Point of Touch: Practices of Empathy

How close can we come without touching? What tension unfolds in the resonating space between bodies? In this workshop, skin becomes a threshold — a porous border where self meets other. By brushing, clapping, or pinching the surface, we activate vibration that ripples into movement, connecting us outward to floor, air, and other dancers, and inward to the layered worlds of tissues, organs and imagination.

From this play of distance and proximity, touch enters as both risk and invitation: melting into another body, attuning to heat as a radar, opening the field of our own body as a zone to be respected and shared. Together we will dance, improvise, and experiment with empathy in its contradictions — how it resonates, overwhelms, or pulls us apart.

“Point of Touch: Practices of Empathy” explores the capacities and quirks of empathy not as an innate trait but as an embodied practice — a cultivated redirection of attention. Rooted in somatic improvisation and choreographic research, the workshop offers guided encounters and touch-based explorations. The work does not seek resolution, but invites us to stay open, affected, and attentive: moving within elastic pleasure, awkwardness, and the vulnerability of being-with — stretching our sense of togetherness within and beyond boundaries.

Alica Minar is a Slovak choreographer, performer, and curator based in Prague and Berlin. Loud visuals in which narration and abstraction go hand in hand are typical of her work. Through bizarre situations, she intuitively searches for humour and poetry, while dissecting the neglected sides of burning societal issues together with the audience. Shaped by choreographic scores and clowning principles, she explores how nudity and costumes distort the perception of the dancing body. Since 2023, she has also expanded her curatorial practice, co-creating projects such as the Dancetopia Symposium and Fest of Fools. Since September 2024, she is part of the curatorial team of Studio ALTA in Prague. Alica is a graduate of choreography studies at HAMU in Prague (BA) and Inter-University Centre for Dance HZT in Berlin (MA).

The workshop is presented in collaboration with DanceConnected.