POLITICAL BODIES
I love to create spaces of practice. Not places to switch off.
Not a place to consume contact.
A place where we can train attention.
A place where we can practice to train consent as timing.
A place where we can train responsibility as an embodied skill.
The measure here is simple:
does the dance increase choice for both bodies?
Touch is a language.Weight is a conversation.
Intensity is negotiated, not taken.
Pleasure is part of practice. But pleasure without awareness is just extraction.
So we train to keep the body awake.
EVERYBODIESAREPOLITYICAL
EVERY BODIES ARE POLITICAL
An International Gathering of Contact Improvisation, Body Practices, Art & Political Imagination
EVERY BODIES ARE POLITICAL is a a projects that moves in many directions and it's also a six-day international gathering dedicated to exploring the inseparable relationship between bodies, movement, power, and politics.
This gathering starts from a simple yet radical premise:
there is no neutral body.
Every body is shaped by history, power structures, access, exclusion, violence, care, and privilege. To work with the body—through dance, contact improvisation, performance, or somatic practices—means to take responsibility for this reality.
We believe that all bodies are political, not because they choose to be, but because they exist within systems that mark them differently.
Why This Gathering
In contemporary dance and somatic practices, the body is often framed as universal, neutral, or equal.
We challenge this assumption.
Bodies are not equal.
They are different, and these differences matter
They are affected by:
• gender, race, class, ability, age
• geopolitical location and migration
• access to resources, safety, and visibility
• historical and ongoing systems of power
Ignoring these differences reproduces inequality.
Starting from them opens the possibility of responsibility, care, and transformation.
IMPACTING
Impacting is a dance project that brings Contact Improvisation into public space to investigate the politics of encounter.
Public space is not neutral. It is regulated by economic rhythms, surveillance, productivity, and unspoken behavioral codes. There is a choreography already in place: move efficiently, consume, don’t linger, don’t touch, don’t disrupt.
Contact Improvisation enters this choreography as friction.
Rooted in shared weight, listening, consent, and unpredictability, the practice proposes another logic of encounter. It values slowness in a culture of acceleration. It values mutual support in systems built on competition. It allows bodies to meet without predetermined roles.
Contact Improvisation proposes another way of relating — to gravity, to surfaces, to other bodies. It values touch, negotiation, pause, and unpredictability. In contrast, public space often operates through invisible rules: how to move, how to behave, how to occupy space, how to meet. There seems to be a “correct” way to exist together.
Impacting places these different logics in contact.
Impacting investigates what happens when this relational practice interrupts the tempo of the city. When bodies lean, roll, pause, and make contact where contact is usually regulated or erased. When presence replaces performance.
The project asks how our bodies “impact” the social choreography of the city — and how the city impacts us in return.
We expose other possibilities of being in urban space. We show up forms of collective presence that are not based on consumption or efficiency, but on attention and shared weight.
Impacting understands the body as political territory. Each shared weight becomes a small act of resistance against isolation. Each pause becomes a refusal of imposed tempo. Each contact becomes a rehearsal for another social structure.
Impacting is not a spectacle placed onto the city. It is a proposal: that public space can be reimagined through embodied practice. That meeting does not require a predefined script. That bodies, in contact, can quietly disrupt the idea that there is only one correct way to move, to relate, to belong.
Impacting it is also a project that bring in the public space their NO to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
IMPACTING IS A PROJECT BY NICA PORTAVIA & CONTACT IMPROVISATION BOLOGNA
Touch is not neutral.
Touch carries history.
Touch carries power.
Touch carries desire.
Touch carries risk.
We touch with awareness, or we don’t touch.
EVERY BODIES ARE POLITICAL creates a space to:
• acknowledge privilege without guilt
• recognize oppression without simplification
• practice accountability without moralism
• move together without erasing difference
The Gathering as a Practice
The gathering is conceived as a non-linear, open-ended process rather than a closed event.
It functions as a living Social Tuning Score:
a shared space where movement, discussion, disagreement, listening, and imagination continuously inform one another
This is not a gathering that offers answers.
It is a space that practices questions together.
Questions such as:
• How do power relations live in our bodies?
• What does consent mean beyond technique?
• Who is allowed to take space, to fall, to rest?
• How do we move together without reproducing domination?
• What strategies of survival and care can we invent collectively?
EVERYBODIESAREPOLITICAL IS A MOVEMENT- WRITING-RESAERCHING PROJECT initiated by Fran & Nica
We are not here to reproduce the world as it is.
We are here to practice another world through the body.
Touch is not casual.
It carries power, history, desire, and risk.
So we move with awareness, or we don’t move.
This is not a place to “just do whatever.”
Freedom without responsibility becomes violence.
If you want intensity, build it with consent.
If you want pleasure, stay accountable to the relation.
If you want play, keep it intelligent.
Your yes matters.
Your no matters.
Changing your mind matters.
Rest matters.
Distance matters.
There is no “normal body” here.
No correct speed, no correct ability, no correct gender, no correct technique.
But there is one requirement: responsiveness.
If you take space, notice it.
If you disappear, notice it.
If you lead, notice it.
If you follow, notice it.
We don’t practice to look good.
We practice to become more aware.
DANCING FOR PALESTINE
3 YEARS AGO THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE HAVE STARTED. SINCE THAT DAY WE ARE SHOWING UP IN OUR STREET, SQUARE, PUBLIC SPACES TO SAY NO TO THE GENOCIDE, TO SAY THAT WE WANT A PLACE CALLED PALESTINE, TO SAY THAT WE WANT ALL THE PALESTINIANS SAFE.
VOICES OFF BY NICA PORTAVIA AND MAX CIMBRO BONATTO
POEM BY ALEXIS PAULIN GUMBS & OTHERS POETS
VIDEO BY GRA
POLITICAL TUNING IN
This is not a neutral space.
Every body arrives already marked by power, by access, by exclusion.
We do not pretend equality — we practice attention.
We do not erase difference — we move with it.
Care here is not politeness.
Care is the courage to notice who is centered and who disappears.
Accessibility is not something we add later.
It is something we negotiate live.
If you need to rest, rest is part of the dance.
If you need to say no, no is choreography.
If you change your mind, instability is intelligence.
This dance evalues responsiveness over endurance.
There is no correct body here.
No ideal weight, speed, ability, gender, or rhythm.
Virtuosity is not domination.
Softness is not weakness.
Slowness is not absence.
We are not here to perform normality
we are here to interrupt it.
We refuse urgency.
We refuse productivity as a measure of worth.
Touch is not owed.
Distance is not rejection.
Desire is allowed to shift, to pause, to contradict itself.
We practice consent as an ongoing conversation, not a checkbox.
If discomfort appears, we do not rush to fix it.
If conflict arises, we stay curious before defensive.
Friction is not failure — it is information.
We move responsibility through the body, not onto one person.
This space does not promise safety.
It commits to care and accountability.
This dance is not about freedom from limits.
Enter listening.
Enter unfinished.
Enter ready to be changed.
Nica Portavia 2026
“The improvisation of the moment, the way we move together without scripts, mirrors how society could work if people paid attention to each other rather than power structures.”
You’re not dancing alone; you’re accountable to the group, to the moment, to the space. That’s a political act.
STEVE PAXTON