Dancing in Sächsische Schweiz / České Švýcarsko

The Dancing Wilderness Project 

Sächsische Schweiz / České Švýcarsko

spring 2025

dates to be arranged.  If you are interested in attending, please write to info@bodyresearch.org for when dates are announced.

• hiking, movement exploration, and quiet time in forests and beautiful sandstone formations. somatic and sensory investigation and simple, reflective quiet time together in a landscape of forests and sandstone formations. ‘sleeping outdoors under rock shelters (“boofen“).
• facilitated by Karl Frost
• Where: Sächsische Schweiz / České Švýcarsko, a cross-border park and nature preserve an hour east of Dresden  on the German/Czech border
• Time:  The weekends begin with hiking in Friday early evening  and leaving Sunday evening.  Option also to come a day early on Thursday to just relax and explore, as well as possibility to stay longer and explore in a less structured way 
• Cost: 150e – 300e sliding scale 
  • sliding scale… pay what you can in the range, No one turned away for lack of funds. 
    It all goes to a good cause!
  • for registration information, write to info@bodyresearch.org

• A Non-profit Fundraiser: Karl is not making any money from the event. All profits go to good causes, split between grassroots Environmental Justice causes and Ukraine aide.
• on Facebook

The Dancing Wilderness Project was started in 1997 by Karl Frost as an exploration of the interrelationships among wilderness experience, body-based creative process, and how we choose to live our lives. With open mind and senses, we look for an immediate experience of nature: experience unmediated by ideas or preconceived limits. We explore…

• Nature as source of metaphor and inspiration for movement and image
• Quiet experience of nature as food for the soul
• Finding a different sense of space, time, and relationship away from civilization
• Dance not simply about the environment, but with it
• Extrapolating our knowledge and practice of dance and creative process in the studio to new environments: forest and mountain top as the stage and earth, pine needles, and rock as the floor.

The days will be a mix of quiet hiking and exploring time and simple movement scores from the Dancing Wilderness Project, using and building on what we explore in studio. These simple structures invite us into altered states of awareness of place and exploring of meaning in sensory connection to the “more than human” world. We find a sense of “dance” emerging out of functional movement exploration on unusual surfaces and in unusual spaces.  As we dance in nature, rather than looking for spaces most like a dance studio, we instead look to see what each space offers.

We’ll be dancing with sandstone, trees, fallen leaves of past seasons, and each other.

Logistics

Schedule: We begin on Friday afternoon  with a hike in. We’ll be out by evening on Sunday.  

Location: precise meeting point To Be Announced

Camping: Normal camping is not allowed in the area, but as the area is a traditional rock-climbing area, “boofen” – bivouacing in rock shelters – is allowed. This means no tents, just sleeping bag and sleeping pad

We hike in, bringing everything that we need for the time with us. We pack in our food and refill on water along the way. We practice low impact camping, paying attention to our physical relationship to the world around us. Hiking to base camp will be moderately strenuous.  All should have some hiking experience and some experience working creatively with their body. Feel free to call or write with questions.

Weather:   Everyone should have clothes for warm and for cold weather, rain gear, as well as sleeping gear appropriate for cold weather.  You don’t need a tent, as we will be sleeping under rock overhangs to protect from rain.  The event will happen “rain or shine”, though this may be revisited in the event of an extreme weather event. In general, there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

Food: Different for this year, everyone is expected to bring their own food.  New regulations prohibit the use of camping stoves, so we will all just bring in our own food rather than cook together.  Pack the minimum you need to reduce weight, and try not to bring in glass jars.  Feel free to ask for advice for minimizing weight! 

Group size is limited to 14

Environmental Justice Fundraiser: The trips are produced as non-profit fundraisers for environmental defense / environmental justice organizations.  All of the money beyond expenses goes to small, grassroots activist campaigns effectively working to protect our environment and foster a healthy relationship to it.  

Gear:  everyone is expected to bring their own camping gear.  

A quick list of the essentials you would need to bring would be

• sleeping bag (rated to zero degrees at least) and sleeping pad
• layered clothing to be OK with working in both warm and cold temperatures
• rain gear, just in case
• personal toiletries, plate, cup, spoon
• Day pack!  We will be leaving our big packs and gear as we go out exploring for the day. We will also need capacity to bring water back to base camp.
• Journal and pen for writing
• Your food
• Water! Water is an issue.  we will have to pack in all the water we’ll be using. You should have capacity for carrying at least 3 liters of water per day, as we will be active and sweating. 
• a pack for all of your gear.

Extras

• water filter
• camera

Note:  We won’t be carrying all of our stuff all of the time. We hike it in and then spend most of our time with just what we need for the day, stashing the rest of our gear at a base camp while we are out day-hiking.  

For more information, write Karl at info@bodyresearch.org

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Check out Accidental Tourists: a film montage of sensory meditations in places less marked by human action. The first offering in a multi-year project exploring the effects of nature-time on awareness, emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.

Karl Frost has been practicing and teaching contact improvisation and related investigations since the late 1980s in California and has shared his work in over 25 countries. He began his movement explorations in martial arts as a teenager, before expanding his studies to somatics, contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and physical theater. His performance work, via his company, Body Research Physical Theater, explores postdramatic works rooted in somatic psychology and paratheatrical exploration and alternates between stage productions and highly interactive performance happenings exploring audience agency and personal meaning. He has an MFA in Dramatic Arts and a PhD in Ecology. He works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture.

Of Body Research performing work …

’something startling but strangely beautiful to behold.  Molly Rhodes, SF Weekly, San Francisco, August 07