Workshop Descriptions
Boiler Plate
These workshops are a dive into the fabric of touch that is key to our relational practices in the movement of Contact Improvisation – and for many of us, in the living of life itself. I cannot teach all of this material but you are free to request specifics. Any workshop below will be steeped in somatic communication, this adventure into our movement life begins within ourselves, but moves outwardly, to where selfhood refuses to be stable, set and limiting. Instead, its instability is key to its creativity, the play that appears when our relational communication is fluid, movement scores throughout the weekend will make this connection. In these workshops we will form and reform what we know as touch, exploring how this touch translates into the flow of movement. We increase the strength of our moving together with the human and the more than human worlds we also are.
Creative, thoughtful, heart based, skill based, our learning will be anchored in the core principles of Contact Improvisation, such as: how to move weight like water – actions of cascading. The details of touching within weight exchange. The rising and hanging of the body – each mode significant to communication. How attention lives in the very small. Extending to form surfaces that arc. Learning to trust the physicality of our extended intelligence that underlies reflexive action. The availability of many forms of temporal engagement. Our movement practices will include lots of dancing both as skills building and exploration, although, in many cases these will be the same thing.
States of Tonality:
A Dialogue of Presence and Physics in Contact Improvisation
A focus on physical tonality in Contact Improvisation forms the meeting ground for this workshop which will detail how embodied states govern dancers’ skills and capacities. While the dynamics of tone shape and structure our every move, they also determine the levels of communication between bodies in motion. We can say that our dances are dialogically determined by the meeting of our tones. Tone shapes our presence, and is coextensive with our physical attention, our curiosity, and our movement skills, especially where weight is concerned.
This creates a daring coalescence of gutsy playfulness and musicality coupled with somatic depth and pleasure
The Art of Being Ready:
Surprise, Communication, Co-Creation, and Emergence
Relational Intelligence in CI:
Embodied CoCreative Practices
Physical Dynamics of Flexible Selves:
Contact improvisation at the edge
Somatic Communication:
Relational Intelligence in Contact Improvisation
Moving Well Together
Embodied Communication in Contact Improvisation
This workshop will be an immersion in practices that support physical readiness to engage in the unknown – because we are always more than one. Our co-created dances release dependence on practiced pathways, are built on the physicality of attention that include our partner’s attention, rely on movement principles of felt physics, have organizational integrity, and embody care. Participants MUST be intermediate-advanced dancers in Contact Improvisation.
This workshop engages dancers in emergent events of co-creation and an understanding of how our temporal abilities influence our communication and the quality of our dances. Our meetings in co-creation produce relations of presence. Presence is how the spirit of the dance arises to form that third being – the dance itself. The emergent dance arises through our commitment to our relations. We seek dances that unleash the wilds of possibility which reveals more in every moment than we can imagine alone.
“All Intelligence is Collective Intelligence” - Michael Levin
This workshop is a deep dive into those relational practices inherent in dancing contact improvisation that build a foundation for co-creativity, individual and collective trust, and ultimately, emergent phenomenon. Relational intelligence is part of the meeting of dance partners when we experience ongoing surprise and the rise of actions greater than any single being can conceive. To understand the fundamentals of our co-creative meetings we study the body that knows, communicates, and inquires through all levels of touch. Embodied attention shapes our meetings and awakens communication. It moves within bodyminds, faster than body language. While working on the physicality of moving well and moving well together, we will train those embodiments that are always also in consideration of our partner’s well-being – and our ability to know so. Through training specific practices, working through scores, showings, discussions, and other investigative modes, we delve into topics that make physical the ethics of care, modalities of difference, decolonizing our embodiments and our relational expectations, and reWilding our moving presence. Creative, thoughtful, heart based, skill based, our learning will be anchored in the core principles of Contact Improvisation. From the concrete to the sublime, we will stretch the reach of our dance until it lives within our every moment.
This workshop will work with states of embodiment that lead us into the dynamic movement spaces of physical action realized through attentional flexibility in motion. Contact Improvisation is a dance form that remains on a cutting edge, not only in terms of the actional relationships that appear continually out of a crazy physics of motion played like spatial violins in which the bow and the strings inseparably make up new musical sound possibilities, but also by the mind bending communication of beings who know themselves to be more than merely one, neither merely a bow or a set of strings, but always both … and. These words support ideas that we will come to recognize as opening our dancing relationships into new theoretical spheres, that, because we dance, become embodied actualities that we live. Practice and theory live within our every meeting and we continually exceed the limits of cultural domination, isolation and separation through actions that speak to a world we choose, not one we are bound to. With imaginations unleashed, attentional discipline and physical preparation, we will land in an immense playground that rewrites our ideas of the future self.
This is a two-day dive into the fabric of touch that is key to our relational practices in the movement of Contact Improvisation – and for many of us, in the living of life itself. Steeped in somatic communication, this adventure into our movement life begins within ourselves, but moves outwardly, to where selfhood refuses to be stable, set and limiting. Instead, its instability is key to its creativity, the play that appears when our relational communication is fluid, Movement scores throughout the weekend will make this connection. In this workshop we will form and reform what we know as touch, exploring how this touch translates into the flow of movement. We increase the strength of our moving together with the human and the more than human worlds we also are. Creative, thoughtful, heart based, skill based, our learning will be anchored in the core principles of Contact Improvisation, such as: how to move weight like water – actions of cascading. The details of touching within weight exchange. The rising and hanging of the body – each mode significant to communication. How attention lives in the very small. Extending to form surfaces that arc. Learning to trust the physicality of our extended intelligence. Movement practices include lots of dancing both as skills building and exploration. Although, in many cases these will be the same thing.
We seek emergent actions that require more than one … the elegance of collective agreement that works on such a fine scale that negotiation is invisible. Moving well, together, takes us beyond ourselves in ways that empower our deepest inner knowing of belonging. We find our joy. Where there is somatic communication, we are stronger, more playful and far more versatile and creative. Let’s do this!
This workshop trains dancers to recognize and understand the influence of their physical embodiment on their communicative capacities in Contact Improvisation. Quality communication requires listening, but what is the body that listens? What does non-verbal listening mean when you are moving together with someone? If there is listening, what is speaking? How does that happen? Our time practices, attention, and the orientation of our movement skills influence what we share across and within one another’s body. In this workshop, movement scores will offer us an opportunity to train while engaged in making dances. Discussions will deepen our experiential clarity and understanding, and skills practices offer us an opportunity for our physical potentials to grow. This workshop is for dancers beyond the beginning skill level in Contact Improvisation.
Emergent Practices: CI unfolds the Art of Ensemble
Until you have skills and the ability to act, possibilities have no meaning and are rarely even considered. With skill you have power, but not necessarily the intricate levels of care. With care creativity can be abundant, but what is realized by the imagination and how does it become art? Everything is relational, but when this is recognized, tasted, and skillful, two or more become a single organism that is always also a multiplicity acting beyond its individual limitations. This being is an entangled ecology in which communication can become communion and we open to the transcendent potentials of emergent phenomenon. There are so many reasons to dance, especially those found in these four general categories of mindfulness. Beginning in Contact Improvisation on the weekend, we will develop our work to the level and values of ensemble dancing. Please come ready to grow, for your dance to expand, and for your world to rock.
Technical, Ethical, Creative, and Relational: Transcendent Practices
Contact Improvisation finds Ensemble Dancing
This workshop is for Contact Improvisation dancers who wish to expand their improvisation skills into ensemble practices, extending their ability to engage in complex creative relations.
It is for dancers who want to embrace art-making as a co-creative practice. In this work we will study the physicality of attention that begins with tactile flesh communication and becomes spatial touch. Our time practices begin with the immediacy of presence and unfold into durational agreements with our dancing partners that allow all ensemble members to engage in art-making. Score structures unfold within the movement as narrations, not as stories so much as events that define states of being and world views. We will study how we communicate the conditions of events, emergent internal scores, future potentials, and creative anchors that organize our agreements. We will consider how the quality of our briefest relations build trust and see that they produce emergent phenomena so that amazing things happen. Critical to all is when to join and when to let go. Contact skills will be our base of practice and ensemble art making our goal. We will conclude this 4 day event with an informal showing.
Contact Improvisation meets Ensemble:
Somatic Communication within CoCreative Practices
We meet this weekend to unfold a body of material that I hold close to my heart. Coming from Contact Improvisation, our work will move us into Ensemble Practices, giving rise to dances that we could locate neither in Contact Improvisation solely, nor in Western based Dance Ensemble Improvisations. To arrive in this material, I worked very hard for many years attempting to understand how the embodied states that are necessary to do Contact Improvisation safely, care-fully, and yet with wild physical play could come together with the huge physical movement range that western dance forms embrace. This meant bringing the functional orientation that is necessary in CI together with the gestural intricacies of dance improvisation, inner spaces with outer spaces. It meant organizing beyond the individual self and so very much more. Understanding our dance relations from their somatic bases brings us a tremendous amount of freedom and relational intelligence. I am excited to be sharing this work with you.
Somatic Communication:
Contact Improvisation for the 21st Century
We meet this weekend to unfold a body of material that I hold close to my heart. Coming from Contact Improvisation, our work will move us into Ensemble Practices, giving rise to dances that we could locate neither in Contact Improvisation solely, nor in Western based Dance Ensemble Improvisations. To arrive in this material, I worked very hard for many years attempting to understand how the embodied states that are necessary to do Contact Improvisation safely, care-fully, and yet with wild physical play could come together with the huge physical movement range that western dance forms embrace. This meant bringing the functional orientation that is necessary in CI together with the gestural intricacies of dance improvisation, inner spaces with outer spaces. It meant organizing beyond the individual self and so very much more. Understanding our dance relations from their somatic bases brings us a tremendous amount of freedom and relational intelligence. I am excited to be sharing this work with you.
“Nita is a cross between a scientist and a Shaman”
Davide Casiraghi