Physical Training & Body-Based Research
LEIMAY LUDUS is a living, evolving practice that unfolds through the body, artistic experimentation, and community exchange. Whether explored as a creative process, professional training method, or somatic practice, LUDUS invites dancers, performers, artists, and individuals of all backgrounds—including those with no prior movement experience—into an embodied journey of discovery.
Rooted in over two decades of research by LEIMAY Artistic Co-Director Ximena Garnica and continuously expanded by core LEIMAY Ensemble members, LUDUS is a physical and sensorial training method that conditions the body, sharpens perception, and redefines the relationship between body, space, and time. It fosters attunement, transformation, and relational embodiment, cultivating a permeable body—one that is responsive to energetic connections, spatial dynamics, and states of becoming.
Drawing from Butoh, Noguchi Taiso, experimental theater, and visual arts, Ludus physical training and body-based research challenges Eurocentric performance training models, fostering heightened imagination, physical awareness, and deep states of listening.
CORE LAYERS
Each Ludus layer refines a unique approach to embodiment, attunement, and transformation, expanding movement research into different physical, energetic, and spatial states:
- LUDUS STRINGS – Exploring interdependence through invisible threads connecting the body to space and others.
- LUDUS BECOMING – Investigating transformation, dissolving fixed identities, and embracing continuous change.
- LUDUS PLASTILINA – Working with malleability—the body as soft clay, adaptable and fluid.
- LUDUS FIRE – Engaging with intensity, ignition, and transformative forces.
- LUDUS VOICE – Exploring breath, vibration, and sound as movement.
- LUDUS WATER – Developing a fluid, weight-responsive body through Noguchi Taiso principles.
- ROOTS & RHYTHMS – Honoring Colombian and Japanese movement traditions through Japanese Butoh, Afro-Indigenous, Caribbean, Andean, and Asian rhythms and heritage.
Interdisciplinary Research & Expanded Practices
Alongside movement training, CAVE functions as a research and playground space, where movement intersects with craft, materiality, sustainability, visual art, and technology.
The labs and workshops at CAVE take various forms—open classes, apprenticeships, invited research labs, and public experiments. These workshops extend LEIMAY Ludus into wearable design, handcrafted objects, immersive installations, and sensory environments, exploring embodiment as a continuous exchange between physicality, materiality, and perception.
CORE LAYERS
CORE LAYERS
Wearables, Materiality & Handcrafted Objects
- Designing performance costumes and functional handcrafted wearables, emphasizing upcycled and sustainable materials.
- Creating sculptural and functional objects, from performative set pieces to artisanal handcrafted works, as well as standalone sculptures that exist as pure forms of material and spatial inquiry.
- Engaging with natural materials, handcrafting techniques, and digital fabrication to explore the relationship between the body, the environment, and machine-assisted processes.
Art Installations, Space & Nature
- Transforming perception – Creating installations that make the unseen visible, using materials to frame absence and emphasizing transience, emptiness, and harmony with nature.
- Developing kinetic sculptures – Sculptures that exist in dynamic relationality, shifting, expanding, or responding to natural forces and spatial conditions, where tension, suspension, and transformation emerge through interdependence.
- Exploring spatial composition as a living dialogue between presence, absence, and transformation.
- Working with organic and industrial materials, integrating both hand-built and machine-assisted fabrication into spatial installations.
Visual, Light & Cinematic Exploration
- Developing art films, experimental cinema, and photography that extend Ludus principles, where movement, stillness, and spatial tension create surreal, contemplative landscapes.
- Exploring expanded cinema, where projections interact with bodies, textures, and architecture, dissolving the boundaries between film, sculpture, and performance.
- Using light as material, treating projections as sculptural surfaces that shift and transform space.
- Developing cinematic choreography, where movement, framing, and spatial and textural interaction create meditative and dynamic visual compositions.
Archives, Process & Documentation
- Archiving as an Extension of Practice – Treating documentation as a lived, evolving process—an extension of embodied research and interdisciplinary creation.
- Process Training & Research Documentation – Exploring methods of self-archiving, collective notation, where process becomes a site of reflection, experimentation, and transmission.
- Documentation – Using film, photography, digital and other tools as mediums to extend ephemeral practices, creating archives that both preserve and reimagine works.
LUDUS In Multiple Spaces
In Communities
In Universities
In Residencies
