK & European festivals. I now lead CI intensives (weekends and longer courses) throughout the UK, as well as internationally.
In CI, being off-balance and free, yet focused, caring and creative, is liberating and enriching. I practice making myself ‘homeless’, to be at home wherever the dance travels. I love to play with the dynamic spectrum, from tenderness and still, to acrobatic. In movement, I’m excited by dwelling in the unusual, yet love to revisit ‘old friends’ afresh. I welcome trios to whole group scores as much as a single-partner dance. I am interested in the relationship between intimate, aesthetic, and environmental spaces, and inspired by cross-media collaborations with impro musicians, as well as spontaneous artists.
I live in Dartington and love being and interacting with the land and elements.
Single Class Teachers
SINGLE CLASSES
Where are your interests? Where do you want to grow? Single classes happen in the afternoon and you can spontaneously choose a class you would like to join. A timetable with an overview which workshop will happen where and when will be offered at the venue during the retreat.
Valerie Kattenfeld
offers Integrating the Archetypes
Valerie Kattenfeld is an internationally known Biodanza facilitator, Tango teacher / dancer and spaceholder of tantric formats. After participating in her first sacred sexuality training at ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) in India in 2017 she decided to dedicate herself to facilitating group processes that invite to authentic encounters through the body, words and rituals. With ease Valerie creates environments of trust, openness, play and magic, for example the “Sexylonga” or “Temple Nights” – formats that she brought to Buenos Aires that combine eroticism & play in a safely & lovingly held place. The TEDx speaker (“How can Biodanza change your life?”) was born in Vienna, Austria and has given workshops literally around the globe (USA, Vietnam, Tansania, Germany etc). She lives in Argentina where she collaborates monthly with Ale Karasik who is the head of T&P Argentina. She will tour tour through Europe in June/July 2024.
My experience at Touch&Play deeply moved me because I felt I have arrived to the tribe I always belonged to.
Dr. Skye von Nordheim
offers Taboo-breaking magical mystical workshop
Skye is a psychologist, facilitator and happily wholesome kinkster with a knack for all things weird and wonderful.
Having previously contributed to Touch&Play UK, Touch&Play Mexico and many more sex+ festivals for dance, intimacy and play, Skye is excited to be back at Earth Spirit Centre, inviting you along for some taboo-breaking and life-affirming experiences.
Musicians, Artists and Care team
Bela Emerson
offers Live Music for jams
My cello and I have an intimate and exquisite relationship. Together, we weave transformational space for contact, play, and exploration.
I’m a specialist improvising musician for CI and other relational movement. As a neurodivergent gender-fluid professional artist, I work alongside CI practitioners actively attending to the flow and energetic shifts in the field.
I offer spacious, impulse-based acoustic cello, and multi-layered multi-genre electric cello soundscapes, working both solo and in collaboration with other musicians and sound artists.
Aquila Sunrise
offers Groovy & Soulful CIRCLE SINGING and Live improvised music for jams
Aquila is a certified vibeologist and a seeker of Enbrightenment, with deep passion for communication, especially the language of music. Receptive and heartfelt approach is a common thread running through the variety of his instruments and styles, from ambient soundscapes, through groovy beats to soulful circle-singing.
Halina Rozensztrauch and Finlay Forster-Davies
Sooth&Care and Work-exchange coordinators
Core Team
Neil Morbey
Neil is a mindfulness and touch facilitator, coach and counselor from Bristol. His business is Positively-Mindful.com which is the vehicle through which he delivers workshops and courses in therapeutic practices, personal development, relational work and intimacy exploration. Neil also teaches Swing-Dance and Blues-Dance and Contact Improvisation. Neil has also been a lifelong kinkster and since 2019 he has been teaching workshops to help make kink more fun and friendly to all, opening up the depth of playing at the dark edges of our consciousness.
Neil loves to bring playfulness and presence into his work and his life and he specializes in making his workshops feel warm and welcoming to all, which stems from his own experience as being incredibly anxious and nervous the first few years of his own journey into alternative explorations.
Elle Tipping
Elle is a holistic wellbeing coach and facilitator based in Somerset. She is passionate about embodied living and creating eudaemonia- the natural and unique state of human flourishing. In 2023 she opened the Harmony Within studio in Shepton Mallet where she facilitates community mental health programs, queer art events, qigong, NLP coaching and more. Her current curiosity is about how we can develop our relationship with expressing desire, across all aspects of life. Connect with Elle @harmonywithinorg on Insta and FB.
Daniel J. Hayes
Touch&Play Founder
Medical doctor (M.D.) and epidemiologist (Ph.D.), professional mediator, Contact Improvisation practitioner and social entrepreneur.
Dr. Daniel J. Hayes is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Back in the days he collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where he led malaria research projects.
He is the founder of Vidàlia, an eco-village an hour outside of Barcelona. Currently, he serves as the Executive Director of Earthdance Creative Living Project Inc., an artistic and cultural centre, and the world’s oldest Contact Improvisation community, based in Massachusetts, USA.
He has been practising Contact Improv for decades and plays since he was born.
Jamus Wood
Onsite coordinator
I dance, I explore and I have an innate curiosity for life. Deeply influenced and rooted by the practices of Body Mind Centering, Contact Improvisation, explorations into The Land and Embodied Consciousness. Currently I am exploring the more than human relationship with Dartmoor and the question of what does the land remember.
Touch&Play has been a rich place of learning, experiencing and play over the last ten years, so much so that I find myself as part of the organising teach for this unique and exciting experience.
Touch&Play UK organisers reserve the right to change or make adjustments to the teaching team at any given time and at short notice. Thank you for your understanding.
About Touch&Play
While Classical Contact Improvisation asks what happens when two physical bodies meet in space, Touch&Play asks what happens when two alchemical human beings meet in space.
We will research, experimentially (both experimental and experiential), these questions around the nuances of our relational bodies.
The first Touch&Play gathering took place in 2010 in Berlin focussing on an exploration of The chemistry of Contact Improvisation.
The current frame is a wider one and is described as an exploration of “The relational body”.
Contact Improvisation is one of the many tools we use for this exploration along side dance, kink, somatics, tantra, authentic relating, NVC.
Our values are focused on play, authenticity, inclusion and embodied consent.
