THE PROCESS

The classes are built on are premises that being born on the gravitational field of our planet will inevitably generate fear-reactivity and an accumulation of unnecessary tensions of all sorts stored in the bodies. Along the growing up process, external pressures and challenges from society, educational system, family and so on, will inevitably be added into the construction of personal narratives, potentially further compromising a sense of connectedness. Play-Fight Practice brings awareness into the unconscious resistances towards gravity and the implications of the universal fear of falling on every facet of human expression. Tensions and adversities are necessary frictions to spark evolution but when stagnated and repressed in the body-mind system, it becomes a traumatic event, the source for a myriad of dysfunctionalities. The physical exercises, orientated in playfulness, focus on recognizing, acknowledging and recycling those harmful lifelong accumulation of tensions and stored blockages into a self-empowerment cultivation. Ultimately, the practice stimulates self-honesty and the embodiment of non-resistance, rescuing flow and a sense of unbroken wholeness as our original state of being.
PLAY-FIGHT PRACTICE
ORIGINS

The roots of Play-Fight Practice goes back in 1995 when Bruno Caverna was heading a Capoeira project for patients of a public psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro in collaboration with Luiz Cantador. From the very beginning, the classes were characterized by a deconstructive approach, questioning the dysfunctional aspects of the more conventional Capoeira methodologies at that time. Along its evolutionary teaching process, Bruno would organically integrate principles and knowledge from his experiences in various disciplines such as Physiotherapy, Psychology, Contact-Improvisation, Pushing-Hands, Contemporary Dance, Somatics, Russian Systema, Watsu, Biotensegrity and more recently Freediving.
The label Play-Fight coalesced and took shape only in 2012, though, when Bruno traced back his teaching trajectory and realized that the practice could no longer fit into any known category. The chosen name was a way to acknowledge its Capoeira foundation, while at the same time honoring the extrapolative territory that would most coherently represent the essence of an ever-evolving holistic practice.
PHILOSOPHY

Play-Fight practice is a deep excavation into the nature of our human existential condition, interweaving the inherent life polarities like a symphonic interplay between confrontation and cooperation, form and formlessness, presence and absence. On a biological perspective, life can be regarded as an unavoidable relational play-fight dynamics that takes place uninterruptedly within ourselves from moment to moment as well as at each interaction in our surroundings. The cooperative aspect of the practice ensures that individual's integrity is imperative. On the confrontational side, the practice has the potential to reflect each other's blind spots and to expose concealed unconscious resistances and self-deceptive mechanisms, like a ruthless mirror that can potentially reveal the delusory myth of our acquired identities.
BRUNO CAVERNA
Bruno Caverna is a pioneer in creating authentic multidisciplinary body-mind practices sustained by an embodied movement philosophy drawn from over 35 years of studying and immersing in various of disciplines such as Gymnastics, Capoeira, Acrobatics, Contemporary Dance, Contact-improvisation, Taiji, Russian Systema, Watsu, Surfing and Freediving. Bruno began teaching in 1995 as a capoeira project leader at a psychiatric hospital. The highly demanding context supported his auto-didactic nature to flourish whilst the process configured deconstructive in its essence, the pedagogical ground for all the other future teaching projects that eventually expanded over 30 countries worldwide in the past 20 years. Bruno's inborn maverick essence led him to always challenge the seemingly dysfunctional societal mindsets that would be in dissonance with a healthy functionality of the being. For a period of time, Bruno felt compelled to strongly question the validity of any social model whenever it would reveal itself as disguised controlling power structures, particularly in those with apparent manipulative and undermining relationships between teacher and students. The inner struggle and the refusal to easily acquiesce to the norms set Bruno off into a lonely explorative path for several years till he realized the uselessness of fighting against the rules of the human game. Bruno eventually transformed his lifelong embodied experiences with inner resistances and struggle as the core subject of interest on his practices and embodied philosophy. In 2012, Play-Fight and Liquid Body coalesced as authentic practices out of a need to label his lifelong research in the body-mind field. In 2016 he founded Formless Arts, an international cross-disciplinary hub that represents a moment of maturity coinciding with the foment of a community of self-responsible individuals. Bruno's teaching philosophy consists in becoming a revealing mirror to one another by sensibly exposing the boundaries of our crystallized social masks and the acquired self-deceptive mechanisms. In the end, Bruno is convinced that is mainly through the hurtful exercise of constantly looking after our own shadows and confronting the human flaws that we may find a sense of wholeness from within, while at the same time acknowledging and honouring a diversity of artful expressions with substantial tolerance towards conflicting perspectives.
FOUNDER
Francesca Romano
ITALY
Ester Braga
ITALY
Marina Sekacheva
RUSSIA
PLAY-FIGHT PRACTICE
FACILITATORS
Miriam Costa
ITALY
Lena Maya
AUSTRIA
Chiara Zompa
ITALY
Bruno Caverna
BRAZIL
TESTIMONIALS
PARTICIPANTS PLAY-FIGHT