Teaching Team
— SAVIA Festival 2026
SAVIA brings together seven teachers from Argentina, Mexico, and the United States — spanning generations, lineages, and approaches to Contact Improvisation and somatic movement practice.
lUCÍA BERTONE & JOSÉ VILLA
bUENOS AIRES, arg
Lucía and José have lived, danced, and taught together for over 25 years in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Their research is rooted in the simple phenomena of everyday life, interwoven with Contact Improvisation (CI) as an initiatory practice that can unite the different quadrants of Being. They are currently interested in the process of individuation through the power of physical contact, as an entry into the state of “Primordial Improvisation.” They have also been captivated by the passion of assisting and accompanying births.
For them, CI is a way of life, a language for understanding and sharing in the world, a policy of action that distills feeling and thought. They create and produce events related to Contact Improvisation: Jams, Labs, performances, classes, gatherings, and festivals (Buenos Aires CI Festival). A current focus is on generating offline spaces for practice and teaching to care for and nurture nature without the interference of the ethical and aesthetic indoctrination proposed by domestic technological devices and social networks. Recently, they conceived and coordinated a seminar on teaching Contact Improvisation Pedagogy in a laboratory format, aimed at discovering keys for the transmission and expansion of the practice of C.I., which is their main interest at this time.
Their workshop at savia
IN RECIPROCITY
Contact Improvisation is an experience-based language — each movement enters the sense of the signifying body in instant communication with another body, generating an endless range of directions through which information travels both consciously and unconsciously, in the sharing and reading that each person can allow themselves to access this richness of encounter.
This workshop is an invitation to expand perception and communicational range across all levels of experience in reciprocity, aligning ethics, practice, and aesthetics.
Nina Martin
Texas, US
Choreographer/improvisor, pedagogue, dance theorist and performer. Centered in the phenomena of perception, composition and spontaneous movement states, her research springs from over 40 years of embodied research in postmodern dance aesthetics and especially into the workings of the human neuro/visual perceptual system and preconscious movement phenomena. Martin tours across the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia teaching and performing inspired by dance systems: Ensemble Thinking™ and ReWire Movement States™ which complement her practice of Contact Improvisation.
Performance/collaboration credits include Lower Left Performance Collective, Martha Clarke, Shelley Senter, Roma Flowers, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon Pick-Up Company, Mary Overlie, Deborah Hay, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton along with Daniel Lepkoff, Lisa Nelson, Warshaw, and Nancy Stark Smith in the PBS Dance in America Beyond the Mainstream nationally televised program. Martin’s choreographies received six fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as other honors.
Martin is an artist member of the Lower Left Performance Collective. ReWire Movement States™ and Ensemble Thinking™ are dance systems initially conceived by Nina Martin and continually developed by Lower Left artists, which also offers a certification program in Ensemble Thinking. Martin hosts dance destinations in Far West Texas in the artful town of Marfa in the Chihuahuan Desert. Martin is a newly certified teacher in Gyrotonic™ and she is a Professor of Dance Studies at TCU School for Classical & Contemporary Dance.
Miroslava wilson & briseida López
Baja California, MX
MIROSLAVA WILSON MONTOYA
Director, choreographer, dancer, teacher, and somatic movement educator
Originally from Hermosillo, Sonora, based in Tijuana since 2007. She holds a degree from the Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán, a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad de Sonora, and a Master's in Marine Sciences from UNAM. She served as co-director, choreographer, teacher, and artist-producer of Péndulo Cero Danza Contemporánea from its founding for 15 years, and currently serves as president of Péndulo Cero AC. She co-founded and co-directed the Mexican-Chilean company Hunabkú Danza, collaborating in Mexico and Chile from 2002 to 2006.
Committed to developing artistic, environmental, and humanist projects through an interdisciplinary lens, her work has been presented in China, South Korea, Japan, India, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, Germany, and Mexico. She is a certified Somatic Movement Educator through the Body Mind Movement Center México, and a certified facilitator of Participatory Collaborations from Biology and Culture through Matríztica school of thought.
She currently promotes her project Somas Somos, directs the holistic space Casa Viva, and offers her workshops Expansión desde el Cuerpo, Santuario Corporal, Cuerpos de Agua, Cuerpo Amor y Autonomía, and Movimiento y Bienestar para Adultxs en plenitud. Alongside personal research projects in various settings, she collaborates year-round with Mujeres en Ritual Danza Teatro and Purple Dancing Club, and is a co-facilitator of PORTAL, a binational platform for experimental dance, somatic, and contemplative practices.
BRISEIDA LÓPEZ INZUNZA
Choreographer, dancer, actress, and teaching artist
Mexican by birth, based in the border city of Tijuana, Baja California since 2004, and a graduate of the Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán, Sinaloa. As a performer, she has worked with choreographers including Claudia Lavista, Phillip Adams, Allyson Green, Leslie Seiters, Joe Alter, Victor Ruíz, Daina Ashbee, Jess Humphrey, Sebastián García Ferro, touring Mexico, South America, the United States, and Europe.
Deeply engaged with movement as a possibility for dialogue in relation to space — physical, sensory, sensitive, social, and abstract — across diverse sociocultural contexts, she draws on these as powerful stimuli for scenic creation, energetic renewal, and physical, emotional, and mental well-being. She is interested in body education as a catalyst for regenerating social fabric, supporting the emotional body, and as fundamental education for human development in contexts of abandonment, vulnerable communities, and older adults. She is also drawn to the intersection of disciplines in contemporary scenic creation, elements that expand the performative spectrum through global concepts and codes capable of generating interaction between audience and performer.
She currently collaborates on various projects in the San Diego–Tijuana region, including Incendio Producciones, Clepsidra Laboratorio de Investigación Escénica, and Mascherología en Movimiento. She co-directs the binational platform PORTAL alongside artists Miroslava Wilson and Jessica Humphrey, and leads the project Movilidad y Bienestar para adultos mayores.
Their workshop at savia
CREATURA: SOMATIC MOVEMENT LABORATORY
CREATURA is a space for coexistence and creativity in which participants enter the internal dimensions of water within their own bodies — and the fluid quality of their own nature that follows.
Drawing from the dramaturgy and choreography of their work creatura, Briseida and Miroslava guide an inquiry into phenomena of life: impermanence, containment, support, fragility, and resilience. Through somatic movement prompts, imagery, and improvisation, participants will explore the qualities of fluids in the body — interstitial, intracellular, extracellular — embodying the lightest and densest fluids, from lymph to blood. Water that solidifies. Waters that meet at confluences and deltas. Waters that evaporate, condense, and stir into wind and storm.
Open to the full community · Ages 12 and up · Family participation welcome · For anyone curious about expanding their movement, creativity, and experience of encounter with others.
Jessica Humphrey
California, US
Jessica makes dances to leverage the profound healing potential of human beings moving together, attending to space, time, and bodies, and deepening their relationships with each other and the world through the tenderness and vulnerability elicited by the creative process. Her movement research began in childhood with gymnastics and continues with dancemaking from various, shifting perspectives, and states of body~mind. Her dances are expressions of her engagement with paradox, contemplative and somatic practices, Integral Theory, Practice-as-Research, and reverence for works of those within whose lineages she moves.
She has co-created several evening-length dances over the past 20 years with artists such as Deborah Hay, Sara Shelton Mann, Gabor Tompa, Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s La Postra Nostra, Leslie Seiters, LIVE, and throughout her 13-year collaboration with Eric Geiger.
In 2021, she initiated Portal, a transborder dance experiment born on Zoom during the pandemic and continuing to grow IRL on both sides of the US-Mexico border. She now co-facilitates this platform for dances created through somatic and contemplative experimentation alongside Briseida López Inzunza and Miroslava Wilson Montoya.
She has an MFA in Modern Dance with a focus on contact improvisation and creative process from the University of Utah (2008) and a BFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach (2002).
Intensive study with Deborah Hay in 2009 changed her life and continues to inspire her every move.
She is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (RSMT) with the International Somatic Movement and Therapy Association (ISMETA) and is certified in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis through the Integrated Movement Studies Program (IMS, 2006) with primary teachers Peggy Hackney and Janice Meaden, Dance-Specific Pilates with Body Arts and Sciences, International (BASI, 2002) with Karen Clippinger and Rael Isocowitz, has studied Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Amy Matthews, and will graduate from the BMC® Somatic Movement Educator Program at Moving Within with Mary Lou Seereiter in 2025/26. She has studied the Feldenkrais Method® with Seiters, Geiger, and Kristen Baum Wilcox and Alexander Technique with Marjean McKenna, Eileen Troberman, and Shelley Senter.
After experiencing the shadow dynamics of horizontal, non-hierarchical group structures, she was inspired to pursue training in the facilitation of conflict as a creative process as well as leadership that cultivates healthy hierarchy through the integration of both top-down and bottom-up processes. Her certification in Integral Facilitation® (Ten Directions, 2019) with Diane Musho Hamilton, Rob McNamara, Cindy Lou Golin, Gabriel Wilson and Rebecca Ejo Colwell informs her work in the studio, within institutions, and throughout the community.
In her role as a Professor of Dance at SDSU, Jessica continues to learn through teaching (dancemaking, contact improvisation, embodied anatomy, somatics, making dances with students and mentoring their dancemaking processes), researching (somatic and contemplative practices in dancemaking as paths to healing, psychophysical development, and spiritual deepening), and working with the Prison Arts Collective to bring arts education to incarcerated participants.
Karen Palafox
Baja California, MX
Dancer, producer, and movement researcher dedicated to Somatic Education, Contact Improvisation, and Evolutionary Aquatic Movement. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree inDance from UDLAP and is a Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist certified by Body-Mind Movement® (Mexico and Brazil), a certified Janzu® Aquatic Therapy facilitator, and currently in ongoing training with AquaSoma®.
Her work is focused on the exploration of developmental movement patterns as portals to sensitivity, perception, and proprioception, both in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Her somatic landscape is largely grounded in the practice of improvisation and CI, through which she investigates how movement and contact open sensomotor pathways for the creation of relational ecosystems, where the soma is inhabited as a living territory, revealing more embodied forms of presence.
Since 2011, she has organized and participated in numerous gatherings, workshops, and events related to dance, improvisation, Contact Improvisation, and Somatic Education in Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Argentina, New Zealand, the United States, and Ecuador.