About Contact Improvisation

Try Simple Contact Improvisation for me does not start with physical contact with another person, but starts long before, with breathing and full contact/awareness of yourself, body, mind, and emotions, recognizing your needs and fears, warming up, letting go, awakening the centers, energy and the flow, then the movement, improvisation, and dance appear. I’m interested in the intensity of presence, in real involvement in what we can create right now. For me, only now is communication possible with another person and the group through contact improvisation. By activating our ability to listen and read the movement of the other, coming in and out of contact, giving clear support and creative impulses, we can develop our own dance within the shared dance. We will work on different contact improvisation tools and use them in dance.

“Before my first inhalation and after my last exhalation, everything already exists. I only have to be. To move from point A to point B with acceptance, understanding, and sincerity. And sometimes it happens that dance is happening through us.”

Forget Your Assumptions Contact Improvisation was created to be done by anyone, regardless of dance experience. While dancers have certain advantages, like familiarity with movement and partnering, they also face specific challenges. Some students may be familiar with partnering techniques, because they know where and how to touch other people, and the ways they lift them are very composed. Other people may have improvised before, but not with partners. Dancers also may have learned that men should lift women, that bigger people should lift smaller people, or that one person should be in charge. None of those things are considered a given in Contact Improvisation. Rather than thinking of picking a partner up and putting him down, dancers should focus on the connection from the floor, to their core, to their partner.

Know When to Say “No” Part of Contact Improvisation is learning to say “yes” to your own ideas and your partner’s. It may seem counterintuitive, but one trick that can help you feel more comfortable in saying “yes” is knowing when and how to say “no”. Touch has so many social and physical meanings. It’s important to acknowledge when you feel uncomfortable, and then to make the choice to either be interested in contact or to say “I want to stop”. Being able to say “no” is really fundamental for safety, being able to take a moment to pause an