Carmen Alcalde
PLAYING SERIOUSLY
“What happens when play stops being superficial and becomes a form of radical presence?”
Carmen Alcalde
I trust in the transformative power of CI, capable of expanding our perception and our awareness, affecting our corporeality and subjectivity to inspire new forms of relationship that I consider necessary in our current culture.
I trained in parallel in the social, artistic, and educational fields, approaching singing, theater, and dance from childhood and later undertaking various trainings that I still draw on. In 2005 I fell in love with Contact Improvisation and deepened with numerous teachers.
Since 2010 I have taught CI in different spaces and contexts, as well as being involved in organizing gatherings, festivals, and initiatives that promote the practice and its philosophy.
In 2011 I settled in an Extremaduran village with a group of friends to start a collective life project with a horizontal and assembly-based structure.
Driven by self-management processes and the dynamics that emerge from them, I studied Group Facilitation and Gestalt therapy, finding numerous connections with Contact and Improvisation.
Since 2017, in the same place, I have managed and inhabited La Enramada, a home and meeting, retreat, and creation space from where I teach CI weekly, organize workshops, host artistic residencies, and accompany therapeutic processes.
As a CI teacher I have participated in the festivals of Asturias, Madrid, Cardedeu, Italy, Provence/France, and in events such as "WIM Festival", "Akelarre de Mujeres con Arte", "Pirineos en Danza", "Itineranzza", "Namoreira" or "FESTCam".
Since 2017 I have co-facilitated with Lucía Sánchez the project Espacios ( ) between life and dance, co-organized the Encuentro Danzas Magas (10 editions) with her and Ernes Novales, and the CI Festival Inmersiones, together with Lucía Sánchez, Diana Bonilla, and Leilani Weis.
PLAYING SERIOUSLY
What happens when play stops being superficial and becomes a form of radical presence?
There is a moment in improvisation when we stop chasing an idea of movement and begin to listen. Attention changes direction: it is no longer about reproducing, demonstrating, or controlling, but about allowing ourselves to be moved by what is happening now. The relationship with breath, with support, with falling and gravity, with space and with other bodies. There, movement ceases to be something imposed and begins to reveal itself.
This shift transforms dance into a territory of discovery. The body-mind becomes more permeable, available, and sensitive to the unexpected. Play emerges - not as escape or entertainment, but as a way of entering more deeply into experience. A state in which curiosity replaces the need to get things right, and where surprise finds space to exist. An expanded perception that awakens the intelligence of the body in relationship.
Contact Improvisation proposes a dialogue with the unknown. It invites us to listen before deciding, or to take risks without anticipating outcomes, allowing something to emerge in the "in-between" of shared territory rather than imposing it. To welcome mystery - therein lies its power.
A space to let ourselves be affected by encounter and to practice the capacity to remain available to what we do not yet know.