Please Follow These Links Below To Learn More
Click on titles to view descriptions and bios!
Unless otherwise indicated, all sessions are in English and close captioned.
All timings in US Eastern Time (EDT/UTC -4). For timings in your time zone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html
The full schedule in one huge spreadsheet can be accessed here.
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DAY 1 23 APR FRIDAY |
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Session I 6am-9am PDT/9am-12pm EDT/3-6pm CEST/9pm-12mn UTC+8/10pm-1am JST |
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TIMES IN EDT |
Room A |
Room B |
Room C |
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9:00-9:30 AM |
Room A Welcome intro and land acknowledgement |
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9:30-10:00AM |
Lecture-Movement – Aquatic CI |
Panel – History of CI in Thailand |
Lecture – The politics of patience: Covid lessons for embodied allyship |
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10:00-10:30 AM |
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10:30-11:00 AM |
Movement Workshop – INviteME performance scores Limited to 20 participants |
Facilitated Conversation – Envisioning Fair Festivals Alex Zampini, Katya Dikowa, Samuli Lehesaari, Markus Hoft KW: Festivals, Equity – not recorded – |
Movement Workshop – A listening touch: audio guides for outdoor practice |
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11:00-11:30 AM |
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11:30 AM – 12:00 N |
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Session II 11am-2pm PDT/2-5pm EDT/8-11pm CEST/2-5am UTC+8/3-6am JST |
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TIMES IN EDT |
Room A |
Room B |
Room C |
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2:00-2:30 PM |
Panel – Long View: CI as a political practice? |
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Facilitated Conversation – Authority, Legitimacy, and Desire in CI – not recorded – |
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2:30-3:00 PM |
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3:00-3:30 PM |
Movement Workshop – Small Dance, Big Dance, A collective strategy for Remaining Connected and Embodied Limited capacity 30 participants |
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3:30-4:00 PM |
Panel – What can and should the CI community do about climate change? Richard Kim, Benjamin Pierce, Heike Kuhlman, Erik Mägi, Cléia Plácido (USA,Germany, Sweden, Brazil) KW: Climate |
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4:00-4:30 PM |
Panel – Transitioning Towards Connections – How to engage with the practice of touch during and after the pandemic |
Lecture – Reconnecting to memories of West-African traditions of improvisation |
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4:30-5:00 PM |
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Session III |
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TIMES IN EDT |
Room A |
Room B |
Room C |
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8:00-8:30 PM |
Panel – Improvising within the field of settler colonialism on Indigenous land |
Panel – Using Discoveries from Online Dancing to Contribute to the Future of CI Invitation to Mission Improvable class and talk prior to this session. See description for details. |
Other – Exploring CI through micro-phenomenology |
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8:30-9:00 PM |
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9:00-9:30 PM |
Movement Workshop – Nancy Stark Smith’s Research as Infinite Game KW: NSS |
Lecture – A Call for CI Citizens |
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9:30-10:00 PM |
Lecture/Movement Workshop – Healing Trauma in the Body in CI as it relates to consent |
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10:00-10:30 PM |
Facilitated Conversation – Questioning CI – not recorded –
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Conversation/Movement – A seed of embodied experiences from Japanese/Asian bodies – Offline remote dancing KW: New forms, Tradition |
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10:30-11:00 PM |
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KW = Keywords
Aquatic Contact
collin edina, US/Germany
Lecture-Workshop, English
Keywords: Sociology, Methodology, Waterdance
Room A: 9:30am – 10:25am
An inclusive for all lecture-workshop appropriate for amphibious dancing en solo and duet. We’ll dive into complementary practices; movements for an aqua, terra, Contact milieu, breathing etudes, and perceptual cues. Ethical coherence, the transpersonal meaning of one’s dancing in ecological and social contexts shall be raised.
Collin Edina has participated in unique states of experience as a Massage Bodyworker, Peer Counselor, and performance artist. My fascinations are Contact, novel aquatic forms of bodywork, music-making and dance in water; “Improvisations In Immersion”. I administer “Liquid Bliss Around The World” a network of Aquatics enthusiasts.
History of CI in Thailand
Nitipat Ong Polchai, Tananpach Asavasemachai, Ladda Kongdach, Wattana Wattanawithee, Krid Prarom, Ing-On Rinyapas, Thailand
Panel Discussion, English and Thai with translation
Keywords: History, Place, Community
Room B: 9:30am – 10:25am
In order to think about the future, it is inevitable to think about our past. In this panel discussion conducted in the Thai language, we want to cover something that has been missing in the CI scene in Thailand. That is, to talk about our CI tradition with local Thai artists across different generations from 1970s-2020s. We will introduce and discuss about how we understand our CI practice in the context of Thailand. How our CI practice relates and compare to the traditions of CI according to Contact Quarterly and the world. Development and challenges of CI in Thailand. We intend to garner curiosity and critical views from local Thai public about CI and we welcome our international CI community to interact with comments and questions. My agenda for this event is about bringing a Thai CI community across old and new generations to “write a history” together and garnering communal, public, and perhaps institutional recognition that this practice deserves.
Nitipat Ong Pholchai/Spine Party Movement is a physics lecturer and dance artist with an interest in community-based learning, and tailoring somatic practices for different groups. He is an artistic director of an art collective Project C in Bangkok where he used his facilitation tools and somatic movement knowledge to build a collaborative platform for new multidisciplinary makers to create, exchange and connect their work with audience through workshops, showcases and performance parties. He has been actively promoting somatic education and contact improvisation to the public of Thailand since 2014. He has locally shared his knowledge and creative projects with groups in Thailand ranging from Buddhist meditation centers, alternative schools, social activist groups, The Blind theatre Thailand and university dance departments. He has also presented his works and developed artistic collaboration internationally with communities in Malaysia, Iran, India, Bangladesh, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. www.suiragno.wixsite.com/spineparty, www.facebook.com/spineparty
The politics of patience: Covid lessons for embodied allyship
Sarah Gottlieb, USA/Spain
Lecture, English
Keywords: Pandemic, Equity
Room C: 9:30am – 10:25am
This workshop will explore how the state of “not-being-able-to-do anything-about-it” experienced in Covid times can become an example, and therefore a future resource, for the critical work of deconstructing oppressive behavior and engaging in consent-culture. We will connect the dots between “embodied allyship” and civic discipline.
Sarah Gottlieb is a performing dance artist, movement pedagogue, writer, and social justice activist. She teaches politicized extensions of CI internationally and writes the series Myths to Break Down. Sarah works with multiple antiracist organizations, and has been a public speaker and workshop facilitator about white-deconstruction with SoSRacismoMadrid since 2017.
INviteME Performance Scores
Dorte Bjerre Jensen, Denmark
Movement, English
Keywords: Pandemic, Healing
Room A: 10:30am – 11:55am
I would like to facilitate my online performative score INviteME: a space for exploration, connection and creation. During this pandemic we are performing the right care, but we need to include caring with (Kunst),and here CI and art will play an important role as a situation of care and healing. For this session you will need:
- Pieces of papers (the size of post its or a bit bigger), around 20-30.
- Tape or sticky Tack
- A pen (or two)
- a glass of water
- your mobile phone
Dorte Bjerre Jensen (Denmark) is a dancer, performance artist, author, researcher and teacher. As an artist she creates, directs, and performs. Dorte holds an M.F.A. from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. Currently she is a full-time artist and researcher at Aarhus University(IMC). Info: www.dortebjerrejensen.dk www.eer.info www.touchy-subjects.com
Envisioning Fair Festivals
Alex Zampini, Katya Dikowa, Samuli Lehesaari, Markus Hoft
Facilitated Conversation, English
Keywords: Festivals, Equity
Room B: 10:30am – 11:55am
Let’s dream about an utopian festival. How do we want to come together as a community? How do we relate our practice to the bigger world that we are part of? What does fair payment mean? How can we be more than CI-consumers? What would be the ethics and the values, if I had the power to set a new standard?
Markus Hoft studied Dance at SSCD, Dundee, physical theater at Ecole Philippe Gaulier and Actiontheater (San Francisco/Berlin). Performing, teaching and choregraphing in Germany and abroad. CI teacher and organizer of three CI festivals in Germany. www.fooldance.de
Alex Zampini is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist active in the field of music, film and dance. As a C.I. practitioner he facilitates jams, festivals and performances internationally as a musician and musical director. His projects are process-oriented and combine his interests for psychology, improvisation as a performance practice, environmental activism and the exploration of power dynamics. www.AlexZampini.com
Katya Dikowa (they/them/no pronoun) is a music, dance and pleasure activist based in Hamburg – Germany. They stay optimistic that fair visions on how humans live together can enrich our CI practice and that the essence of our movement practice can ripple out into a more beautiful future.
A listening touch: audio guides for outdoor practice
Laura Doehler and Sofie Narbed, UK
Movement, English
Room C: 10:30am – 11:55am
This workshop invites participation in an audio guide that supports a personal relational improvisation practice outdoors. With shared reflection on experiences of the guide, we explore the possibilities of audio work and outdoor exploration as an alternative way to access CI-related practice. The guides were developed in response to the pandemic by the London-based collective Exit Map in the project Moving On.
Information for participants
To take part in this session you will need:
– a fully charged listening device (smartphone or mp3-player). If you have data available on your phone you can stream the audio from SoundCloud. If you cannot stream, please download the audio guide in advance if possible from the GoogleDrive link.
– headphones
– clothing and footwear that you will be comfortable moving in in outdoor space.
Please arrive promptly on Zoom at 10.30 EDT ready to walk/move outdoors, with your listening device and headphones. Please note that there will be an 8 minute arrival window for the session after which we will not be able to admit people for participation in the audio guide. There will be a brief introduction, after which we will invite people to go out and move with the audio. We will be back on Zoom from 11.20 EDT for group discussion. If you do the audio guide yourself in advance of the session, do feel free to join us for the discussion part, from 11.20 EDT.
Laura Doehler is a dance artist, teacher of CI, and founder of Exit Map, a collaborative platform that stimulates connectivity between artists and environment.
Sofie Narbed collaborates with Exit Map as a cultural geographer and CI practitioner with a strong interest in movement as a practice of relationality.
Long View: CI as political practice?
Nita Little, Keith Hennessey, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ann Cooper Albright (USA)
Panel Discussion, English
Room A: 2:00pm – 3:55pm
How does CI both push against and support mainstream ideologies and oppressive power dynamics? In this panel, four seasoned improvisers create a frame and context for the inquiries of this conference, by thinking about CI’s political relevance throughout its (nearly 50 years) of history. We share our range of perspectives in order to imagine the possible future[s] of the form.
Dance researcher, theorist/artist, Nita Little, PhD is one of the founding developers of Contact Improvisation (1972). Teaching around the globe, she guides one of its forward leading edges as an activist for relational intelligence. She directs the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (2016), an international network of dance laboratories.
Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, curator and educator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed worldwide. Drawn to collaboration as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. He is currently an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Experimental Theatre Wing; the Massachussetts Institute of Technology; and a master lecturer at the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia.
Keith Hennessey, MFA, PhD, makes dances, performances, texts, rituals and relationships. Born in Canada, living in San Francisco since 1982, and touring extensively, Keith started dancing CI in Montréal in 1979. He’s still at it, critically, playfully. Prioritizing collaboration, critique, and play, Keith instigates embodied experiences that respond to political movement.
A dancer and a scholar and a 2019-20 Guggenheim Fellow, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, Ann Cooper Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. Her latest book, How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world, offers ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives. Ann Cooper Albright is also a veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation and has taught workshops throughout the U.S. and abroad. The book, Encounters with Contact Improvisation (2010), is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others.
Authority, Legitimacy, and Desire in CI
Ophra Wolf, USA
Facilitated Conversation, English
Keywords: Authority, Desire, Safe Spaces
Room C: 2:00pm – 2:55pm
How do our personal relationships to authority, legitimacy and desire support or inhibit the creation of safe spaces for CI? Specifically, how do the ways in which we experience and express authority, legitimacy and desire affect our ability to share the practice of CI in communities where the persistent presence of violence and trauma can pose a significant barrier to a participation?
Ophra Wolf is a dancer, performance artist, teacher, healer and community activist dedicated to a lifelong study of movement and embodied intelligence as a vehicle for personal and cultural transformation. Improvisation is her core practice, and Contact Improvisation in particular is foundational to her development as an artist.
Small Dance, Big Dance: A Collective Strategy for Remaining Connected and Embodied
Mahalo, Naomi Moon, Danielle Riome (Montréal CI Community), Canada/Quebec
Movement, French and English
Keywords: Pandemic, New Forms
Room C: 3:00pm – 3:55pm
Join us in a practice that started as an accidental collective experiment, and ended up generating a profound and simple structure to move together. You will have an opportunity to drop into embodied meditation, free movement, and being witnessed.
Our little enclave of the Montreal CI community is a French-English collective who was determined to continue to build embodied connection during the pandemic. We are excited to share this social knowledge/tool that developed organically. We hope it inspires other groups to either use this form, or invent their own. Limited to 30 participants: Because the form was designed for small groups, we will cap the workshop at 30 participants in order to be able to offer an experience that is close to the original form.
Mahalo, Naomi Moon et Danielle Riome (Communauté de CI de Montréal) présentent « Petite danse, Grande danse : un cadre pour garder vivante la connexion avec la communauté et la présence au corps ». Nous pratiquerons ensemble cette structure générée par une expérimentation collective, alors que nous tentions de satisfaire notre besoin de danser/être ensemble, même à distance. Forte de sa simplicité, cette expérience guidée vous donnera l’opportunité de plonger, entre autres, dans le mouvement libre, le rôle d’observateur.rice/obervé.e ainsi que la méditation avec focus somatique. Limite 30 personnes: Puisque ce cadre a été conçu pour un groupe de petite taille, nous avons un nombre limité à 30 participants afin d’assurer une expérience la plus fidèle possible à la forme originale.
Notre groupuscule est un collectif francophone et anglophone membre de la communauté de CI de Montréal. Depuis le début de la pandémie, nous sommes déterminé.e.s à explorer des pratiques ancrées dans le cors pour maintenir et approfondir notre connexion ensemble. Nous avons hâte de partager cet outil développé organiquement, en espérant qu’il inspire d’autres groupes à créer leur propre cadre ou à utiliser celui-ci sous sa forme originale.
What can and should the CI community do about climate change?
Richard Kim, Benjamin Pierce, Cléia Plácido, Heike Kuhlman, Erik Magi, Bel Tornaghi (translator), Pedro Peneula (translator); USA, Brazil, Germany, Sweden
Panel Discussion, English
Keywords: Climate
Room B: 3:30pm – 4:55pm
The climate crisis will remake every part of our world, society, and economy. How will CI be affected? What are our ethical obligations to mitigate carbon emissions? How can we best adapt to climate change? What role does CI play in the biggest challenge of our lives?
Richard Kim is a CI dancer, teacher, and organizer, as well as a musician, technologist, and lawyer. He publishes his and others’ writings on CI at contactimprovblog.com. He also serves as a core member of Work on Climate, an online climate community accelerating climate action, and is based in New York City.
Benjamin Pierce is a computer science professor, a passionate contact improviser, and a climate-change activist. Last year he co-founded Clowdr CIC, which develops and supports an open-source software platform for virtual conferences.
Cléia Plácido mora no Brasil é uma artista negra da dança, pesquisadora de improvisação, professora, educadora do movimento somático body mind movement e mestranda em Artes pela Unesp. Diretora artística do Menos 1 Invisível. Ao longo dos anos organizou jams e vivências de C.I. que interagem com o meio ambiente.
Cléia Plácido lives in Brazil. She is a dance black artist, improvisation researcher, teacher, BMM (body mind movement) somatic movement educator and now working on a masters in Arts at Unesp (Sao Paulo State University). She is also the artistic director of Menos 1 Invisível collective. Through the years she has organized C.I. jams and interactive experiences with the environment. (Translated by Bel Tornaghi and Pedro Penuela.)
Heike Kuhlmann, dancer, choreographer, RSDME, Body-Mind Centering®-SME, MA Choreography, Diploma IBMT, part of the Global Water Dances Performance collective Berlin. Facilitator education training programme of the Somatische Akademie Berlin/ cultural education. Being alive is being in cha(n/r)ge, moving and acting for social and for climate change which are inseparably connected. heikekuhlmann.net
Erik Mägi is a CI practitioner and occasionally also a teacher and organizer, especially on inclusion of children and broad issues of justice at the Radical Contact events. He has engaged in climate issues through university networks, emotional aspects of activism, and legal measures. Currently he works for the Swedish Green Party.
Bel Tornaghi – born in BraSil, citizen of Earth, B has experienced culture in North America, Latin America, and Europe. Working with Translation & Interpreting (Portuguese, English, and Spanish primarily, though we can also communicate in Italian and French). Dancing on land & water since childhood, everything feeds back into its Eco-Somatic Research & Practice; always curious about how movement/dance can help us reconnect with many other ways of thinking & perceiving, allowing our human experience to find and create bridges within the many languages of nature. Nature nurtures. Nurture nature.
Bel Tornaghi – vem usufruindo do privilégio de experiências de vida nas culturas da América do Norte, América Latina, e Europa, e trabalhando com Tradução & Interpretação (Português, Inglês, e Espanhol proeficiêntes e capacidade de comunicação também em Italiano e Francês). Dançando n’água e na terra desde pequena, tudo se condensa em pesquisa & Prática Eco-Social-Somática; sempre com curiosidade sobre como movimento/dança pode ajudar a gente a reconectar com múltiplas outras maneiras de pensar & perceber, permitindo que a nossa experiência humana encontre caminhos e crie pontes entre as muitas linguagens da natureza. Natureza nutre. Nutra a natureza.
Pedro Penuela is a dancer based in the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He’s also a Psychologist and PhD in Performing Arts, having investigated the work of Steve Paxton and other two dance artists (Kazuo Ohno and Pina Bausch), under a philosophical approach regarding the theme of presence.
Transitioning Towards Connections – How to engage with the practice of touch during and after the pandemic
Penny Chivas, Kaisa Kukkonen, Adriana Pegorer, Scotland, Finland, UK/Italy
Panel Discussion, English
Keywords: Pandemic, Touch
Room A: 4:00pm – 4:55pm
Starting with some themes and questions percolating in their practices, Kaisa, Adriana and Penny will discuss skills, strategies and conversations we could be engaging with now in relation to the changing perceptions of touch and proximity.
Penny Chivas is a Glasgow based dance artist with interests in improvisation, activism and performance. She is currently on the MEd programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Kaisa Kukkonen is a dance maker, teacher, producer. Currently she studies at MA CoDE program at HfMDK in Frankfurt and writes her master thesis about Power and Touch in teaching. She studied Movement and Performance Research at North Carelia College Outokumpu. She started to practice CI in 2005 and is a total touch nerd.
Adriana Pegorer [she/her] (Italy/UK). I first met CI -and movement in general- in 1995 via Jacky Adkins at Morley College, London. That same year I also started Tango Argentino, and began mixing the two in what is now generally called Contact Tango. I am passionate about Ideokinesis, interested in intersectionality, and my research broadly revolves around gender and sex dynamics in socio-cultural contexts. During the pandemic, I continued to work in outdoor farmers’ markets, volunteered at a local allotment and recovered from surgery. I also carried on with my studies for an MA in Dance Anthropology at Roehampton University. I am fortunate to have lived through the various lockdowns with my wife.
Reconnecting to memories of West-African traditions of improvisation
James Not’in, Busayo Olowu, Jakob Maché, Nigeria, Portugal
Lecture, English
Keywords: Equity, Queer, Tradition
Room C: 4:00pm – 4:55pm
A joint lecture presenting our collective effort to create temporary spaces in Nigeria in which different traditions of movement and improvisation may meet.
James Not’in is a poet and dance improvisation artist based in Ìbàdàn and is in the process of becoming a devotee Ye.moja (‘mother of all fish’), an òrìs. à known in Brasilian and Cuban diaspora of as the mother of the sea. James is part of Tantdile Xperimenta Lab who recently were awarded with the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development for an art project centering on environmental polution and climate change.
Busayo Olowu is a member of QDance, Qudus Onikeku’s company, who has been touring with various production through major dance venues all across Europe such as Centre Pompidou and others. He is founding member of Illuminate Theatre in Bariga. Furthermore, he collaborated with Onye Ozuzu and Sebastian Mathias. He came in touch with contact improvisation in some workshops in Lagos and at the weekly jam in Bremen. He is also the organiser of the first contact improvisation jam in Lagos, Nigeria. He was a long term member of of Segun Adéfilá’s Crown Troupe of Africa.
Jakob Maché is a multi-disciplinary researcher whose major influences in the movement world are Amos Hetz, Nancy Stark Smith, Adalisa Menghini, Jörg Hassmann, Sara Shelton Mann. He currently lives and teaches language related topics in Lisbon. He spent four years in Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria and was invited to teach CI at various festivals in Togo, Nigeria and Benin.
Improvising within the field of settler colonialism on Indigenous land
Katelyn Stiles, Kevin O’Connor, Margit Galanter, USA
Panel Discussion, English
Keywords: (De)colonization, Land acknowledgements, Relationality
Room A: 8:00pm – 9:00pm
CI as its starting place thinks with relations. Considering this, how does each of us improvise within the field of settler colonialism on Indigenous land? Following Tuck and Yang’s assertion, “decolonizing is not a metaphor,” how might contact improvisers attend to the particular grooves of the land they practice on?
Katelyn Stiles is Tlingít Kiks.ádi Clan of Sitka, Alaska and a member of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. She grew up in Los Osos, Ca on Chumash land and is also of Norwegian/English/French settler descent. She lived in Berlin for several years filming and dancing in the CI community. She is a filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, improvisor, and currently a PhD student. www.katelynstiles.com
Kevin O’Connor, of Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) and Sicilian descent, is a multidisciplinary artist working as a choreographer and dance improvisor. He is involved in a decade-long artistic collective exploring de-colonizing performances, storytelling and community memory making within polluted watersheds in Ontario, Turtle Island. He is currently part of Circus Zero’s creative process called TRY. www.ecologicalbodying.com
Margit Galanter is a dance poet, educator, and cultural instigator living on Huichin (Berkeley, CA). Shx founded the vivid grove — a live art school for moving, learning, creative evolution, and collective liberatory practices. Margit is currently a doctoral student at UC Davis and former Co-Director of Earthdance. www.vividgrove.org.
Using Discoveries from Online Dancing to Contribute to the Future of Contact Improvisation
Bebe Miller, Cecilia Fontanesi, Funda Gul, Nancy Hughes, Zach Pine, USA
Panel Discussion, English
Keywords: Pandemic, Online, Equity, Consent, New Forms
Room B: 8:00pm – 9:25pm
Our interactive panel discussion will explore insights and discoveries from online dancing. This information will expand and deepen the form of CI, and can also be used to help make CI practices more virtuous– especially by making spaces safer, more inclusive, and more connected to daily life and global concerns.
Bebe Miller, Artistic Director of Bebe Miller Company, organized Solo/Duo Dancing Project, a series of online workshops for improvised choreographies, with several iterations this fall and winter, delving into the rhythm of how we notice change, organize our time in space, and track our strategies of connection.
Cecilia Fontanesi and Funda Gul have worked together to host over 50 online CI jams. Before the pandemic, both of them taught CI and facilitated jams in New York City. Cecilia is also using video- conferencing tools to reach people living with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s through movement, dance, and theatre. Funda has also facilitated in collaboration with Cross Move Lab hosted by Guanglei Hui.
Nancy Hughes co-founded the Buffalo (New York) CI Jam, has taught CI classes and labs for years, co- coordinated the Global Underscore for 8 years, and recently taught CI as an adjunct professor at Brockport College. During the pandemic she has been hosting an online Mission Improvable weekly online CI practice and conversation.
Zach Pine has taught CI weekly since 2013, co-organized a weekly Underscore, and hosted a weekly jam in the San Francisco Bay Area for 10 years. At the start of the pandemic, he convened a series of online lab sessions for CI teachers, facilitators, and hosts to help discover the opportunities in CI-inspired online dancing, and since then has organized weekly online CI- Inspired Score & Jam sessions.
You are invited to Mission Improvable before the Panel. Join at any time.
Creative connectivity through online CI dance exercises and open improvisation.
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMoc-itrTMsGNwcL7iDaEoZkEZ1ZsnlQ2ya
Friday EDT
Dance 6-7:15 pm EDT
Class Talk 7:15-7:30 pm EDT
Community discussion 7:30-7:45 pm EDT
Exploring CI Through Micro-Phenomenology
Esteban Fredin Ortiz, Mexico
Movement, Spanish with English translation
Keywords: Cognitive science, Online
Room C: 8:00pm – 8:55pm
Through this workshop I seek to introduce the micro-phenomenological interview as a method for exploring the rich gamut of experiences CI offers. By bracketing background knowledge and focusing on how an experience presents itself, we can access fine grained processes that, otherwise, can easily go unnoticed.
Esteban Fredin Ortiz is a creative studies professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. His research applies concepts and tools from cognitive sciences to the study of contact improvisation. He is also a dancer at the company Pájaro Arte Escénico, and has organized the Global Underscore site in Monterrey in 2019 and 2020.
NSS Research as Infinite Game
Sarah Young and Patrick Crowley, USA
Movement, English
Room A: 9:00pm – 9:55pm
Starting with Nancy Stark Smith’s concept of being “always in”, we will explore CI as an infinite game through elements from States of Grace, the Underscore, and other teachings of Nancy. We will stretch our improvisational practices, articulate strategies, fail successfully, and find endless play.
Sarah Young (Northampton, MA) has collaborated with and performed works by dance makers Nancy Stark Smith, David Dorfman, Jill Sigman, Hilary Easton, Stephan Koplowitz, and the Treehouse Shakers. She had her first Underscore Talk-Through with Nancy in 2011. Since then, she participated in Glimpse 2, the January Workshop, and the Northampton Underscore +/- group. She currently co-coordinates the Global Underscore. She served as the Executive Director of Earthdance from 2013-18. She became a Feldenkrais practitioner in 2015 under the direction of David Zemach-Bersin, NYC. She is an Alum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, BFA 2003, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Morocco 2008-10, and mother of two-year-old Calder Savage.
Patrick Crowley has been studying Contact Improvisation since 1984 and the Underscore since 1990. He trained extensively with Nancy Stark Smith and other longtime teachers of CI. He teaches Democracy of the Body as a concept for increasing perception, inclusion, consent, and equality internally, in space, and with others.
A Call for CI Citizens
Michele Beaulieux, USA
Lecture, English
Keywords: Safer brave spaces, community approaches
Room C: 9:00pm – 9:55pm
We’ll move through times we felt safe and brave in jams. We’ll explore how active jam citizens and community accountability lay the foundation for safer brave spaces. We’ll look at the jam guidelines, community practices, group governance, and harm response processes that undergird safer brave spaces.
Michele Beaulieux (she/her) is an advocate for safer brave space, a liturgical dancer, marketing consultant, and identical twin. Her dance writing has been published in Contact Quarterly, CQ Contact Improvisation Newsletter, and the Sacred Dance Guild Journal. She lives in Chicago and blogs at reservoirofhope.blog.
Healing Trauma in the Body as it Relates to Consent in CI (Video and Workshop Experience)
Rythea Lee, USA
Lecture, English
Keywords: Trauma, Consent, Healing
Room B: 9:30pm – 10:55pm
Come view Rythea’s 42 minute video presentation on the “fawning” response, dissociation, trauma education, and finding joyful regulation, as applied to consent on the dance floor. This workshop/presentation invites the discovery and understanding of how trauma defense responses can influence our choices, our boundaries, our ability to speak up, our clarity, our general embodiment, and so much more. You do not have to identify as a trauma survivor to benefit from this info/work/share. Trigger warning: Some non-graphic mention of sexual assault and trauma
Rythea Lee is a long time CI community member, a professional performance artist, an author, singer/songwriter, and passionate creative junkie of many disciplines. She has dedicated her life to helping people heal childhood trauma through her therapy practice, her teaching and training programs, and online show called Advice from a Loving Bitch. More at Rythea.com
Questioning CI
Keith Hennessy and Taja Will, USA
Facilitated Conversation, English
Keywords: Critical race, Queer-feminism, Embodiment
Room A: 10:00pm – 10:55pm
Keith and Taja will host a conversation inspired by critical race and queer feminist perspectives. How does CI reinforce white and hetero norms? How does CI create openings for new practices where these norms are dismantled? What can we un/learn in BIPOC-only or white-only spaces? How can we support more liberated spaces for embodied awareness, improvised dancing, mutual care, and political engagement?
Keith Hennessey, MFA, PhD, makes dances, performances, texts, rituals and relationships. Born in Canada, living in San Francisco since 1982, and touring extensively, Keith started dancing CI in Montréal in 1979. He’s still at it, critically, playfully. Prioritizing collaboration, critique, and play, Keith instigates embodied experiences that respond to political movement.
Taja Will (Taja/they) is a queer, Latinx, non-binary, disabled femme agitator. Working through power and love, they create rituals, choreography, constellations of shared experiences, where melanin is sacred, and the solar system meets bone marrow. Will is a choreographer, educator, current Jerome Hill Fellow, an improviser, a Healing Justice practitioner, and equity consultant based in ancestral Dakota and Anishinaabe land.
CI with greater freedom from the form: a seed of embodied experiences from Japanese/Asian bodies
Chico Katsube, Shoko Kashima, Ryuta Iwashita, Japan, Japan/USA
Conversation and Movement, English and Japanese with English Translation
Room C: 10:00pm – 10:55pm
１. Offline Remote CI Jam “A contact improvisation dance in which you can dance together with us without going over the Internet, even if we are not in the same space. You can dance from a distance as sending your feeling towards us, which encourages us to be conscious of each other and to believe that we are dancing together and connected.”
２. Languages as containers of bodies “If you could sense natural elements from intonation, pronunciation and musicality of different languages, what would they be? We feel textures in Japanese language relate to some earth and/or rock elements, and those of Thai language relate to some strong water element. Within those elemental containers, we seem to create different tones as if the language is the membrane of a body and there is tonality of the content inside the membrane. How much does a language as a cultural path inform textures of our movement?”
３. Gravity in cultural bodies “Considering Butoh, Noh and other performing arts in Japan, our bodies sense the gravity pulling towards the Earth in a much greater manner than performing arts in the West, such as ballet which shows bodies ascending to ‘the heaven’. What shifts in directionality when the center of the gravity becomes higher or lower?”
Ryuta Iwashita (they/them) is a Japanese queer movement artist, educator, visual artist and a creator of an embodied self-actualization practice called “SOTAI” (https://gofund.me/f31223d0). Their artistic lexicon derives from their lived experience of intersectionality as an immigrant who has lived their fluid life between their home country, Japan and their current home, New Orleans. Their current interest is to love their Asian face (12:05pm, April 7, 2021).
Shoko Kashima is Dance artist, mainly forcus on Contact improvisation, improvisation dance. She is a photographer as well. Originally from Chiba, and moved to Kagoshima with Chico Katsube in 2012. Organizer of I-Dance Japan CI Festival. She is enjoying farming, dancing and living in the mountain.
Chico Katsube is an improvisation dancer from Osaka. In 2000, she founded Cico in Tokyo. In 2012, she moved to Kagoshima with Shoko Kashima. They started the activity with the focus on establishing an art community in the countryside. They are organising i-Dance Japane from 2013. Ryuta participated in i-Dance Japan 2019.