I attended a week long dance festival called Skiing On Skin 2025 (Contact Improvisation Festival Finland) at the Vierumäki sports institute near Helsinki in February 2025. For one of the workshops, I draw sketches which are presented here.
When I attended a bodywork workshop with Ulla Päivikkö then I didn’t have a partner for the exercises so instead I draw. These sketches from my dance diary, are of the teacher and her assistant. They were made very quickly as the two people being drawn were moving from one position to another as the workshop progressed.
There are many sketches – 59 pages of them in total! Here are a few in no particular order. There are many more not shown – each was completed in seconds with fluid and gestural strokes of the pen, without correction or alteration. Hopefully, it records the sense of it – the mass of two bodies in relation to each other.
Link to the Skiing on Skin website https://www.contactfestival.fi/
A few of the sketches
