Stand on one leg and challenge yourself!
Organise your body so that you are constantly throwing yourself out of balance!
You are standing on one leg, but you are also moving,
As if you are playing some kind of childhood game!

Are you falling?
How are you organising yourself?
What is your head doing, and what are your arms doing?

Quickly switch legs! Are you falling now?
What is your head doing now, and your arms and the other leg?
How is your body “saving” you from falling?

Close your eyes!!
Continue the game and map the organisation and reaction of your body!

Recorded by: Mia Štark

You are lying on soft, warm grass, looking at the sky.

You hear the murmur of people.

Birdsong.

You feel warmth.

With every exhale, the body releases its weight into the ground.

Letting go.

Your system is calming down, you are calming down.

You sink deeper and deeper into the ground on which you are lying.

That surface is your support,
And your body is safety and grounding.

Recorded by: Mia Štark

Take a large sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal.

Hold the piece of charcoal with both hands.

Draw lines strongly.

Your attention is on your fingers, on your palms.

Follow the movement of your wrist, elbow, shoulder.

Draw and remain aware of your entire arm.

Let the body organise itself according to the gesture.

Press the charcoal more lightly — release the pressure.

How are your arms and body organising themselves now?

Take as much time as you need in pause and silence.

What does your work look like?

Recorded by: Mia Štark

You are sitting in an armchair reading a book.

Your eyes fly across the letters, adding them up

And connecting them.

You turn the pages.

The page is rough, or smooth.

Thin or thick.

Glossy, coated or uncoated.

What is it like?

What is that book like?

Heavy or light?

Stop paying attention to the book and observe your hands, your palms holding it.

How are your fingers organised, your joints — many small joints.

How does the skin crease?

How does your wrist move?
—
Close your eyes — Remember — Draw

Recorded by: Mia Štark

Go outside and begin an adventure guided by your senses.

Hyper focus on sight —
What do you see that is new, how do you see it, from which position, near or far?

Hyper focus on smell —
What scents surround you, is your sense of smell overwhelmed? Where does your nose lead you?

Hyper focus on hearing —
Continue your adventure, let the sounds take over!
Where do they lead you, or do you stay in one place? Where are the sounds coming from?

Hyper focus on touch —
Fabric, air, other people, plants, animals? What is touching you, what are those textures, and where do they lead you next?
Is your attention on what is touching you or on what you are touching?

Finally, hyper focus on taste —
Do you want to bite into something, do you want to taste something, even just touch it with your tongue, open the buds on your tongue?
How often do we let our adventure of exploration be taken over by the sense of taste?

Recorded by: Mia Štark

You are sitting next to someone.

You are touching — shoulder to shoulder,
back to back
or palm to palm.

Close your eyes, breathe deeply.

Attention is on the meeting and the touch.

With every breath the body expands, with every exhale it contracts
again,
and again.

You are breathing together, warmth is created in the touch.

Shared calm, shared rest, shared breathing.

Just like cellular respiration.

Recorded by: Mia Štark

Pay attention to the walls surrounding you, to the space you are in.

What is within us can be found outside, and vice versa —
The walls of a room, the membrane of a cell, safety.

Shift your attention to your skin.

The large membrane that you see and clearly feel.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Go even deeper.

Imagine the cells and their membranes —
Safety and support.

Hold that thought within yourself and outside yourself, carry it into every space you enter.

Recorded by: Mia Štark

Whatever you are doing, stop!

Go outside.

Find a position in which you can feel the sun, wind, warmth, or coldness on the skin of your face.

Breathe in.

Imagine the air flowing and traveling through all the hollows of your skull.

It enters through the nasal cavities, travels into the nasal conchae,
First, second, third.

Allow the air to flow through.

Feel it beneath your eyes, deep within the skull.

Breathe in like that several times.

Recorded by: Mia Štark

Body-Mind Centering® morning classes

with Zrinka Šimičić, certified educator of somatic and developmental movement through BMC® and certified movement analyst – somatic practitioner through LBMS.

On Wednesdays from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. at the Zagreb Dance Center (Ilica 10) and are open to everyone, regardless of previous experience.

Body-Mind Centering® is an integrative approach to movement based on an experiential model of psychophysical learning about different body systems, their anatomy and physiology, as well as developmental movement. Its goal is to connect factual knowledge with personal experience. The BMC® approach begins with awareness of cellular and sub-cellular structures, tissues, and organs as a pathway toward activation and outward action with greater support and more choices. The founder of this approach is Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

The price for a single class is €15, and for a full month €45.
A 20% discount is available for unemployed persons and members of UPUH and PULS (discounted price: €12 for a single class, €36 for a monthly pass).
Two free places are available for people facing physical, economic, or other difficulties.

For additional information and registration: somahut.mmk@gmail.com

Body-Mind Centering ®  /BMC ® are registered service mark of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, used with permission

9 and 10 May 2026

KONTEJNER / BUREAU OF CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE

Odranska 1/1, Zagreb

SomaHut is an initiative launched in 2020 under the umbrella of the Zagreb-based art organisation Multimedijalna koliba. It is dedicated to connecting people and to the development and dissemination of knowledge arising from the exploration of the phenomena of body and movement through different approaches, disciplines and fields of human activity: art, science, education, care…

This year’s SomaHut festival is a two-day event which, on 9 and 10 May, gathers international and local artists and somatic practitioners in the premises of KONTEJNER in Zagreb, Odranska 1, to share through performances, workshops, ‘warming up the audience’ and conversations with visitors the results of artistic processes, as well as the impulses and questions that guide their research.

The festival is centred around an interest in the body as a place of conditioning, imperatives and fears – fear of stopping, of the future, of the unknown – but also of their continuous processing, transformation and opening of new possibilities. For two days, KONTEJNER will thus become a space of encounter, socialising and exchange of somatic experience, performative possibilities and knowledge.

The Saturday programme begins with the CONTINUUM PRACTICE WORKSHOP led by Sylvain Méret, dance artist, movement and dance therapist, educator and somatic practitioner, whom Zagreb audiences have already had the opportunity to encounter through the Improspekcije festival.

In the afternoon there will be an experiential anatomy workshop for children between 6 and 10 years of age on the theme WHAT ARE BONES FOR?, led by Marina Brajdić and Zrinka Šimičić.

The evening programme brings the performances SHIFT INTO AN UNKNOWN PAUSE by Anja Bornšek, dance artist and somatic movement educator, VOLUME OF MEMORY by Tina Valentan, dance artist and trainee in expressive therapy at the Tamalpa Institute, and HOW CAN WE WATCH? by dance artist Ana Kljujev, a final-year undergraduate student of Contemporary Dance at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb.

On Sunday morning the CONTINUUM PRACTICE WORKSHOP continues, while the afternoon programme begins with a discussion on SOMATIC EDUCATION AND THE SOMATIC IN EDUCATION, bringing together members of the SomaHut study group, teachers from the Department of Dance at the Academy of Dramatic Art, somatic practitioners, educators and everyone interested in the processes of embodied learning and teaching.

The evening programme presents the performance work KONTAMINA by Mateo Babić and the ritual performance FLUID i T by Sylvain Méret.

SCHEDULE

Saturday, 9 May 2026

10:30-13 h CONTINUUM PRACTICE WORKSHOP with Sylvain Méret

13–15 h Lunch break and social gathering in the KONTEJNER courtyard

15–16 h WHAT ARE BONES FOR? Experiential anatomy workshop for children with Marina Brajdić and Zrinka Šimičić

18 h  SHIFT INTO AN UNKNOWN PAUSE, performance-experiential work by Anja Bornšek, with an introduction to the performance by Tina Valentan

VOLUME OF MEMORY, performance work by Tina Valentan, with audience warm-up  by Anja Bornšek

21 h  HOW CAN WE WATCH?, performance work by Ana Kljujev

Sunday, 10 May 2026

11 – 14 h   CONTINUUM PRACTICE WORKSHOP with Sylvain Méret

14-16 h Lunch break and informal gathering in the KONTEJNER courtyard

16-17:30 h Round table: SOMATIC EDUCATION AND THE SOMATIC IN EDUCATION

19 h  KONTAMINA, performance work by Mateo Babić

20 h  FLUID i T, work-in-progress performance by Sylvain Méret

Conversation with the performers and the audience

The fee for participation in the Continuum Practice Workshop is €90, or €60 with an early registration discount (until 30 April 2026).

All other programmes are free of charge, with donations according to your possibilities.

To participate in the workshops, please register at: somahut.mmk@gmail.com

Initiator and programme director of SomaHut: Zrinka Šimičić

Festival programme and organisation: Zrinka Šimičić and Mia Štark

Assistance in organisation and promotion: Lara Šercar

Production: Multimedijalna koliba in collaboration with KONTEJNER – Bureau of Contemporary Art Practice

Visual identity: Vanja Cuculić

Production: Multimedijalna koliba, 2026

The SomaHut 2026 programme is co-funded by the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and the European Union.  

SomaHut is part of  INTERLACE: Art and Action in Contemporary Dance Education, a project funded by the European Union, Erasmus+. INTERLACE aims to provide dance educators with learning environments and peer-to-peer exchanges for knowledge transfer and for developing inclusive methodologies for teaching creative dance to diverse local communities. The INTERLACE project provides dance educators with an environment for learning and peer-to-peer exchange, with the aim of transferring knowledge and developing inclusive methodologies for teaching creative dance in local communities.

Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.