Teachers & Classes
Nita Little
The Art of Being Ready: Surprise, Communication, Co-Creation, and Emergence
This workshop invites you to discover how readiness, presence, and non-duality are essential components in the creative practices of CI. Our practice-based workshop is concerned with cultivating states that are congruent with an ethics of care and its physical and mental capacities. Receptive, resilient, organized for any dynamic engagement, as bamboo bends with the wind yet passes through concrete, we will train to meet one another with the generosity of play and the discipline of creative practice. Juxtaposing the unknown / unknowable with the field of possibilities, we cultivate what it means to be prepared, respect for constraints, trust in our capacities, and a return to informed emptiness. Emphasizing time practices, this workshop studies the size of now – especially as it influences our relational modes: developing reflexive skills, noticing the dynamics of responsive durations and appreciating events of communion. Our training will locate practice with theory based in movement principles.
As we progress through three meetings, our orientation will turn towards emergent events of co-creation and an understanding of how our temporal abilities influence our communication and the quality of our dances. We seek dances that unleash the wilds of possibility and reveal more in every moment than we can imagine alone. Class will include discussions, scored creative practice, training exercises and small group labs.
Keith Hennessy
Dancing as Political Healing
What is the healing potential of our dancing together and how is it always and already political? Prioritizing improvisation and collaboration, we will play with the possibilities of healing, politics, and dancing together.
I welcome your curiosity and concerns. What inspires you or prevents you from dancing more freely, especially with others? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to ongoing wars, political and ecological crises, personal and collective precarity, and embodied traumas? How can dancing be activated as anti-capitalism, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure, and shared power? I will invite the prophetic ancestors of anarchism, Black feminism, and others into the studio to contextualize and renew our dancing.
Paul Singh
Chasing the Moment
In this 2-hour session, we’ll begin by identifying points of connection—how they feel, how they appear, and how they can be stretched, weighted, or dissolved. Once we understand these qualities, we’ll build a practice that teaches us to follow these points all the way through. Inspired by the idea that “the work is never done,” we’ll explore skills and patterns that help us keep leaning into chance and connection, rather than pulling away or disengaging when we approach the limits of the moment.
Moving into touch
In this 3 hour session, we will pass through all the magic that CI can offer us: warming the body for listening, connecting through skin and intention, navigating shared pathways of falling and redirecting. We’ll spend time focusing on the subtle understanding of touch and the entire scale of weight that it can provide. We’ll train exercises that send and draw bodies in space, create stillness through meeting, and allow falling through chance-taking. We will re-examine the differences between leaning vs. pushing, letting vs. doing, and checking out vs. zooming in. The goal is to provide a space that asks more of the practice that we already have at our fingertips. We will start the new year by less doing and more intuiting.
Alicia Grayson
Full Body Awareness in CI
We will cultivate full body awareness so that the instrument of our body can be ready and responsive for anything to happen as we dance. When we give time and attention our body’s innate intelligence can wake up. However, sometimes we can be asleep, frozen or numb in parts of our body which means that other parts have to work extra hard. This can create a tension or noise in the system where it is difficult to hear ourselves and for our partner’s to hear us. Full body awareness supports an ability to listen to ourselves and our partner so that we can be present for engaging in the unfolding improvisation.
Specific areas of focus will include
Solo and hands on support for core to periphery and periphery to core connections
Embodiment of the 5 fundamental actions (yield - resting in connection, push, reach, take hold and pull) in each of the 6 limbs.
Breath practices and visualizations
Modulating Tone and the Practice of Choice
Learning how to modulate tone in any part of the body at any moment from feather light to strong and powerful can open up so many possibilities in our dancing.
We will practice organizing our bodies so that the amount of weight we offer in any moment supports listening and inviting rather than expecting and demanding. When weight is given as an unconscious expectation the receiver tends to respond from a place of survival rather than creative choice. The ability to attune to and modulate weight in any given moment opens us up to co-creating in the improvisation.
Topics we will explore include:
Clarity in skeletal alignment to support ground/rebound and spacial reach.
Listening at different layers of fascia for communication about direction, weight and timing.
Organizing the body as a whole, moment to moment, so we are available for the unfolding improvisation.
Gretchen Spiro & Steven Homsher
The Listening Point
This 3-hour class will focus on the point of contact—that alive, shifting place where physical and energetic relationship begins. It’s where we listen, respond, and co-create in motion.
We’ll explore precision in the architecture of our bones, the fluid intelligence of attention, and the cohesion that arises when our mindbody is responsive and available. We will tune our bodies and our attention to be relational, active, and awake.
Our practice will center on the clarity of connection, exploring how it is shaped by presence, tone, and timing. We’ll follow the dance that unfolds when we listen deeply—to gravity, to touch, and to each other.
We will offer skills and exercises that support:
– Cultivating precision in the point of contact
– Riding and generating movement through the rolling point
– Training the body to be available for surprise and artistry
– Sensing structure and listening with our bones
– Moving from curiosity and openness, not control or expectation
Whether you are new to Contact or returning with years of practice, all are welcome in this shared research space . Come with your attention, your imagination, and your body just as it is. We’ll connect, explore, and dance a lot.
