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, 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.

• 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)

• 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 and Ali Williams will both be leading the water contact classes.

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

$350 early bird discount until Feb 15th

$400-$550 Sliding scale thereafter.

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 encourge 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

1:30-3: Lunch break

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

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

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

1:30-3: Lunch break

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

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

5:30-7: Dinner

7-8: Underscore talk through

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 principals 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.