About SAVIA
our story
SAVIA Festival was intentionally created through cross-border collaboration. Natalie and Tania are dancers and organizers based in San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, respectively. We share a love for Contact Improvisation and for the way intensive, retreat-style practice sharpens our craft and brings the global dance community together. From this shared passion, we decided to create a festival of our own.
Over the many months of developing this offering, we identified a set of shared values: inviting inter-generational teachers dedicated to the form, fundamentals, and experimentation; building bridges between cultures & lineages; hosting at high-quality studio space with wood floors and natural light to support our practice; providing access to nature to deepen the experience; and offering a fair pricing structure that ensures accessibility across our communities.
We feel deeply humbled and excited to bring this vessel to life, and we can’t wait to witness what will be created within it.
The Organizers
Natalie Koski-kARELL · San Diego, CA
Natalie is a community weaver, dancer, interdisciplinary planner and psychedelics advocate based in San Diego, CA. Her creative practice is at the intersection of dance, ritual theatre, and spiritual ecology. She is the founder and producer of The Ouroboros Collaborative, a creative platform supporting movement-based and ceremonial offerings, and co-founder and co-curator of SAVIA CI & Somatic Movement Festival.
Natalie’s movement lineage includes long-term study and collaboration in Contact Improvisation, aikido, yoga, and experimental dance, with teachers and artists from California and abroad. She has a BA in Theatre & Political Science from Boston College, JD from UC Law of San Francisco, and MA in City & Regional Planning from UC Berkeley. She was born & raised in Northern Virginia, and is a dual Mexican citizen with deep ties to Michoacán, with roots also in Finland.
Tania rENTERÍA · tIJUANA, BC
She explores movement and the relationships that emerge through contact between bodies, with a particular interest in the space where embodied experience meets language. Her training has been independent and cross-border — workshops in dance improvisation, composition, acrobatic movement, and somatics across Mexico, Argentina, and the United States.
In 2017, she completed the Formación de Artistas Contemporáneos para la Escena at Galpón FACE. She began practicing Contact Improvisation in Buenos Aires in 2019, and it has since become central to her movement practice.
She co-founded and co-directed Improvisación & Contacto until 2024, a platform for improvisation and performance creation workshops in Tijuana.
She currently leads a regular Contact Improvisation laboratory at Círculo de Aikido dojo, where she actively works to build and sustain community, and co-organizes Savia: CI and Somatic Movement Festival.