What’s this skin we are in? When we touch – and are ‘touched’ – what kind of intensity is created?

How we respond, or how much our physi

ology is able to respond, to sensation and proprioception, is often due to what in improvisation we call “tuning.” Is the body ready to receive? Curious? Playful? Contact Improvisation is a meeting between bodies that are dancing with the kinesthetic sense – tuning it, playing with it, and creating with it.

I often show up at jams and look around and find myself wondering where the dancing is. Sometimes I see it, but often I see more lifting and moving around one another. However, when I first began practicing CI, even though I was already a dancer practicing improvisation at the time, CI gave me a whole new world of possibilities when it came to dancing and performing improvisation, and for the last 18 years this has become an ongoing study.

Contact can be a way to deepen the art of improvisation. Contact Improvisation taught me about kinesthetic states – the ability to use kinesthesia (our sense of movement) to find different ways of dancing, and to be in a state of kinesthetic flow while dancing. That moment when you feel like your sensations are leading you, and everything in the dance begins to make sense? That’s what I’m talking about. Tension masks sensation – so working with sensation can be a release. Sensation can also free us, tune us to the previously unperceivable, keep us safe(r), and be a great source of curiosity and creativity.

In this intensive we will spend time tuning our sensation though solo dancing, turning on the sensitivity of our skin to the floor, our weight to gravity, and our breath to movement. We will then look at ways that contact with a partner can be a great creative source for movement creation, and how the meeting and working with a partner supports, provokes, and inspires dancing.