Unplugged Dance

About 

Unplugged Dance is a 7-week immersive residential program that offers time, space, and continuity for personal and collective exploration in dance and somatic practices.

Our approach derives from a desire to experience dance in concepts and ways that don’t restrict themselves in movement aesthetics or technics, but neither condemns them. Instead further explores dance as a powerful mechanism for reaching the world within and the world around us.

Unplugged Dance cultivates a shared environment rooted in attentiveness, agency, and mutual respect. Through a rhythm of individual practice and collective inquiry, the program supports the deepening of personal processes and the articulation of questions in relation to movement and the art of dance.

Listening to a Permanent Culture of Dance

This year, Unplugged Dance is oriented toward exploring movement as a regenerative, living practice that nourishes our bodies, our artistic work, and the ecosystems we inhabit.

The program invites an approach to dance that understands movement as a means of ecological awareness and approaches the dancing body as a living, multidimensional organism, inherently interconnected with its environment. Practices are held as ways of cultivating relational sensitivity, an embodied attentiveness to the living networks that connect us with one another and with the world around us.

This year’s workshops are shaped around: 

– eco-somatic perspectives that engage with the intersections of dance, ecology, and community, drawing inspiration from principles of permaculture and deep ecology.

– site-specific practices in natural environments that invite direct engagement with the textures, rhythms, and dynamics of the landscapes we inhabit. Space is approached not merely as a backdrop, but as a companion in the creative process, where movement can arise in response to land, weather, soundscape, and living ecosystems.

– process-oriented, participatory, and reflective formats. Unplugged Dance prioritizes experience over external validation, treating movement as a learning field in which every gesture is understood as part of an evolving dialogue between body, environment, and artistic practice.

– approaches that expand our understanding of dance as a political, cultural, and ecological practice, capable of cultivating awareness, resilience, and transformation through deeper connection with ourselves, with others, and with the more-than-human world.

Listening to a Permanent Culture of Dance offers a common ground for diverse practices and ways of engaging over the course of the program.

Facilitators – Workshops

Mariela Nestora 

Fieldwork scores 

 

Kate Sagovsky 

Rewilding Play

 

Vasiliki Tsagkari

The body as roots for poetry

 

Reversed Dances [Franziska Gerth and Lily Pasquali]

The Loss Lab: Embodied Research in a Damaged World

 

Alessio Castellacci

Embodied Voice Flow

 

André Uerba

Space Weavers 

 

Bodycartography [Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad]

Ecosomatic practices for living and dying

 

Kyveli Kouvatsi & Yorgos Sioras Deligiannis – facilitating the introductory week 

Who is it for?

Unplugged Dance is seeking individuals who are ready to commit to a deeper learning and research process. It is open to both professionals and non-professionals with an interest in dance, movement, and somatic practices. Specifically, it is an ideal opportunity for:

⫸ Professionals in Performance, Dance, or Visual Arts

⫸ Recent Graduates

⫸ Dance Therapists & Somatics Practitioners

⫸ Critical Thinkers

What to expect 

Unplugged Dance 2026 offers a blend of structured and organic learning through:

⫸ Experiential Workshops: Led by international facilitators, these sessions explore the relationship between body awareness and creative expression through dance improvisation, experiential anatomy, artistic expression and critical thinking. Their orientation is dance experience as a field of observation, experimentation and creativity. 

⫸ Open discussions / Critical circles: Open questions on the philosophical, political and socio-cultural relevance of dance

⫸ Personal and Collective Integration Time: Opportunities to reflect, connect, and grow through heart circles, feedback sessions and group sharings. Scheduled time for self-practice and research alone-together on the platform.

⫸ Shared living space: One of the aspects that makes this program so unique is the way we share time and space. The location and geography of Paleohori that hosts the program, encourages communal exchange and collaboration.

⫸ Collective activities on the land, with hands-on practices of eco building and gardening. 

⫸ Daily excursions

Dates 

April 26 – June 13, 2026 

Participation Fee

We invite you to choose the fee option that best reflects your current financial situation. Paleohori Eco-Art Space is an independent, self-funded, non-profit project sustained entirely through participation fees. Any contribution above the regular price helps make supported places possible for others – because we may all be in the same sea, but not in the same boat.

The sliding-scale participation fee is available until February 28, 2026:

“Supporting” range 

€3451 – €4000 

Regular

€3450

“Supported” range

€3451 – €2900 

From March 1, 2026, a standard participation fee of €3600 will apply.

A payment plan in three installments is available.

If none of the listed fee options feels accessible to you, please contact us at unpluggeddance@gmail.com.

For further information and how to register please visit  Unplugged Dance 

Contact details: unpluggeddance@gmail.com