Open Floor International ~ Ground Floor Lab

28 October - 2 November 2025 ~ BERLIN, Germany

Teaching Faculty ~ Deborah Lewin and Bence Gáspár

An Exploration of Life Through Movement for Personal Healing, Professional Growth, and Community Building

A foundation in the most up to date approaches to embodiment and mindful movement, our Ground Floor Lab is an intensive, experiential, 30 hour introduction to the Open Floor curriculum. You’ll come away with an understanding of the core teachings and practical skills to use them in your movement practice, your everyday life, workplace and communities.

The Ground Floor Lab will take place at Ballhaus Rixdorf, Berlin, GERMANY - see below for full details.

Meet Deborah

Professionally, Deborah has been working in the field of movement and embodiment for 30+ years. She qualified as a Sesame Movement and Drama Therapist in her early 20s, soon broadening into the field of conscious movement and teaching 5Rhythms® for over 25 years.

In 2014, she was one of a group of 15 Founding Teachers of Open Floor International (OFI) and in 2016 attended OFI’s Therapy in Motion training with Andrea Juhan and Irit Ziv-Ron. In 2023 & 2024, she completed both the Foundation & Applied Training with The Centre for Systemic Constellations.

She has a blended professional life, working online and in-person, with large groups, small groups, and one-to-one. Her respect for the wisdom of the creative body is incisive and contagious.

“I am committed to personal development, and nurturing individual and collective transformation….. I hold the teaching space with deep attentiveness, clear instruction, and an absolute delight and love of movement.”

Meet Bence

I have been dancing and meditating since my childhood, and practicing yoga since I was 17. And since I was 5, I wanted to be a biologist. Every now and then the idea came to dance professionally, but then studying biology and critical social theory ‘won’. Dancing, although a very important part of my life, remained a hobby. At the age of 25 I was ready to start my healing journey—choreography gave way to movement improvisation; psychedelic trips to psychotherapy, retreats and ceremonies; ‘just enjoying’ and pleasing others to self-discovery and striving for integrity.

As a queer person with Jewish and Roma ancestry and a childhood in post-socialist Hungary, I experienced injustice and inequality in countless forms, so it was inevitable that I seek ways of using the privileges I had to empower myself and others. My first access was through education and intellect, and then the physical, somatic followed. When I learned that inclusion, diversity, equity and social justice are inherent to the Open Floor movement practice, another piece of the puzzle found its place.

While I was doing my PhD in biology–still trying to find my way in the image of the world that I received at the beginning of my life–I understood that the Open Floor was wide enough to make space for both worlds... I didn’t have to choose anymore between dancing and studying. So I trained to be an Open Floor teacher, and this container is spacious enough to be a medium for anything I can transmit—only what I have experienced myself.