Baltic Dance Network Programme 2025

On August 23–24, 2025, the newly established Baltic Dance Network will host two open dance seminars featuring artists from Latvia and Estonia.

The workshop programme aims to provide a collaborative space for the Baltic dance community to explore its shared identity, amplify the presence of Baltic dance in Europe, and deepen understanding of each country’s unique dance context—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

REGISTRATION:

Registration for workshops – HERE

SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS ARE LISTED BELOW

Roosna and Flak – RESPONSIVE BODY (EE)

Date: 23 August, 11am-5pm.

Duration: 5 hours divided in 2 parts with 1 hour break 

Location: Arts Printing House Studio II, Vilnius

Recommended age: 18+

Process: Starting with a physical warm-up, then moving into exercises and practices exploring different topics connected to the main theme: CHANGE.

Description:

Over the last 15 years dance and media artists Külli Roosna and Kenneth Flak have developed Responsive Body Practice, a framework of strategies and principles for choreographic and technological research, as well as a way to stay alive and keep evolving as artists.

The very definition of movement is change from one state to another. Movement is always happening. Change is always happening. Dance has a unique potential to address the constant pressures of change — in society, in the environment, and in ourselves. How do we find the stillness within that allows us to respond appropriately and intelligently to the whirlwind of events around us? How can we ride the flow instead of drowning in it?

In this workshop you will explore the tension between pure sensory experiences and the solidifying effects of definitions. A dance between memory and pure being, between concepts and sensing, between intentionally directing movements and witnessing them unfold.

You will work with solo materials and partnering, as well as group compositions, starting with a calm and focused warmup, before moving into more complexity.

 

Bio:

Internationally active choreographers, dancers and digital artists Külli Roosna (Estonia) and Kenneth Flak (Norway/Estonia) have been collaborating since 2008. They have dealt with a wide range of topics, including deep ecology, mythology, totalitarianism and internet culture. The core of their work is human experience in interconnected realities. This is often explored through the heightened awareness of the dancing body’s possibilities and limitations, in a constant dialogue with the digital technologies and discourses that extend and counterpoint it.

They have performed their works all over the world. Additionally, they teach Responsive Body movement technique, composition, and sensor programming at various universities and festivals, adapting their methodology and content to different contexts.

Their performances Shelter Ouroboros (2024), Singularity (2022), Two Body Orchestra (2020), Prime Mover (2018), and Blood Music (2014) were nominated for the Estonian Dance Awards.

 

Laima Jaunzema – HYBERNATING LAVA-UNFOLDING OTHERWISE (LV)

Date: 24 August, 11am-5pm.

Duration: 5 hours divided in 2 parts with 1 hour break 

Location: Arts Printing House Studio II, Vilnius

Recommended age: 18+

Process: 

The workshop consists of a continuous arc of movement research, reflection, and shared presence. Participants will be invited to enter slowly, engage attentively, and leave with a sense of having encountered the practice that is open to each participant’s embodied interpretation of proposed explorations.

Structure:

• Arrival and groundwork (30 min): guided landing in the space and context of the workshop, short introductions;
• Peripheral body (1 hour): guided movement structures to build upon the further explorations;
• Relational unfolding-smaller groups (1 hour): moving together with attention to proximity and re-imaging the space;
• BREAK (1 hour);

• Opening smaller group experiences to larger group (30 min);
• Hybernating Lava – Unfolding Otherwise – building up collective dance, witnessing its path while in it (1 hour);
• Deconstructing the experience (30 min);
• CLOSING CIRCLE, feedback (30 min).

The structure holds a balance between individual engagement with movement practice and collective inquiry. The workshop will offer tools that support ongoing embodied research building up to the creation of collective dance in the context of this workshop. The structure also invites each person to shape their own experience within the shared space. Participants are expected to participate through the whole duration of the workshop.

Description: 

This inclusive movement workshop invites participants to a movement practice that explores the body as a site of political language, poetic disruption, embodied dissent.

Together, you’ll engage in guided movement to express ideas and emotions that often resist words—welcoming tension, awkwardness, and new forms of physical storytelling. Inspired by Laima’s research, the session centers on the idea of the “peripheral body”: bodies that exist outside cultural norms, shaped by experiences of displacement, neurodiversity, or living at the edge of social visibility.

Using movement, you’ll explore how bodies can speak from places often overlooked—connecting personal experience (such as the autistic body’s lived reality) to wider social landscapes, including the Baltic region’s rich and complex histories. 

You’ll share space through practices that allow us to “collapse” together, feel supported in motion, and listen deeply to the subtleties of how we move. The workshop encourages us to inhabit uncertainty and “in-between” states—seeing these not as problems, but as sources of creativity, care, and transformation.

The body becomes a responsive terrain to meet instability, navigate displacement, inhabit the “in- between” as a generative state.

 

Bio:

Laima Jaunzema is an interdisciplinary choreographer. Her work navigates the unstable terrains between body, language and power. Emerging from the remote peripheries of Latvia, currently based in Riga, she works locally and internationally with shifting formats — from solitary to collective interventions, collaborating across disciplines and geographies. Facilitating spaces for reflection and rupture- always seeking to deconstruct hierarchies of knowledge and presence in the field of contemporary performance. She treats choreography as a method of thinking — an embodied poetics that disturbs, reveals, and repairs the transmission — of memory and the still-undiscovered languages of bodies. 

Laima had graduate from School for New Dance Development (SNDO), Academy of Theater and Dance, Amsterdam University for Arts. Before she has also pursued studies in dance in Berlin and Denmark, and furthered her education in curating contemporary public art at HDK-Valand in Sweden. Laima was granted Dance Web scholarship, Impuls Tanz 2024 , mentor Isabel Lewis.

In the context of proposing and facilitating workshops Laima has a long lasting experience of proposing movement research, concept development and theory in various contexts and formats of urgency.