NICA PORTAVIA

DANCER

ACTIVIST

CONTACT IMPROVISATION FACILITATOR

PERFORMER

PHILOLOGIST

I am a dancer with endless curiosity, endless questions, doubts and love for practicing and researching.

I study the body as a place where we have been living since the beginning — shaped by sensations, memories, culture, dreams, and the forces of gravity and relation. Dance, Contact Improvisation and Material For the Spine are the practices that changed my life.

Contact Improvisation gives me an always new language to explore the space between people, between parts of the body, between action and reaction, impacts. For me, it is a way to study presence, support, transformation, attention — to move with the world as it moves.

I believe in dancing as a way to practice shaping ourselves within constant change, and to recognize how, through our movements, our steps, our reaches, we shape the world we want to live in.

Contact Improvisation is, to me, a deep metaphor for life.

We are beings made of relationships — with ourselves, others, and the world around us.

In a world that shifts faster than we can predict, CI offers tools to navigate presence, unpredictability, and connection.

This practice invites us to feel, to fall, to listen, to be supported by gravity and one another.

It’s a way to study our attention, our reflexes, our ability to adapt, re-direct, transform.

We explore how the smallest sensation can shift the whole system.

We move together, creating and holding space for difference, similarity, and collective radical  presence.

It's a Body-Mind-Anthropological-Imaginative Journey

We research the body as a place we’ve been inhabiting since we were born — shaped by culture, dreams, gravity, history, imagination.

We approach movement as endless research, endless transmission, and a way to study the complex web of relations we are part of, choose to engage with, or simply find ourselves in.

We’ll let the dance ask:

Can we be radically active and fully present?

Can we dance and fully breathe?

Can we rest in between this fullness?

Can we meet — really meet — in movement, in impact, in support?

I see the body as a web of relationships.

We are, because we are in relation.

And dancing is one of the most powerful way I know to remember and practice that.

I transmit from the belief that movement can be a tool for change,, for awareness, for shared growth.

My workshops are spaces of collective inquiry, endless research, endless questions, where difference is welcome, where we study how to be together — physically, socially, politically.