BIO
Kaisa Kukkonen (1986) is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Finland. She works with the poetry of movement, politics of touch, and somatic practices. In CI she is interested in multidirectionality, subtle but powerful consent, and relationality.
Kaisa has been dancing CI since 2005, and teaching since 2010 in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Iceland. Her CI home is Berlin, where she learned from Joerg Hassmann, Daniel Werner, Christine Mauch, and Gesine Daniels among others. Later her teachers and/or co-dancers have been for example Katja Mustonen, Anya Cloud, Iiris Raipala, Terhi Rasilo, and Nita Little.
Kaisa finished her studies at Iceland University of Arts in the MFA of Performing Arts programme (2021-2022) in September 2022 with a performance project “Take This Touch Inside Your Body”. She graduated from the MACoDE program at HfMDK in Frankfurt with a master thesis “Noticing Power Relations in Teaching Touch in Contact Improvisation” (2021). For the thesis she interviewed fourteen Contact Improvisation teachers, collected their strategies and thoughts on how to teach touch. Website: https://kaisakukkonen.wordpress.com/
Poetic scores for CI
The classes are inspired by my poetry book Scores for Touch and at Skiing on Skin I will be using the poems as scores for teaching and dancing Contact Improvisation.
In the classes we will keep on moving with the topics of touch, as well as write. Classes are suitable for all levels and for people who wish to find more depth and clarity in their CI dancing.