MARTIAL DANCE: contact improvisation meets soft-form martial arts with Karl Frost

Martial Dance with Karl Frost contact improvisation meets soft form martial arts Upcoming Workshops 28 Feb – 1 March: Wuppertal 8-9 March: Prague (February Leipzig workshop postponed to late April/May... new dates announced soon) Other upcoming workshops in California, Texas, Canada, and Japan www.bodyresearch.org Martial Dance is both subtle body meditation and athletic play in physical contact, blending soft-form martial arts with contact improvisation. Participants explore interdependent movement through collaboration, supports, lifts, and playful challenges of force, structure, weight and balance. Dancers work with martial focus and mechanical curiosity; martial artists release combat-focus for more open-ended physical play. Central to the practice is adaptive physical listening—sensing biomechanics, nervous systems, and shared structure and adapting mechanically sound movement with pleasure and care. We play with support, redirection, shaping each other’s movement, and collaborative movement into and out of the floor and through the air. Structured exercises and open exploration draw from Tai Chi push hands (Toishou) and contact improvisation, leading to grounded, curious, and physically engaged play of body and mind. Practices from release-based contemporary dance and the Passive Sequencing work develop proprioceptive awareness and fine-tuned adaptability Logistics for Leipzig workshop below. for other workshops , see the website or write to [email protected] Doing Multiple Weekends: for those who want to do multiple Martial Dance weekends in 2026, the workshops are intended to be about 50% novel material for each workshop and 50% shared foundational material worth repeating and deepening into. If you want to do multiple weekends but money holds you back, write for significant discounts for multiple weekends. --- Leipzig workshop Logistics Time: 12h -18h Saturday/Sunday Location: Fudoshin Aikido Dojo... martial arts studio with tatami mat floors Fees Early registration (by 7 February): 100-250 euros sliding scale Regular (After 7 February): 140-250 euros sliding scale, sliding scale As with most Body Research events, this workshop is “no one turned away for lack of funds”. This means pay what you can in the sliding scale range, and if you can’t afford the lower end, write a note and we can work something out. Registration… To register, fill out registration form and send in fees... see website for links https://www.bodyresearch.org/martial-dance/ Karl Frost has been teaching and performing contact and related work in body-based creative process for the over 39 years. He is known internationally for his dynamic and articulate movement style, rigor in physical research and teaching, and for the edge-pushing nature of his work in both practice and performance. His work, influenced by studies in contemporary release technique, Alexander technique, and martial arts, has been showcased across the US, Canada, Europe, and South America. His performances, via Body Research Physical Theater, take the body and emotionally and physically felt experience as their reference points, often in highly audience interactive frameworks. Karl holds a PhD in Ecology (emphasis in Human Ecology and Cultural Evolution Theory), and MFA in Dramatic Arts, and a BA in Physics. He is currently a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).