15th - 17th February · 2027
To Be Danced By Spaces
3-Day Workshop with Nitipat Ong Pholchai
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Where do our bodies end and spaces begin? How might we surrender to being danced by the spaces we inhabit rather than merely dancing within them?
This workshop emerges from a decade of navigating Thailand's urban landscape through the body—where Contact Improvisation becomes not just movement technique but survival strategy, political resistance, and collective dreaming. Having journeyed from physics laboratories at Berkeley to experimental performance spaces in Bangkok, Ong offers a practice shaped by collaborations with blind artists, queer activists, and Buddhist communities.
Together, we'll explore the body as space rich with potentialities:
• Memories and constellations coming to touch and meet
• Topologies of hardness, softness, tension, and release
• Liquid boundaries forever changing between inner and outer
• Rhythms of continuity, pause, and subjective time
We approach CI as quantum relational practice—active somatic listening through skin, flesh, and bone at the cellular level. Through models of liquid cellular balls, tensegral kites, and spirals, we'll investigate how bodies and spaces entangle, creating fields of shared possibility.
Methodologically, we'll engage:
• Synesthetic translations between touch, sound, and proprioception
• Honest embodied fantasy and nature-based memory
• Collective algorithms of needs, listening, and agency
• Tactile drawing and spatial reimagining
This workshop invites participants to acknowledge normative tendencies in collective spaces while cultivating confidence to shift them playfully. We'll embrace gaps, miscommunication, and imperfection as opportunities for dreaming more liberated futures.
Whether seeking self-discovery or collective action, all are welcome to this practice of "decentralized co-responsibility" where performance becomes ethical questioning and imagination finds physical ground.
Bring comfortable clothes, curiosity, and willingness to be witnessed.….
About the teacher
Nitipat "Ong" Pholchai is a Thai interdisciplinary artist, educator and Contact Improvisation practitioner now based in Chiang Mai. Trained in physics at Harvard and Berkeley, he began dancing in the SF Bay area as a serious hobbies before returning to Thailand, where CI became a way of navigating uncertainty — political, economic, social — through the body. His work has unfolded alongside a blind artist seeking accessible space, a queer activist community, and a Buddhist sangha, shaping a practice he describes as quantum relational: an active, cellular-level listening between self and space. Ong is the founder of Conscious Movement Collective Bangkok and teaches, performs, and facilitates workshops exploring the body as a site of potentiality — where movement becomes both survival strategy and collective dreaming toward more liberated futures. He has had both the honor and the pleasure of meeting and exchanging embodied practice with practitioners and cultural communities around the world.