Kristina Marlen

Workshop:

• MOVEMENT AND IMMOBILITY

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www.marlen.me

Kristina Marlen – After studying cultural and social sciences as well as law, I completed my training as a physiotherapist (with a certificate) in 2006. Today I work as a physiotherapist and body worker, (yoga) teacher and trainer in my own practice. Additionally, I am a singer, dancer and performer. My love is dedicated to the contemporary dance, contact improvisation as well as the art of improvisation in general. My foundation to all this is starting with the loving acceptance of whatever is.

I’ve broadened my bodywork in 2008 and have included the sexual aspect, the basis being the tantric ritual. Since then, I’ve explored and extended the boundaries of it perpetually. Touching people is in not only my job, but also my calling. Including sexuality into the process opens up another dimension that is exciting and deeply nourishing. What really fascinate me about the work with sexual energy is the aesthetic and the poetry as well as the breaks, variances and opposites inherent in passion and the body images.

I define myself as queer and use this term as a helping construct for my general opinion that desire and sexuality, gender identity and love are infinitely variable and require a plethora of expression.

I am interested in kink practices, because I am interested in everything that broadens the range of human sensation and expression. I am interested in all colors of the sensational range; and our longings are the key to great creativity and freedom. The taboo and the censorship are the opponents of our playful, strong and lustful self. I love to accompany humans into spaces of experience, where they are allowed to experience entirely new qualities of sensations; feeling helpless as an increase of surrender, sweet pain, their own desire for power and powerlessness. Yet, also vulnerability, openness and the experience of being held in that. Possibly discovering that feelings you would have never paired are actually closely related. In all this, I like to be the sensible companion, and every time when new ways on the emotional map disclose themselves, I will learn as well.
I will hold the space and support this travel journey.

MOVEMENT AND IMMOBILITY

In this workshop we explore the area where the Japanese inspired Rope Bondage meets with Contact Improvisation as well as with elements of modern dance.

Contact Improvisation: a dance form, for which freedom plays an important role: a dance that knows no fixed steps, but lives through movement-flow and improvisation; a dance that celebrates and explores the endlessness and the possibilities of movement.

The Japanese Rope Bondage celebrates the body in its immobility. The limitations, restriction, the state of the body being restrained make up the fascination of Kinbaku or Shibari. Its aesthetic is dedicated to the expression of the body which is not free anymore.

Drawing from the two opposites - Movement and Immobility - we playfully explore the differences between external and internal action, between motion and emotion, impulse and resistance.

We explore body spaces and their potential for stretching and compression. We experience the rope as a medium of control and resonance. This workshop is a field of experiments on the polarity of feeling safe and explorative risk, between restriction and surrender, between limitation and freedom that spring out of the whole process.

No prior knowledge of dance or shibari is needed.

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