Katya Mustonen

Finland

WORKSHOP

Orchestrated Body

This workshop considers the body as an orchestra where several parts play together. Applying this into our contact dancing, we expand our ability to stay aware simultaneously with more than one thing, choice or action at a time.

Through the palette of hands-on practices, exercises and scores for dancing, we inspire and generate action for improvisations. We enliven our solo dancing in order to spark and spice up our CI dancing through tasks that ask for an active choice making and fine tuning of our senses.

We pay attention to the dynamics of listening and use simplicity as a ground from where complexity can sprout. We extend our movement pathways and vocabularies by enhancing timing, rhythm, orientation and chaos. Staying with the questions while articulating our choices in each moment is to strengthen and extend the spaces between our knowing and the unknown.

ABOUT ME

Katja Mustonen is a Finnish dance maker and teacher, currently based in Outokumpu, Finland. She graduated as a dancer in Finland 2004, and holds an MA degree in Contemporary Dance Education (MACoDE, HfMDK, Frankfurt, 2010).

Since 2008, she’s been teaching Improvisation, Contemporary Dance and Contact Improvisation internationally in institutions, festivals and other venues. Artistically, she keeps being interested about the states of presence and the body’s ability to embody, transmit and transform images into knowledge, emotions, language and atmospheres. Merging photography, video, sound and text together with objects continues fascinating her, allowing her to create a larger body of her artistic work.

Photography: Taina Koistinen