Gravity is your partner, the earth your playground, the others your support.
Contact improvisation is a movement practice which started in 1972 in New York by a group of dancers and gymnasts led by Steve Paxton. Breaking conventional structures and forms of dancing, the group experimented together while challenging notion of hierarchy, gender, and technique in dance.
Indeed rather than learning steps and having a codified technique, Contact Improvisation is a form based on physical principles. It plays with physical laws such as gravity, momentum, centrifugal forces in order to find effortlessness in dancing with a partner.
Over these course we will co-create a playful and safe space for experimentation and exploration. Starting each class in solos to enhance our body awareness, we will then integrate basic skills of Contact Improvisation with a partner in a simple and guided way. Practicing falling, rolling, sliding, floating, lifting and supporting.
We will approach other themes such as touch and no touch, following and leading, support, structures and lifts, centre and extremities, shared weight and shared balance, upside down, head to tail connection, dynamics, tonicity and momentum.
By the end of the course you should have the tools to join a contact improvisation jam and improvise with others. Open to both beginners and those who have more experience.
Here is some inspiration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRerX0a68
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y944TF9a9_s
- Prerequisites: Enjoyment and openness to movement and encounter in dance.
- Services: Dance instructor
- Equipment: Comfortable sports or dance clothes, preferably long pants.
