KalaKeli movement arts is an intensive training programme that invites acclaimed international and Indian teachers from various movement disciplines to share their knowledge and inspire the next generation of movement artists from all over the world.
Our unique programme offers training in contemporary technique, traditional martial arts, yoga, meditation, breathwork, fighting methodologies, improvisation, creative research as well as complementing lectures in the sciences of the body, mind and soul.
The retreats are hosted at ITAÍBA in Arambol, Goa, surrounded by lush vegetation, exotic birds and monkeys. A beautiful and peaceful environment to move amongst nature.
What is Kalakeli?
Kalakeli is a living, breathing entity not just a space, but a shared experience. Here, everyone is both student and teacher.
Guided by energy rather than instruction, Kalakeli invites you to journey inward to become more whole in order to meet the world as it truly is: a complex, paradoxical place where creativity and kindness coexist with conflict and destruction.
We hold space for a brief, sacred pause in the rhythm of your life.
A moment to reconnect with your purpose, to explore meaning, and to deepen your understanding of self and others.
It’s a bracket in time, a gentle invitation to make peace with contradiction, to sit with the questions, and to remember what it means to be fully human.
Our Philosophy
Kalakeli is a Sanskrit term meaning ‘playful arts’. Playful as expressing pleasure and amusement. Art as the expression of human creative skill and imagination. Kalakeli’s intensive training programme is a space where you ‘play’ with ‘art’ and put ‘art’ at ‘play’.
Young animals learn the skills and tricks of their elders by playing. They invite each other to play with ceremonious attitudes and gestures. Play is a training of the young creature for the serious work that life will demand later on.
Young animals learn through play, a ritualistic symbolic act in which they mirror the gestures and instincts of their elders. These ceremonial invitations to play are initiatory rites, where the Self begins its lifelong journey toward wholeness.
Play becomes the stage upon which the young ego encounters the unknown, rehearsing for the demands of life in a space untouched by judgment or failure. In this sacred container, the child rises and falls freely, guided by inner instinct and outer mentors who play the role of guides.
Here, within the bounds of symbolic action, the young creature experiments with being: by taking on roles, testing boundaries, and discovering inner resources. Through play, the creative unconscious finds expression, the psyche expands, builds resilience, and learns to trust its own process.
Play is life itself in its purest, most instinctual form. Humans, like animals, move and play not just to train, but to remember. To return to the Self.
We gather in movement to learn, to reconnect with one another with joy and with the lost parts of ourselves. In play, we dissolve the rigid ego and enter a space where opposites meet: freedom and structure, fear and courage, shadow and light.
In this space, we prepare for the world and reclaim our place in it.
LOKAH SAMASTAH SUKHINO BHAVANTU
Who is it for?
Kalakeli retreats and residencies are aimed at people who have an existing practice within the movement arts. We are looking for an openness to express and discover ones honest true self as part of a community of like-minded individuals.
You will be training for several hours a day and will need to remain adventurous, curious and humble in front of unknown disciplines.
We ask our participants to be respectful of themselves, others and nature, with an eagerness to explore outside your comfort-zone.
