*Freeing the Embrace*
Contango Intensive
Workshops & JaMilonga with Raffaele Rufo (Rome)
Innsbruck, Saturday 20 June 2026
A full day of dance and exploration between tango and contact improvisation, where breath, touch, and movement unfold as a somatic dialogue of trust, rhythm, and transformation.
Join a single workshop or immerse yourself in the complete intensive, culminating in the JamMilonga — a shared space of experimentation where the worlds of tango and contact meet, and form becomes flow.
Open to all levels — for movers, contact dancers, tango lovers and beginners who wish to explore dance as transformation, between structure and surrender, listening and play.
*You can join alone or with a partner. No prior experience required.
📍Venue: Jugendheim Saggen, Falkstraße 26, Innsbruck (Austria)
📞 Info & Bookings: Cilla Lundberg — +43 699 17143114
“Freeing the Embrace” — An immersion into Contango
Contango is an immersive journey where somatic movement, contact improvisation, and tango weave together into one living dance — a space where breath, touch, and movement open pathways between structure and freedom. Rooted in the intimacy and musical precision of tango and the emancipatory flow of contact, Contango invites dancers to trust their bodies, explore transformation through connection, and experience dance as a process of shared metamorphosis — where every encounter becomes a co-liberation in motion.
WORKSHOPS THEME: ‘FREEING THE EMBRACE’
Freeing the Embrace means working on multiple levels: physical, emotional, and relational. On one hand, freeing the body—particularly the spine, which is the main channel of movement. Just observe how cats move: their backs are mobile and fluid. Our sedentary lifestyle, on the other hand, tends to stiffen the torso, which is also the center of connection in tango. On the other hand, freeing the embrace involves releasing the emotional energy that flows through the embrace. Tensions and fears influence the way we touch and allow ourselves to be touched. Finally, freeing the embrace also means knowing how to enter and exit contact fluidly, without stiffness or abrupt breaks, allowing the relationship with the other person to remain alive and dynamic. In the workshops, we will work on these aspects through simple, progressive exercises to make the embrace freer, more fluid, and more present.
PROGRAM OF INNSBRUCK SUMMER CONTANGO INTENSIVE: SATURDAY 20 JUNE 2026
Workshop #1 – 10:00–13:00
Embodying the embrace — inhabiting a shared space of connection
Listening, Contact, and Trust
A workshop to explore the quality of contact, weight, and presence in an embrace through simple, slow and progressive movements.
Workshop #2 – 15:00–18:00
The embrace in motion — evolving connection into a shared dance
From Connection to Dance
A workshop to evolve the embrace into movement: moving together, entering and exiting contact, allowing dance to emerge in a fluid and playful way.
JamMilonga – 19:00–22:30
An open space where tango and contact merge — a collective dance between improvisation and form, listening and rhythm, individual flow and shared pulse. A living celebration of somatic dialogue.
Teacher’s Bio
Raffaele Rufo is a dance pedagogue, choreographer, and researcher based in Rome with over twenty years of international experience. Over the course of two decades of training, performance, teaching, and community work, he has developed TangoSomatics, an integrative method that combines tango, contact improvisation, and somatic movement to cultivate relational awareness, presence, and creative transformation. His workshops are open to dancers of all backgrounds and invite each participant to rediscover movement as a space for connection, curiosity, and play. He holds a PhD from Deakin University (Australia) with research focused on touch in tango as somatic listening, and he regularly teaches at major festivals of tango, contact tango, and contact improvisation across Europe.
Contango exercises - the specific approach of TangoSomatics
Documentation of the recent Contango workshops conducted by Raffaele Rufo (PhD) in 2026