Rizoma is a gathering of Contact Improvisation and Butoh dancers, movers, and seekers, taking place at Quinta Ten Chi, Sintra, Portugal. Surrounded by nature, we will create improvisational spaces where the visible and invisible meet.
How do we move upon the earth while attuning to its hidden depths? How do we touch another body—not just its
physical form but the echoes of its soul?
Beneath our feet, an unseen rhizome spreads—a network of silent connections, pulsing with life. Our bodies emerge
from this invisible weave, part of a shared, living fabric. In dance, we make this web visible—meeting, merging, dissolving, and reforming in a continuous flow.
Contact Improvisation roots us in the tangible—where weight, momentum, and gravity shape our movement.
Butoh invites us into the liminal—the space between presence and absence, matter and spirit, memory and dream.
We fall. Into gravity. Into each other’s stories. Into the abyss of the unknown.
We surrender. To resonance—between bodies, between dreams, between worlds.
A dance unfolds, where the physical and the oneiric entwine, where we become gravity, structure, memory, and
breath—indistinguishable from the dance of life itself.
DATES
26th- 29th of May
LOCATION
Quinta Ten Chi, Sintra, Portugal (quintatenchi.org)
Workshops, jams and performances: A mix of guided sessions, open improvisations, and performative spaces.
BUTOH PRACTICE
How can we dream within another’s body and the shared space?
These sessions invite us to awaken the imagination, exploring the meeting point between mind and body—if they are not one and the same. Imagination has an immediate effect on the body, and this is a key focus of our practice. We move towards a dance that transcends the purely physical, unfolding through multiple layers—our lives, memories and the ancestral information carried in our cells.
Through this exploration, we create space for a dance that emerges from structure yet surrenders to gravity, allowing the bones to fall and the dream to become tangible.
Each session follows a process of emptying and becoming, shedding superficial layers, releasing excess tension, and clearing the way—so that we may be fully available to be danced by life itself.
CONTACT IMPROVISATION PRACTICE
The Rhizome proposes a non-hierarchical relationship and a horizontal transmission of information. This ideas will infuse our explorations.
The journey of attention will be our starting point. With somatic tools we will refine our listening and witness how and where our attention travels in our body, in contact with other body(s) and in relation to space.
We will plant seeds in the form of intentions that invite the mass into movement.
We will spend a lot of time in “the unknown”, that space that opens up as we share weight in dynamic reality.
We will explore some physical principles that are at the base of the practice and we will also spend time falling.
Through different scores, we will give way to the dimension of composition and the jams will be our space of play where the limits of the disciplines disappear.
FACILITATORS
Adriana Víquez (CR/ESP)
Performing artist, movement researcher and facilitator of Contact Improvisation.
I began my journey of exploration in dance more than 15 years ago, studying Contemporary Dance in Costa Rica and Argentina, nourishing myself along the way with other practices such as physical theater, Butoh, Dance Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation, among others.
During the last 6 years I have been immersed in the study, practice and teaching of CI in Spain, Portugal and Costa Rica as well as in the creation of Dance and Improvisation pieces and in the study of different somatic practices.
Vir Torres (ESP)
Dance performer and movement researcher. Psychonaut, navigator of body-mind-space. Born in Granada (Spain), I studied flamenco and spanish dance until my 20's in the proffesional school of dance. The last few years of my career I gave a wild jump to the area of butoh, dance improvisation and experimental expression researching the body as a vehicle to discover the unknown, deconstructing my dance and peeling off layers of what I consider it separates me from my true expression. My work is highly influenced by the wisdom of eastern traditions, having meditation as a fundamental pillar of my daily practice. As a butoh dancer I have created different solo pieces as “Amatista”, “Buenos Aires”, “Chinamasta” and “Autum Roses”, "Borboleta do Céu e da Terra" and I have been part of productions such as “Sasayaki, from a whisper to cry (with Tadashi Endo as director) and “Bob Cabaret” (Marlene Jobstl as director). I am based in Portugal in a place dedicated to embodied practices, community and nature called Quinta Ten Chi. There, we organize different events as dance workshops, festivals, artistic residencies so we all take different roles, from performing, teaching, organizing, holding the space in any way.
VALUE (includes 3 meals per day*)
220€ Early Bird (before May 1st)
250€ after May 1st
*only dinner on arrival day + breakfast and lunch on departing day
ACCOMODATION
30€ shared dorms
21€ own tent/ van
REGISTRATIONS
https://forms.gle/aK6GRUm32zAFd975A
CONTACT
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(+34) 675774899 Adriana
(+34) 644644004 Vir
Also check out other Entertainment events in Sintra, Dance events in Sintra, Performances in Sintra.
