Touch&Play AUSTRALIA 2025
7-12 March 2025
Meet your Hosts
Dr. Daniel J. Hayes (DeeJay)
Touch&Play Founder
Social Entrepreneur, Community leader, Practical Idealist with an MD. and Ph.D. in Tropical Medicine. He’s been dancing, playing, meditating and conversing Contact Improvisation (CI) for over 20 years. He is the founder of the Touch&Play Movement and the Vidàlia eco-village outside Barcelona. He is the current Executive Director of Earthdance the oldest CI based Intentional Community located in Western Massachusetts and partner in CAMP an arts and cultural retreat center on the Coast of Oaxaca. He’s been exploring the intricacies of the Relational Body for over 15 years and is committed to building a more peaceful and authentic world through his social entrepreneurial and creative endeavors.
Akasha - Janine Leagh
Touch&Play Local Host
Akasha lives a life in service and in response to the omnipresent life force energy. She bows in reverence to the Sacred Self and believes it not separate to the human experience. British born but a wanderer by nature, she worked on Cruise Ships before residing in Australia until 2020. A teacher’s teacher, facilitator, mentor, Somatic trauma therapist and student of the Conscious Movement arts she has facilitated students Internationally for over 25yrs.
Nick
Collaborator
Nick works with heart centred people creating deep, nourishing spaces, to reconnect with our inner wisdom – getting clarity and alignment on what really matters -using breathwork, movement, embodiment and consent practices, ritual and sound.
He is passionate about witnessing humans being unapologetically themselves, lovingly dismantling any conditioning that no longer serves.
He is a trainer with Alchemy of Breath on the Inner Journey and 400hr breathwork facilitator training programs.
Nick is an advocate of men’s work – joining and leading online and in person men’s circles with the Manhood Worldwide group since 2019.
Inspired by authentic relating, dance and authentic movement, internal family systems, boundaries and consent work, Vedanta, soul initiation among others.
In love with the connecting and healing power of CI – in every moment tuning into our boundaries & desires, communicating with our bodies – and being open to magic.
YOU BELONG HERE
Touch&Play invites individuals to explore their authenticity and relational dynamics in safer and supportive spaces. It acknowledges that embracing life is not just about celebrating strengths and virtues, but also about acknowledging one’s limits, and shadows, fostering a holistic journey of self-discovery and growth.
ABOUT THE TOUCH&PLAY MOVEMENT
“Leave your relationships more beautiful than you found them”
Touch&Play is an exciting and growing global network of local communities that come together around a set of shared practices and a common culture. We’ve been organizing retreats and community gatherings since 2010 and have held events in 16 different countries and 4 different continents. Our events strike a balance between the local context and culture where a retreat takes places and the global embodied, humanistic and spiritual practices and values that underpin our work. In the end we are striving to build a deeply caring and seriously playful world where we can live authentically and in peace with ourselves and our communities.
Transform your relations through embodiment and authenticity
The first Touch&Play gathering took place in 2010 in Berlin and explored The Chemistry in Contact Improvisation (CI). While Classical CI focuses on what happens when two physical bodies meet in space, Touch&Play asks what happens when two human beings meet in space.
Our current frame is a wider one and is described as an exploration of “The Relational Body”. We will experimentially (both experimental and experiential) research the questions and nuances of our dancing bodies as they constellate in any given context and time. Contact Improvisation is one of the main tools we use for this exploration along side Dance, Kink, Somatics, Tantra, Authentic Relating, NVC, Play fighting, Grief Work, Land Dance, Oracling and more. Our values center on emergent play, authenticity, inclusion, embodied consent, care and community.