“Your level of sensitivity has to match your level of risk.”

--Nancy Stark Smith

Listening to the Physics

A five-week Contact Improvisation series in Puna

Five Mondays · 3 hours each week · Puna, Big Island

Contact Improvisation asks us to develop a physical intelligence that is responsive, relaxed, and ready.

In this five-week series, we’ll slow down enough to listen.

Not just to our partner, but to the continual conversation between weight, gravity, momentum, structure, sensation and choice. We’ll explore the subtle information that is available in every moment of the dance, and develop our capacity to respond to what is actually happening rather than rushing toward what we think should happen next.

For those with experience, this is an opportunity to deepen familiar skills and discover new possibilities within them. For those newer to Contact, it offers a grounded introduction to the principles that make the form both exhilarating and sustainable.

We’ll work with floor work, rolling, falling, weight sharing, tone and structural support, pathways through space, listening through touch, and the constantly changing relationship between stability and instability.

And we’ll practice something that can be surprisingly difficult for experienced dancers:

slowing down.

When we slow down, sensation becomes more articulate. We can notice the tiny shifts that precede a larger movement. We can feel when our body is available for more weight, when it needs less, when a pathway is opening, and when a familiar pattern is taking over.

From that increased sensitivity, we can take greater risks with greater choice.

The goal isn’t to become more virtuosic for its own sake. It’s to become more available to the dance.

Each session will include guided explorations, technical and perceptual studies, dancing with partners, and plenty of time to integrate the material through jam.

This is a committed five-week series. Coming each week allows the work to accumulate, relationships to develop, and the questions that emerge in one class to become the starting point for the next.

Come ready to listen, experiment, play, and discover what becomes possible when you give your attention to the physics of the present moment.

5 week commited series. Monday's in November 4-7pm

Carpooling is Essential!

Investment:

Access Rate: $225

Sustainer Rate: $250

Pay-it-forward Rate: $275

Work Trade: $150

Work Trade is available for a limited number of participants who are able to arrive approximately 90 minutes early each Monday to help with agreed-upon projects supporting the land and venue. Because this is a committed five-week series, work-trade participants commit to participating in the work trade for all five weeks. Showers are available to you in between worktrade and the workshop.

*Cancellation policy: Registrations are nonrefundable if you cancel or cannot attend. In exceptional circumstances, I may offer a credit toward a future event at my discretion; credits are not guaranteed. If I cancel the event, you will receive a refund.

Shannon Sahaja is a somatic educator, dance artist, and movement facilitator with more than two decades of experience exploring the body as a source of intelligence, creativity, and connection.

She holds a BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase and has studied extensively with many of the early pioneers of Contact Improvisation, including Nancy Stark Smith. Her teaching brings together a deep understanding of the mechanics of weight sharing with curiosity, play, attunement, and improvisation.

Shannon is also a longtime yoga teacher and meditation practitioner. Eight years of living and teaching at Harbin Hot Springs, along with her mentorship with Angela Farmer, deeply shaped her approach to embodied practice.

From 2017–2024, Shannon helped hold and cultivate the community of Ecstatic Dance Oakland while teaching Yoga and Contact Improvisation.

Her work includes Experiments in Communal Play, Nesting & Resting: The Art of Togetherness, Contact Improvisation intensives, retreats, and other embodied explorations.

Shannon creates spaces where technical learning and physical intelligence meet playfulness, presence, connection, and the unexpected.