Symbiotic Danscapes 2026 RITUAL RIOT workshop

RITUAL RIOT: bodymind trainings for endless common(ing) dances

RITUAL RIOT proposes dance as a practice of endless commoning, where movement becomes a way to

rehearse futures, resist erasure, and imagine how we might live together otherwise.

The workshop brings into dialogue two intertwined practices:

Open Training, a collective bodymind physical practice,

and common(ing) dances, a participatory choreographic research rooted in queering folk dance and listening to land, space, and collective desire.

Together we ask:

How do we create collective rituals of movement in a present that often feels futureless and how can these become gestures of resistance?
What if body practice is not about executing movement correctly, but about entering a shared site of investigation?
What changes in how we move when we attend to how our movement affects environments, human and more-than-human?
How can dance mobilize new possibilities for living, organising, and sensing together?

Participants will work through repetition, rhythm, footwork, voice, endurance, and co-leadership practices,

training the body as permeable, responsive, and relational.

Through score-based collective dances, deep listening, and shared movement-making,

the workshop explores how rituals can emerge from the act of stepping together.

Moving between structure and emergence, guidance and self-organisation, the practice proposes dance as both rite and riot,

an embodied method for rehearsing collective resilience, resistance, and rebirth.

Bio

Polena Kolia Petersen is a Greek-Danish dancer, facilitator, and choreographic researcher based in Athens. Her practice moves at the intersection of participation, community engagement, and expanded choreography, approaching dance as a space where ritual and uprising can coexist.

Working through social choreographic scores, feminist and decolonial pedagogies, and somatic research, she investigates how gathering to dance can generate contemporary collective rituals — spaces that nurture resilient, sensuous, and critically aware communities of movement. Central to her work are questions of memory, loss, and the continuous rebirth of the collective.

Drawing from Greek folk dance practices, endurance-based movement, voice, text, and sound, her work treats stepping together in space and time as both a social technology and a gesture of resistance. Her practice is rooted in the ongoing reassembling of the commons through dancing.

Practical info

Dates: June 22 – July 19, 2026

Part of Symbiotic Danscapes 2026

Location: Paleohori Eco-Art Space, Lefkada

Shared accommodation & 3 full daily meals are offered

Register here!

Interview with Polena Kolia Petersen

Would you like to introduce yourself?

My name is Polena Kolia Petersen. I’m a Greek Danish dancer, facilitator and creator of dance. I mostly work with dance through community, participation and the question of what the relationship is between dance as rite -as in ritual- and riot. I am mostly occupied by dance as an embodied political practice, and the question of what It holds as an experience, as practice in relation to resistance and worldings. Meaning creating new worlds and being together with each other in different ways, and often in this question brings up the “different ways in relation to what?” Well, in relation to our status quo in this current society.

What brought you to this work, and what was the moment that you said, Okay, this is going to be the work?

I guess there’s something autobiographical in this. And also this current question, …there’s a Greek poet Titos Patrikios.. I heard a podcast with him, and he said that when he was young, he stopped writing poems. He started writing poems from a very early age, and then he stopped, because he thought that true revolution doesn’t lie in creating art isolated. And somehow this is a question that I think about a lot, and I grapple with a lot. I think this accompanies how I ended up with this work, but if I go a step back into my personal journey in this, I find it hard somehow, to just accept that I will be creating separately from life itself. But on the other hand, as Donna Haraway also says, it’s by doing what we do, that we also create society. So, of course, art making, whether it’s behind doors that are closed or in the public space, is always a part of creating society. I grew up on a very small island, Leros, that brought me the awareness of being together and actually being very affected by how a number of people live together in space and time. Dance has been for me, a thing that my body just needed to do. Growing up there I didn’t always have the possibility to dance.

So I didn’t always reflect on the relationship between dance and social change or dance beyond the necessity of the body to express. But later on, I studied psychology. I was an academic in psychology. I dropped out of that because my body kept coming back to this need to move and be moved. And I remember that there was this idea. The first sensation I had was that I wanted to return to Greece and create an eco community with friends, where arts and politics would coexist. So, I guess this is what you created with Kyveli (laughs). Yeah, I’m not sure I have arrived in the media that would connect dance and how it affects our way of living together, but it’s very clear that this is the focus, because this is the way I can bear living in this world. It’s very hard for me to remove myself and not care about the connections and the webs of what I have chosen to do as an artist and as a mover, and how this brings us, further apart or closer to each other.

Would you like to tell us a bit about your experience with dance education?

Going to a Greek school, I was not introduced to dance being a possibility to study – arts in general. So, that was not on my map at all, even though all my teachers knew about it, I didn’t have that on my map. So, when you don’t have something on your map, it’s very hard to think you can have it as a destination or to even orient yourself towards that destination. I really loved philosophizing and unpicking the infrastructure of relation within and around us. So, I chose psychology. And when I studied psychology, that was in Denmark, I was very determined to leave Greece. I really longed to explore my mom’s country and travel on my own adventure. While I was studying psychology, I had completely closed down dance. Anyhow, if I go a bit further back, growing up on a small, remote island in Greece, in the 90s, there wasn’t any dance. Suddenly, there was a dance teacher. I danced for two, three years. I got completely hooked on it, and then she left, and I had to stay with the academics, which is also part of cultivating the mind more than the body, and that was something that I stayed with. So during psychology, I didn’t open up to dance at all. I didn’t go to dance classes, and reflecting back on it, I was terrified to disrupt this journey that I had been socialized to feel and choose as the one journey.

I was, I think, maybe 22 when I received student support from Denmark. At the same time, I was working, so I was privileged enough to have these conditions, and I had a hard time to think where I could have more time for hobbies. I was very dedicated to this academic path in psychology, but then I saw an audition for a youth company, Dansebryggeriet in Copenhagen. It still exists, and Laura Navndrup, who is an educator and choreographer and dancer, was at that time teaching there, but the age limit for the youth company was, I think, 19. I knocked on her door and I said, “Look, I’m much older. I’m 22. I study, I work as a waitress, I teach at the university. But I really want to dance, and I need a steady context, meaning a steady group that I come back to and I can study dance, immerse myself into it.” And she said, Okay, come to audition.

So I got into that youth company. I danced with much younger people and teenagers, which was a very interesting experience. And that really opened up something in me. I started getting massive panic attacks when I was studying (Psychology), when I was sitting down to read. Because this journey of moving my body again really unleashed the sensation, the senses in me, the sensing, moving, feeling body. When I was sitting down to read and prepare for my own studies in psychology, I would freak out. So another fact that perhaps shows the importance of having community around you, but also social and financial structures, is that my friend then told me: you are having panic attacks, you need to drop out of psychology reflecting that back to me and revealing to me that in the Danish system you can take a student loan, you can pause your studies. There are some possibilities that I acknowledge as a white Danish person. I had these privileges to be able to do it, but it was also a risk. So, I dropped out of psychology and I started dancing at a one year dance education, where I got to meet, I guess the more traditional approach to dance pedagogy, ballet, modern, jazz, tap, anatomy, contemporary in a very strict manner, where probably I learned to lock my diaphragm more than breathing deeply and moving with that. And that’s where I understood that this really goes against me. I had already formed resistance towards not being manipulated into something, but I really wanted to dance, and I thought that this is the only way. At that point, I found the program of community dance in London at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. I had auditioned for the Bachelor Degree in Dance and Choreography at the Danish National School of the Performing Arts, which is an amazing school, but I didn’t get in, and I think I had two remaining years for student support, and the school, the bachelor, was four years. So I knew that financially, it would be hard. And then I turned to the community dance, which at that point had pedagogy, choreography, choreology, technique, We could say a lot of things about the institution of Trinity Laban and the English system of education. But to be honest, I just met such nurturing teachers. And this is another thing in the dance path. It’s really in the pedagogical relation that you get to explore what dance might be.

And after that, I longed to explore Greece as an adult, so I came to Athens and started working, teaching, working for dance studios, doing administrative work, and got, I guess, to explore more things, like more performing, more teaching. I was quite fed up with the neoliberalism that was more and more present in Denmark, and I thought that the chaotic, partly anarchic and community oriented situation in Greece would be a nurturing ground to work with dance and community and participation.

At the point where Covid struck, I was quite lucky. We were back then with Kinitiras (Company) performing and doing a project in schools. I was performing and teaching in Athens, and I had performances coming up, but then everything closed down. And because of personal events, I longed to go back to Denmark, because I had escaped that chapter quite fastly. So I applied for the MFA in Dance and Participation at the Danish National School of the Performing Arts, where my teacher in the youth company, Laura Navndrup, was now a leader of, and that was so beautiful to me, to get back to this teacher, (). And when I got admitted to the MFA, I just met amazing people. We were, I think, seven very different students with very different paths, and for two years I dived into that. I now had the Danish dance ecology to explore. I really, wholeheartedly recommend this school, because it dives into dance through ‘what if’s’ and expansiveness and critical approaches through the body. It’s very nurturing.

So that’s the educational path…

I could add something just to say about the Open , because I think that really changed something, and it’s not an education, but sometimes I believe we meet teachers or practices that deeply speaks to our structures and that becomes our most formative education, even though it’s not a formal education, and I owe this to Kitt Johnson, who was running Open Training – based on the Mind Body/Muscle Bone from the Body Weather approach by Min Tanaka-in Copenhagen, and took me in to practice and study with the community. And there I met colleagues that are so interested in this practice and so interested in sharing resources for teaching together every week. So this became a big part of educating my body and my physicality. The Open Training practice.

Would you like to share a little bit more in relation to Open Training practice?

It’s something that pre existed, but it’s very hard for me to say that it’s not also my practice, because I experimented with it to such a degree that it’s completely removed, not completely, but a lot removed by what Min Tanaka was doing in the Body Weather farm in Japan. So I first encountered Open Training, which is the name that the community in Copenhagen gave to the , in 2017 going to the weekly classes that the Open Training community hosts in Copenhagen. It’s Kitt Johnson that somehow started this community, and when I first stepped into that practice, I was crying afterwards. I felt that my body was so disorganized, so disobedient, it just explored failure and I was not ready to experience that. And I was so threatened by that, that I didn’t go back. I went back to my ballet, to my contemporary. I hated ballet, but I went back, at least to something that is more formal and requires an obedient body. Then in 2020 when I returned to Denmark, I went back to the practice in the more mature connection between mind and my body, and I experienced this same disorganization and disobedience as a reorganization, and that was an apocalypse. So I have learned the form that Kitt Johnson has formed with the community of practitioners in Copenhagen. It does have some traces from the Mind Body Muscle Bone as it was practiced back in the days by Min Tanaka and through colleagues around Europe, for example, the Dangerous Mouse community in Amsterdam, I realized that there are some elements, like forms of movement or dramaturgies that are kept throughout time, which is really nice, because it’s like seashells you find on a beach, where you find those small treasurous traces. But every practitioner- and that was really the invitation by Kitt Johnson as well – every practitioner brings her own approach, curiosities, movements. One thing that we somehow keep is this butterfly structure, which is said to be taken as an inspiration from Anna Halprin and the dance classes she was running on her dance deck, where you follow each other in a dual structure, like you have pairs following each other, and that, for me, became the basis for my research of the basic principle in Open Training: the principle of giving while receiving. Because I receive information from the body in front of me, and I give it to the body that is dancing behind me. That also waters out this strict notion of one leader. And then I sometimes work and play more with this idea that it doesn’t matter what movement has been initiated. From my proposal, it can transform through the group, and other times we might work with precision. How do we actually maintain the information?

In what setups have you used it until now?

So the first setting was being part of the Open Training community in Denmark, in Copenhagen, which meant that we run weekly classes three times a week. It’s a community, meaning that we are some trainers that offer it and then there are people of mixed age, mixed backgrounds who come and participate. And that is an interesting experience to me because it’s movers with people who don’t define themselves as movers who all coexist together and that is already the first entrance into Open Training as ritual to me. This is a very personal approach to it because it doesn’t require an expertise to enter. Then I have taken open training with me as a movement practice in mostly every setting. When I facilitate spaces for mature adults, I use open training as a medium to connect to our peripheral vision, the trust of each other and moving together, how I learn to listen to you while I also listen to myself, working on coordination, working on rhythm. And generally the Open Training has a dramaturgy , that I sometimes operate in its fullest: walking, to running, to kicks, to jumps, to low positions, to deep leaps, big leaps, and down into a cooldown. And other times I take elements of this and let it respond to each community I work with. Open Training has been something that I run as weekly classes, but because Open Training to me as a practice holds this potential of ritual and body-mind reorganization, it really reacts when you don’t have a minimum of core people who come back to the training. Ifyou have to bring how we move together in space and time up again and again, you never unfold this transcendental experience of moving together in space and time with several people in the room holding the knowledge of the structure. This created for me a big question because I really encountered this dilemma of what the practice becomes in a market and an economy of drop-in classes and fast consumption of “make me move, I want to exercise, I want to to make a video of myself and let’s sell this”. It cannot fit together, it doesn’t fit together. It really takes the juices out of the collective practice of Open Training. So, when I work in community dance projects, I use it as a warmup, as our practice to inquire into movement material as a way to really mold our connective tissues as a group. And then I’ve also run it in somatic educational settings, like the Synaski program that was running in Athens. And there was also a stable community which really worked. It reveals very deep experiences. When we have a core group of people that are present, because we get to explore each other and we don’t negotiate trust. This is a very big part I think. If every time you go into the studio you have to negotiate trust while you also negotiate the unknown, it disorganises us.

Maybe we could go a little bit more towards your current work and the questions you bring also to symbiotic landscapes. So you speak about rituals and how we collectively create rituals, but I would really like to hear from you how you approach that as a process.

Yeah, I think ritual came into my awareness through my studies at the Dance and Participation programme. We were on this exchange, which is called the Glomus Programme, where we met across different disciplines in Århus, a city in Denmark. Sometimes this Glomus Programme takes place in very remote places. But at that time it was COVID. So we met across disciplines, musicians, dancers, writers, I can’t remember, all the disciplines, and we dealt with this approach to ritual, to rite. I noticed there that it was extremely accessible to us as bodies to go into the repetitive movement in order to step together in space and time. And there I had two references. One was the Open Training. And I suddenly realized that one of the big importances in Open Training to me is its ritual element, the repetition, the meditative practice of repeating together with other people and staying with the trouble of listening to your rhythm that I transpose to my body, and I invite another body into that as well. And that also gives this process of passing on. And the other reference that I had was Greek folk dances. So that was my path into it. I started exploring. I researched folk dances in the village of Siatista in Western Macedonia as a sustainable social practice. I didn’t really know what I was inquiring into back then, but I surely knew that there is something beyond the practice of folk dances as a national state practice and product The rhythm and this idea of togetherness, which I somehow had demonized because I was very tired of the impetus to be in sync in contemporary dance and create beautiful dances, but the synchronicity in folk dances really spoke to me because it was not about virtuosity or individual expression. It was about a collective experience. I’m still not sure, we can ask, what is a ritual? And go back in time and explore what rituals have existed. I’m not sure how this question can be answered today. What is a ritual today? But my attempt is the very process of gathering, to witness dance, to critically reflect on dance, to practice dance, or to perform together, as in a community dance performance, or a social choreographic score, to create these rituals and to explore what happens in time. Are those rituals that we could come back to, that we could hold on to and reinvent what the community needs are? And of course, this needs repetitive space, repetitive time and a stable community. And this is something that I feel that in the art, in the arts world, and as artists, we very rarely have. It is something that we’ve been stripped of.

Could you tell us how the non-human is important for you and your practice and in which ways does it matter to you?

I think it matters to me on an experiential level personally as a body because I grew up on an island and the ocean is a huge part of how I experience myself. But I live in cities and in rhythms that really remove me from that. So I don’t feel that I actually practice it, I feel that it is my inquiry and constant request to not only practice dance in non-urban environments, but to practice dance with other bodies. And that means all bodies. In cities, I don’t always feel I do it. So it’s a question that I carry and I implement it in my practice when I can. I find it extremely hard in urban environments, but in settings like in Paleohori, I find the invitation to go back, to ritual as a practice of deep listening. Because ritual is also a celebration, it’s a manifestation of embodied experience so there is an invitation to open up the senses of how I am with the land. Folk dances expressed different relations to gravity, to experiences of air or water. So for example on the islands you will see bodies that have a very high center of weight when they dance. They were very affected by ocean waves and the constant wind you experience on an island. And in Western Macedonia where I was in Siatista, in the village, I suddenly saw very deep and low center of weight in the use of the body in the dance, because they relate to stone, to earth, to mud, to harder surfaces that regard the earth. And here we also have the five elements that I sometimes blend in the practice through my study of Shiatsu and Traditional Chinese medicine, but this is anyhow a very deep experience in any dancing that is removed from the urban landscape. So the question here I bring with me is how we can, in the dances we get to form and in the practice of common(ing) dances, how can we listen to this setting, this environment? How are we becoming with this environment in what we create as movement and what we express through our movement. How are we affected by watching the ocean from afar, by the wind that is blowing, by stepping on one surface or another? And how do we learn to sense our own bodies and listen to the other bodies, also the human bodies I mean, in what you are affected by. Like this, there’s this contamination or leaking of experiences through the elements that don’t need to be articulated verbally, I think it’s something that is felt. And I guess then as an epilogue the question is: how do we return to sensing beyond making sense?

A lot to think about and more to feel. It sounds really like an invitation. I would like to redirect a little bit the conversation to the performative aspect, because Symbiotic Danscapes acts as an experiment itself in relation to choreography and experiencing practices and raise the question how a practice can reach into performance without having to be dismantled, without canceling its practice core, how it will remain a practice as enters into performance and then how the dancing and body is the center of the dramaturgy and not a tool for the dramaturgy. So how you approach these questions, which I think are very important nowadays.

I believe that performance is an organization of time and space which goes back again to the ritual. It is a ritual in a specific time and a specific space. And that invites us to be together. If we stripped off all elements from the performance and held on to the smallest unit of what makes performance possible, it is being together in the here and the now, in space and time. So that brings the necessity of the body. You need the body to experience that. It’s not something that makes the body possible. It’s the body that makes the performance possible. And performance, I guess, to me also brings up things like, “I need to succeed, I need to prove, I need to expose, display”. But with the practice of common(ing) dances comes this quest into what is failure? What is failure as a practice of staying with the trouble, with each other in the here and the now, not needing to prove anything to the outside eye or display anything, but to actually transmit the process of becoming. And that has a timeliness to it that removes the process, the choreographic process, the movement practice, from the product. And that’s perhaps the most substantial resistance to performance as an exposition, as a need to prove and a need to make this another product that we consume, so “you better sell it well to me”. Not exposing but opening up the webs of vulnerability and this process of being deeply open to what happens. And that’s also where the nonverbal comes in. There’s a huge potential to being together in the nonverbal and it’s very sacred to me because it’s very rare. So, as the smallest unit: being in the here and the now, becoming with each other in the here and the now, and the performative being the process of not knowing, but still going into it to figure out something together now that might hold value to how we do things tomorrow.

Want to share moments of discoveries or funny incidents, something that you remember?

So… I think of two settings. I think of my personal experience when I’m in a process where we rehearse or do a practice and the time when it’s not like just before the performance, but the time where it gets closer. And so your system begins to tune you into that it will be exposed or will be shared. What happens to my body then? And the other setting is what I’ve noticed happening in community settings, when we move towards performance. And I think they’re similar in a way. It’s really important and nurturing and also a tool of resistance to be acquainted with floating on an open ocean. But if this is the only state we know, and the only state we are into is being in a constant wiggle on top of an open ocean and we don’t see any forms around us, we only see open horizon, we stop being able then to really make the figures of land, of clouds noticeable. You know, you can’t see figures anymore, you can’t organize.

And I think that’s what performance does to the process (i.e. organizing the experience). But the problem is that we often hierarchize performance over process. What I notice is that performance orients the way I go into practice. It orients me towards organizing and it’s a relation with truth making. But not as a universal truth. As a temporary truth that I acknowledge is liquid knowing, but for some time I take it as a very very stable knowing and that is important at least in my experience. I am a person who operates very much through liquifying. I am very prone to change and instability, and I need things to organize me before I can move on, because if I constantly question everything I lose orientation.

So, performance allows me orientation. And I guess this is the world-making process that Haraway speaks about. Performance allows me to organize the performance as a world-making process, which means that I need to set up some stable factors, some orientations that will be my truth until they cannot serve as truths anymore, but for some time they need to be there for me to relate to it. Somehow I think psychoanalytically this notion of the significant other also comes into this process: that in a process where you’re constantly searching, you need to create something to which you can relate to, because in this space of relating, you find your way towards what you’re going to. And in community settings, I realize that often – and this is most often in settings working with people that don’t define themselves as professionals, but also the case in professional settings some times, whatever that might mean – this gives a coherence and a common goal, which ignites the role and the importance of being together extremely. It can also highlight differences.It underlines that to reach a common goal is important. So, that’s why performance for me is a world-making and small funny moments that I experience relate to these negotiations of chaos, anxiety, not knowing and then suddenly because you go towards somewhere you start to amalgamate the experience into findings. Like walking on a beach and suddenly you find seashells and the seashells witness some historicity and some timeline and where you might go. So you start making your path. But I’m questioning whether these are truths that will remain, because performance is there to make us go through these processes and then to dismantle the truth that we set up. What needs to be very stable is the notion of being together.

Maybe something funny, which relates a little bit to this question. I’m in Chania at the moment in residency. I often come to the festival here, the Dance Days Chania Festival . And the last time I was here, it was to create a piece with women over 65 years old. This was the second time I would work with mature adults in Chania. So we underwent these two weeks where we had to become a group. Really opening up and sharing vulnerabilities and exploring together, you become a group. This quest of making a performance together really intensifies experiences and makes this common journey to reach a goal. When you reach it, you feel that you really have overcome your limits. How is it possible to experience all this during two weeks? We didn’t know each other and now we’re creating something together and then in silence we can all move through time and space, through this silent agreement we have on how to use time and space for this one hour of the performance and you have this huge satisfaction that is very deep in the end. And after that, I have found myself again and again being unable to celebrate it, to really feel the joy of it, because it’s the moment I also realize that after such an intense process, I once again, as an artist, have to leave this community, which is only a temporal community.The project doesn’t create a lasting longing change in their life and I move on to a next project-based work. So what is the point of it all? But then something very interesting happened, because this performance was witnessed by more women and they started speaking about the experience. So these same women came back to Sofia Failerou who is running the festival here, and said to her, “Look, we are not going to stop. We don’t want to stop. We want to dance every week because there was something there.” And now it’s the second year that they go on! And this to me is the most important thing that also, you know, cancels this vanity of our existences as artists on project-based work, because the performance really amalgamated these processes, but the community stayed and they insisted. And that’s self-organization, that’s amazing.

Truly true. Before closing, I would like to ask you if there is something else that you feel is missing, like a question maybe that I haven’t asked, or something that you want to share that you haven’t.

I think it’s a reflection, I’m not sure of when people will meet this interview, but sitting here with you and knowing that we will be in Lefkada June-July. I’m really thinking about what motivates us to meet in a different setting from where we all live, apart from you and Kivelli, who actually live there. In order to dive into some questions, practices, togetherness that ignites our interest and our curiosities and our orientations and goals in life. What motivates us to remove ourselves from our context to go there and explore all that and how do we depart? Like what do we take with us or how do we leave those spaces where something so boiled down has happened? It relates to what I was speaking about before I guess…