At CI Ground Research one year ago, my research group (“Rhodonite”) developed a score to give each other feedback, described below. With CI Ground Research starting again today, I thought some attendees (and the CI world generally) might find useful the…
Category: exercises & tips
In and Out
The Earthdance New Year’s Jam starts today, one of the largest and longest contact jams in North America. It reminds me of the challenges of in and out in the contact improvisation community, particularly at multi-day jams.
Why do I sometimes come out of a contact class and feel like I don’t know what I’ve learned?
The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival ran some 25+ years in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Festival would offer something like 25 different classes over five days around the Fourth of July holiday, along with a ton of jamming. When I…
You don’t have to stop moving in table top — be an underdancer
At some point in the way distant past, perhaps in the 1980s, the story goes that Nancy Stark Smith was teaching a workshop in the Bay Area. Maybe it was in San Francisco. I forget all the other details of…
How to land on your feet
One of my favorite contact improvisation tips came from a class taught by Gretchen Spiro. She just slipped it in, and didn’t emphasize it a lot, but I wrote it down and remembered it. It was simply this, although she…
How to get better? and 6 challenges for intermediate dancers
When you first start dancing contact improvisation, improvement isn’t exactly straightforward, but the feedback is pretty clear. When you stumble, or fall, or can’t complete a movement, you know it. You think, “Hm, that felt awkward. I do that better.”…