A Contact Improvisation Intensive

Contact Improvisation asks us to develop a kind of physical intelligence that is responsive, relaxed, and ready. The dance is created in real time, through an ongoing conversation with gravity, momentum, sensation, and another person’s body. Rather than simply learning a repertoire of lifts or predetermined pathways, we’ll explore the physical principles that allow movement to emerge spontaneously: knowing where your own center is, finding and refining a shared center with another person, and learning how to move over, under, through, and around each other’s centers.

The goal is not to eliminate risk or unpredictability, but to develop the awareness and physical skill to meet them. We’ll practice tracking the constant micro-shifts of weight, balance, momentum, and sensation that tell us what is possible in any given moment. Through this kind of listening, falling becomes information, instability becomes possibility, and lifts can emerge as a natural consequence of two bodies organizing themselves together.

The weekend will unfold through a progression of three essential layers:

1. Find Your Center

We begin with the relationship to our own body: skeletal support, alignment, gravity, balance, and weight.

Where is my center? How do I organize my structure? How can I move from a place of support rather than muscular effort?

2. Find Your Center Through Another

Once another body enters the equation, the experience of center changes.

Through leaning, counterbalance, shared support, and weight exchange, we discover that two people can create a new center together. We’ll explore how to listen through physical contact, respond to another person’s weight, and build structures that neither body could create alone.

3. Get Over It / Get Under It

From shared balance we move into the vertical dimension of Contact Improvisation.

How does one person’s center move over or under another? What makes a lift possible? How do we give weight, receive weight, support another body, and allow ourselves to be supported?

Rather than treating lifts as tricks to be learned, we’ll investigate the physical principles that make lifting and being lifted sustainable, responsive, and improvisational.

Know your own weight → receive another’s weight → share weight → redirect weight → lift and be lifted.

Throughout the weekend, we’ll weave in experiments in community play: simple relational exercises and minimal-contact practices designed to help us become comfortable sharing space, making contact, and developing trust before moving into greater physical risk.

These practices create a bridge between solo movement and full-bodied contact, offering ways to connect without immediately asking the body to surrender weight.

There will be jams and open-ended practice throughout the weekend, giving us opportunities to take the material out of the exercises and into real-time improvisation.

This is Contact Improvisation as a physical practice: grounded, curious, skillful, and alive.

Come ready to move, learn, play, touch, fall, support, listen, and discover what becomes possible when two bodies learn how to organize themselves together.

INVESTMENT

Access Rate— $250

Sustainer Rate — $300

Pay-it-forward Rate — $350

*We have space for 16 dancers so sign up early.

SCHEDULE

9-10: Contempletive Dance Practice

10:15–1:00 — Morning workshop

1:00–2:30 — Lunch break

2:30–4 — Afternoon workshop

4:30-6 -- Jam

*same schedule on Saturday and Sunday.