Kaisa Kukkonen (1986) is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Finland. She works with the poetry of movement, politics of touch, and somatic practices. Her background is in dance, words, and performance. Her interests are movement and voice improvisation, Contact Improvisation, work around consent, pleasure activism, boundaries and touch as well as work with words in the form of poetry or academic writing. Kaisa´s work changes shape and spirals between multiple forms: she makes performances; teaches workshops and classes in movement, touch and boundaries; organises festivals and events; writes and composes; improvises.

Kaisa has been dancing CI since 2005, and teaching since 2010 in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Iceland. Her CI home is Berlin, where she learned from Joerg Hassmann, Daniel Werner, Christine Mauch, and Gesine Daniels among others. Later her teachers and/or co-dancers have been for example Katja Mustonen, Anya Cloud, Iiris Raipala, Terhi Rasilo, and Nita Little. She dances and teaches currently in Helsinki.

Kaisa finished her studies at Iceland University of Arts in the MFA of Performing Arts programme (2021-2022) in September 2022 with a performance project “Take This Touch Inside Your Body”. She graduated from MACoDE program at HfMDK in Frankfurt with a master thesis “Noticing Power Relations in Teaching Touch in Contact Improvisation” (2021). For the thesis she interviewed fourteen Contact Improvisation teachers, collected their strategies and thoughts on how to teach touch.

Significant teachers

Joerg Hassmann, Nita Little, Christine Mauch, Daniel Werner, Anya Cloud, Iiris Raipala, Gesine Daniels, Katariina Vähäkallio, Katja Mustonen.