Contact Improvisation

Playing with gravity, exploring physics using bodies, finding the limits of attention and expanding them.

Contact Improvisation may be a dance of improvising and partnering based on the physics of touch, balance, weight, momentum, flow and resistance. It tunes our senses to be ready to respond in an ever-shifting dialogue of movement. Sometimes quiet and meditative, sometimes wild and athletic, it is a form open to all bodies and enquiring minds.

It is quite fun, sometimes scary, always different, and is training my bodymind to move in ways I never could have imagined. New forms of attention, more balance, strength, flexibility and creativity are great side effects.

Learning to fall creatively.

UC Davis is blessed with a good number of PhD students in performance studies who are also world-renowned contact teachers. It has been a wonderful to be able to learn from them.

There are many jams in the Bay Area and most other big cities. UC Davis jam is Tuesday evenings. Here are some links to videos that inspire me and show some of the play and variety of contact improvisation: 2012 West Coast CI Jam, The Play of Weight, Trio (Poland).