The Three Treasures of Contact is a three-day contact improvisation retreat and jam in Hawaii devoted to dancing, listening, slowing down, and restoring connection — with the body, with one another, and with spirit.

Each day includes a mix of guided classes, open jams, lunch and spacious time for rest and integration.

This retreat honors the heart of contact improvisation: learning through dancing together.

🌍 Land

Contact improvisation on land forms the foundation of the retreat — grounding us in weight, trust, and responsive movement.

🌊 Water

Warm-Water-based CI offers a unique and deeply nourishing environment for play, regulation, and expanded relational possibility.

🔥 Spirit

Through stillness, slow pacing, and embodied presence, we explore contact as a pathway to inner listening and integration.

What to Expect

• Land-based contact improvisation classes

  Exploring weight, gravity, touch, lifting, and relational listening — with clear, accessible pathways for beginners and depth for experienced dancers.

• Water contact improvisation: Warm water pool-based CI sessions exploring buoyancy, play, and nervous system regulation through fluid support.

• Daily open jams: Time to integrate, explore, and dance freely with others, supported by light facilitation and clear container-setting.

• Lunch is provided daily by Jami Fries. Created to support food sensitivities.

• Our gathering takes place at a beautiful retreat center in Kaimu. Gorgeous gardens, views of the ocean, and lush lawns to take a nap or dance in. There is a Spa for our enjoyment, with a wood stove sauna, refridgerated cold plunge, hot tub and pool. ($20 a day or included with accomodations)

• A spacious, unhurried schedule: With time for rest, stillness, reflection, and being with the land.

• A final day devoted to practicing the Underscore and integration, allowing the retreat to land in the body before returning home.

Teaching & Facilitation

With over twenty years of experience, Shannon Sahaja is known for her playful, grounded approach to contact improvisation and her ability to create environments where beginners feel supported and experienced dancers feel invited into new layers of listening.

Her current work emphasizes slowing down, nervous system awareness, and the courage to feel what arises when we move at a more human pace. Shannon will be facilitaing most of the classes at the retreat.

Land contact with:

Merrick Jacob (she/her) is a lover of movement, continuously in awe of the body and its potential for unique expression, creativity, & authentic connection. Influenced by her practices of figure skating, acroyoga, hand-balancing, and contact improvisation, she guides playful movement experiences as an opportunity for deep listening, exploration, and co-creation. She is a certified acroyoga instructor with AcroRevolution & AcroYoga Montréal. Merrick studied a variety of somatic movement therapy modalities with Dynamic Embodiment & The Moving On Center: School of Participatory Arts & Somatic Research, focusing on BodyMind Centering & Laban Movement Analysis. Say hi to her here: https://merrickjacob.com/

Water contact with:

Ali Williams brings a finely attuned sensitivity to group fields, with a particular gift for sensing nervous system states and helping people orient to what is actually happening in their bodies and relationships. Her work centers on presence, emotional honesty, and the capacity to stay connected to sensation even when things feel charged, uncertain, or tender. At this retreat, she draws on her background as an elite synchronized swimmer to offer a warm-water practice exploring three-dimensional, anti-gravity movement. She is especially interested in how safety, agency, and aliveness emerge when people are given permission to slow down, feel more, and let the water move through them.

Who This Retreat Is For

• Contact improvisers who want both structure and freedom

• Dancers drawn to jams as a primary learning space

• Movers curious about water-based CI

• Beginners wanting clear support in weight-sharing and lifting

• Anyone longing for spacious, embodied time in Hawaii

Whether you are new to contact improvisation or have been dancing for years, this retreat meets you where you are.

Accomodations on Site: https://www.goodgatherings.org/event-details/the-three-treasures-of-contact-land-water-spirit

LOGISTICS

Flying In

The closest airport is Hilo. I highly recommend flying into Hilo. Kona is too far.

If you fly into Kona, you can take the free bus — it’s about 4 hours from Kona to Pahoa and about 2 hours from Hilo. All the buses are free.

* Optional place to stay - https://kalani.com/

* If you're searching Airbnb, look for a place near Pahoa, HI.

For Car Rental, or Accommodations, you can also tune in to these Community Telegram Groups::

• Big Island Bulletin:: 

https://www.bigislandbulletin.com/

Click Join 3k plus members in the top right corner to join the Telegram

Be sure to view the code of conduct 

• Coconut Wireless: https://t.me/+QlXWm4bnX3Y5ZGM5

.Aloha Car Share: https://t.me/alohacarrental

*** If you need help with any logistical pieces or have any questions at all, please reach out to Shannon at 510-584-7893

Pricing & Sliding Scale

This is a 3-day facilitated Contact Improvisation retreat, with approximately two-thirds guided instruction and one-third jam time, and integration.

We offer a sliding-scale pricing structure to support accessibility while honoring the labor of facilitation, production, and care.

Please choose the tier that best reflects your financial reality.

• Early Bird  $300 SOLD OUT

•  Kamaʻāina and BIPOC $325 SOLD OUT If you are in need of a ticket, reach out to me directly. 510-584-7893

• Standard Registration: $350–$400

• Supporter / Abundant: $400-$450

  
  

Supporter/ Abundant rates help subsidize local and lower-cost registrations and support the sustainability of this work.

Space is limited to 30 participants to maintain intimacy, safety, and depth of practice.

The retreat takes place from Thursday-Saturday, in order to book end with the weekly ecstatic dances in Puna. Wednesday night at Sundari, and Sunday morning at Kalani (the birthplace of Ecstatic Dance)

If you are coming from off island, I  encourage you to book your travel to arrive for Wednesday dance. 6:30-9pm.

Stay until Monday, to take part in the Puna ritual of Sunday Funday. (admission not included in ticket price)

Wednesday March 11th:

6:30-9pm Ecstatic Dance

Thursday March 12th:

9am-10:30: Contempletive Dance Practice

10:30: Opening circle

11-1:30pm: Contact Improvisation class with Shannon

1:30-3: Lunch break

3-5:30: Water Contact / Half of group with Ali

3-5:30: Land Contact Jam lightly facilitated with Scores by Shannon / Half of group with Shannon

5:30-7: Dinner

7-8: Restore and Integrate. A ritual to settle into restfullness.

Friday March 13th:

9am-10:30: Contempletive Dance Practice

11-1:30: Contact Improvisation class with Merrick

1:30-3: Lunch break

3-5:30: Water Contact / Half of group with Shannon

3-5:30: Land Contact Jam lightly facilitated with Scores by Merrick / Half of group with Merrick

5:30-7: Dinner

7-8: Underscore talk through

8-10: Jam

Saturday March 14th:

9am-10: Reconnection with the natural world.

10-1:30: Underscore

1:30-3: Lunch break

3-5:30: Nesting and Resting: The Art of Togetherness

5:30-7: Dinner

7-8: closing ritual

option to join the community flow of Sunday Funday and stay an extra day.

Sunday March 15th:

9-11am: Song Circle at Sundari

11-1pm: Ecstatic Dance at Kalani

2-4pm: Beach time

4-sunset: gathering on the Seaview lawn. Live drumming, food vending, fire dancing

Class Descriptions

Contemplative Dance Practice is a structured yet open movement practice that integrates meditation, improvisational dance, and witnessing. Created by Barbara Dilley, it invites participants to move from embodied awareness, cultivating presence, perception, and clarity through alternating phases of stillness, movement, and reflection.

Contact Improvisation Class

We will explore movement through shared weight, touch, momentum, and listening, emphasizing physical awareness, responsiveness, and mutual support. Classes will support the group field to come into deeper trust of themselves and prepare the container for jams.

Warm Water Contact class and Jam: You will be supported to explore a variety of water principles and movement states, dropping deeply into self and presence. Simple techniques and support will be given for holding one another in the fluid embrace of the water. From this place, we are able to extend awe, presence and reverence to eachother. The closing jam gives us the space to lean into platonic intimacy as we are guided by the water to explore yielding, listening, and surrender.

Through our community journey we will deepen trust, release agenda, explore consent, playfulness, & experience nourishing relaxation.

The Underscore is a long-form dance improvisation structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith. (the matriarch of CI) It has been evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.

The Underscore is a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvising. It allows for a full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions, embodying a range of forms and changing states. Its practice is familiar yet unpredictable.

The practice—usually 3 to 4 hours in length—progresses through a broad range of dynamic states, including long periods of very small, private, and quiet internal activity and other times of higher energy and interactive dancing.

Nesting and Resting: The Art of Togetherness.

This workshop invites you to slow down, unwind, and experience the ease of being met just as you are. Together we practice presence, deep rest, and the nourishing art of true togetherness.

A restorative environment for soothing the nervous system, and reconnecting through simple, attuned human presence.

Reconnection with the Natural world

A guided meditative journey in the beauty of Hawaii's ecosystem. Slowing down to see, feel, smell, and tune in with what is here, on this exquiste land. You will be given prompts to engage with the natural world, as an interactive journey, and sharing of what your noticing.