About Kira
Kira Kirsch is a movement enthusiast, teacher, dancer, researcher, community organizer, mother and passionate initiator/curator living in Berlin part of Lake Studios, an artist-run dance, research, production and living space.
She is deeply invested into creating and shaping spaces for people to experience, learn about and sensitize their mind-body-movement continuum. She has pioneered, taught and continuously researched through the lens of the Axis Syllabus (AS) for almost two decades, is a co-organiser of the Nomadic College at Earthdance, leads teacher laboratories and has build a community for AS research in the Bay Area, California from 2006 to 2012.
In 2014 she started co-curating a new annual dance festival called SENSING IN and is establishing a regular educational program under the name of Movement Artisans together with Antoine Ragot at Lake Studios/Berlin.
She currently has a guest-lectureship at the HZT University of Arts in Berlin and is invited to festivals and institutions such as ImPulsTanz (AT), Ravnedans (NO), TQW-Vienna or the Goa Contact Festival among many other as well as private initiatives of the grass root type.
As a performer Kira has danced in the works of Sara Shelton Mann (US), David Szlasa (US), Avy K. Productions (RU), Christine Bonansea (US/FR), Half Machine (DK), ABCdance collective/Frey Faust, Cie. Anna Tenta (AT) and in numerous collaborations with her peers. From 2009 -2012 she collaborated with Montrealer Kelly Keenan and their creations "species – a moving body exposition" and "useless creatures" have been presented in the US, Canada and Austria.
Current projects are the establishment of the CoLaboratory Berlin, a research initiative for somatic communication (ISSC-Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication), hands-on intra-actions, gardening and nursing the new family member.
Teacher's statement
I am interested in perception and specifically perception while being in movement. I like to observe the processes of how we move towards perceiving what we could not perceive before. I m fascinated by witnessing the emergence and then presence of embodied knowledge. I think about my need for analytical thought or logic explanations and how it entangles with extending my imagination into what I do not understand yet or what I need to practice understanding with different parts of my nervous system or other body systems and what I then must practice in order it to become not only an embodied consciousness but an articulate one. I am interested in re-configuring as well as creating verbal new language that emerges from when we increase the importance of the felt sense, relations and physical improvisational encounter. I am curious to learn more what the other perceives so the other becomes one, not in becoming the same but as in becoming multiple.
I don’t think dance or contact improvisation will save the world but i am curious of the potential that practicing skills such as awareness, somatic communication, physical coordination, contact communication and other relational practices brings to human intelligence and human with non-human togethering.
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I am a guide, a facilitator, an instigator, a movement-lover, sometimes a teacher and always a learner. Every day i have to find out what makes me curious today, what fascinates me, what did i notice yesterday, what I want to understand better and from there I can honestly share something or begin an investigation with the group that I am with. If i repeat something I try to see what i wasn't seeing before, taking slightly different routes creating a wider web of inquiry. I try to let my body speak, I try to find more nuance in articulating my body and my words, I try to do and undo, question form, appreciate form, from subtle to fierce, always alive.
