Summer Intensive 2026 in Amsterdam

Familiarity & Transformation in Practice and Performance
9-16 August 2026 | Sunday – Sunday (8 days) | 10:30-17:00 | Amsterdam, NL

Summer Intensive 2026

Lily Kiara draws from Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), experiential anatomy & physiology, Biodynamic Craniosacral practice, Joged Amerta Movement (Suprapto Suryodarmo), Songwriting, Poetry, Dance Improvisation as live performance, Life.

‘I don’t know, but I know it in the unknown.’
– Pak Suprapto Suryodarmo

Some words about this particular Intensive in relation to SRT: Nuances and awareness of more subtle layers of our dancing bodies can influence our presence and the availability to the timing and form of our dances. We’ll tune into this through imagery and practices related to (a.o.) Skinner Releasing Technique beyond the Introductory material. This has become an important part of offering these Summer Intensives. I’ve been developing images and practices deriving from SRT during my own practice of almost 30 years in this technique, deepening and expanding them into areas of my artistic interest and my interest of offering a sense of further possibilities. I will also be training in Joan Skinner’s Ongoing SRT teacher training earlier this year, then being able to offer this particular material Joan had designed. Some of this may find it way into the Summer Intensive.

Can we use and expand what is familiar to us? Allow what is, to allow change? Can we listen beneath what is familiar to us? In our bodies when we practice, in the dances we perform. Aligning ourselves with what we may know and what we don’t know. To keep our perceptions alive. To connect to something larger than ourselves. To expand our sense of reality and our sense of what the dances may need (to be). Familiarity as a stepping stone and resource for possible transformation. The difference between habit and familiarity in our perceptions and dances. The invitation is to listen newly each time.

Listening. Attending to what you hear. For a little while or in the swiftness of it passing in the dance. Is it familiar to you? May it point to something new or different? Or is it new? What is it? Can the dance itself respond to these questions? There are layers of listening. Some support our individual technical practice and others tune us to sharing and performing. Deep listening is the practice of hearing multiple things simultaneously. This is what we do when we dance, when we improvise. Listening in action. Fine tuning.

Allowing the presence of our surroundings to affect our sensory experience and (in-)form our dances. To support this, some days we may (partly) work outside and then bring this practice into the studio to allow it to inform our dances. We are part of something larger than ourselves. This is part of our dance. Letting our senses be in touch with outside environment directly strengthens the connections. Connectivity. In this work I’ve been greatly influenced by the practice with Suprapto Suryodarmo in Indonesia.

What are the dances we make in this time, the stories, the poems, the imagination, spaces, musicality, relationship? Soft. Fierce. Wild. Subtle. Liberate. Invitations and (new) availabilities to deepening or to new experiences and perspectives.

One day in this week we’ll set up the day alternatively, to support ourselves throughout the continuity of 8 days.  This could mean starting later or ending earlier, working in silence and/or outside. It will probably be the 5th day (Thursday). A proposition will be offered when we’ve started practicing together.

“And it is the knowledge of the bigger story that is going to carry us through. It can give us the courage, it can give us the strength, it can give us the hilarity to dance our people into a world of sanity. Let us remember it together.” 

– Joanna Macy, in: Our Life as Gaia, in: Thinking like a Mountain

Thank you for your interest. For further details and registration, you can please go to my website.