MEET THE TEAM

ANNA VOMACKA is a dance maker, performer, & educator based in NYC. She is driven by her curiosities and cravings for community, connection, and spaces of shared learning / (un)learning. Anna was on the First National Tour of Broadway’s Life of Pi (2025) as a Richard Parker puppeteer. Anna has worked with Brennan Gerard & Ryan Kelly in their Bessie Award winning project Timelining (2014; 2015; 2023), Nami Yamamoto (Trooper’s Brother; 2022), Mei Yamanaka, & Sondra Loring among others. As a creator Anna’s work explores collective/individual identities, edges, care, & disruption, with an emphasis on research as practice. Anna’s most recent choreographic work, listening near an edge, is an improvisational dance film exploring & challenging personal and collective “edges”. As an educator Anna is dedicated to creating pathways for her students to deepen their practices of personal inquiry, reclaiming autonomy over one’s body and conscious (& intuitive) choice making. Anna is committed to the study and rigor of Contact Improvisation as a physical form and a practice of gathering people of varying identities.

CI: practice & perFORMance is the living project of Anna and Lilianna Kane. The first event took place in 2023. CI: p&p stands at the intersection of the inquiry of CI, and the consciousness in choice making of performance.

asha f. Passalacqua is an integrative bodyworker, aquatic therapist, freediver, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, facilitator, and dancer with a somatic-oriented approach to guiding the body toward functional fluidity. His work is rooted in an ongoing apprenticeship to embodiment, liberation, and integrity in movement and connection

As a mover, asha’s practice has been shaped by the Axis Syllabus, contact improvisation, aquatic dance and freediving, functional training, contemporary dance, Somatic Experiencing®, and Playfight. In both practice and facilitation, he invites experiences that cultivate an available, responsive body; trust in relationship to gravity and ground; and presence within disorientation and change

asha received a BA from Hampshire College in integrative psychology, medical anthropology, and cognitive science, and completed his training as a Certified Massage Therapist at the McKinnon Body Therapy Center. He is a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, with his somatic work informed by SE, parts-based approaches, and Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry.

As an aquatic therapist, asha has studied Aguaahara and Fluid Presence in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain. He offers aquatic workshops and retreats in California and Europe, and practices as a somatic counselor, bodyworker, and facilitator of psychedelic retreats. He works with clients through Sage Integrative Health in Berkeley, California, and co-facilitates legal psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands with Kiyumi.

LILIANNA KANE is an artist and chef, primarily invested in the dance practice of Contact Improvisation. She is committed to improvisation as a physical practice of asking questions, paying attention, patience and peace. She values the interplay of rigor, rest, discipline and play. She teaches and shares her practices nationally and internationally, as well as producing and organizing international CI gatherings and intensives. She is currently the head chef and a CI curator at The Field Center (center for performance, dance and multimedia art) in Bellows Falls, VT) where she has the privilege of regularly practicing, teaching, and researching Contact Improvisation. She is deeply indebted and inspired by all of her teachers, dance partners, and dance ancestors, who continually influence her practice. Website: www.liliannakane.com

LENA ENGELSTEIN is a choreographer and a Bessie-nominated performer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has been called “a human gazelle” by the Brooklyn Rail and her work lauded by critics as "The High Weird." Recent work includes: American Idle Concept & Dir. by Maia Chao, commissioned by Times Square Arts (choreographer), Friday Night Rat Catchers (New York Live Arts (NYLA) 2025, w/Lisa Fagan), Deepe Darknesse (NYLA 2024, The Collapsable Hole 2023 w/Lisa Fagan), all i want is what you want (Exponential Festival 2022 w/Jo Warren). Recent performance credits include: this is the beginning, this is the end by Joanna Kotze, Adult Relationships by Ben Gassman, Oceanic Feeling by Faye Driscoll, 1-800-3592-113592 by performance collective CHILD, They All Lived Here by Isa Spector, Procession by Alexa West, Then She Fell by Third Rail Company (2019-20). She and Fagan received the Foundation for Contemporary Art's 2025 Artists Grant and she was the inaugural Alumni Resident at Colorado College (CC). She has taught at CC, Barnard College, University of Maryland, and others. Lena holds a B.A. in Mathematics from CC. @lena-engelstein

This class will employ the principles of CI in individual and ensemble performance practices in attempt to discover and/or recover one's full range of physical, vocal, and performative sensibilities. Intended to expand the capacity to respond to impulse and desire, resist and reclaim embarrassment, and to hold and give attention, these skills are meant to reinvigorate a practitioners CI work and their solo performance practice.