Contact
Quarterly

Creating a Cultural Shift toward Embedded Access and Artistry

plus: an excerpt from The Way You Look (at me) Tonight Accessibility Handbook

by Claire Cunningham, Jess Curtis, and Luke Pell

The Way You Look (at me) Tonight (2016) is an international co-production by San Francisco/Berlin-based choreographer Jess Curtis and Scottish choreographer Claire Cunningham, in collaboration with UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, dramaturge Luke Pell (UK), video artist Yoann Trellu continue...

by Michele Beaulieux

A #MeToo disruption occurred at the West Coast Contact Improvisation Jam (wcci-JAM) this year. Twelve people sat in the middle of the dance floor at the Saturday evening jam and told their stories of harassment, assault, marginalization, and invisibility in continue...

A Dance of Cheongsong’s Immigrant Wives

by María Peredo Guzmán

Introduction
The music sounds Asian although it is not; the dancers have Korean citizenship although they were born somewhere else. Divided in two uneven groups, they slowly move from one gesture to another in a dense ritual attitude. continue...

A Question from CQ, and a Round of Responses

by Nancy Stark Smith, Keith Hennessy, Ann Cooper Albright, Geneviève Cron-Riger, Daniela Schwartz, Kent Alexander, Zach Arfa, Taja Will, Kathleen Rea, and mayfield brooks

"Frictions and Illuminations" by Nancy Stark Smith
CQ editors have been talking about the topic of “CI Intersections” for many years, as articles and photos pass by us issue after issue, evidencing an increasing number of CI classes continue...

by Karen Nelson

CI (embodied) interrogates its own history, a 2017 performance event previously called The History of Contact Improvisation through the Body, came to life because of an invitation, an election of a president, an evolving dance form, a roster of continue...

writings orchestrated by Anya Cloud, Karen Schaffman, and Sara Shelton Mann

Sara Shelton Mann grew up in rural Tennessee. At age 17, arts, politics, and culture collided for her under one roof at Shorter College in Georgia. “I was just a southern hick running away from the people I grew up continue...

essay, interview, and performance texts

by Nancy Wozny, Michelle Ellsworth, and Joanna Rotkin

When Michelle Ellsworth’s fingers start snapping offstage before she enters the performance space in Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome (her ode to the end of men), I feel my anxiety notch up. I sense trouble ahead, which continue...

with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Joy Mariama Smith, Sara Smith, Tara Aisha Willis; moderated by Cassie Peterson

Cassie Peterson: Why is this conversation around identity and performance important to you?

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko : I’m thinking a lot about the power of ideas and their ability to pull people together. I’m thinking about theory continue...

a dialogue between (philosopher) Romain Bigé & (dance improviser) Charlie Morrissey (and conversely)

. . . The stage as laboratory

Romain: Your recent piece, Wild Card (2015), with Katye Coe and philosopher Alva Noë, reminds me of one aspect I admire in the first performances of Contact Improvisation (CI): continue...

Addressing Gender in CI Practice and Community

by Kristin Horrigan

As a professor of Dance and Gender Studies at Marlboro College in Vermont, I have been researching the intersections of CI and gender for several years and leading workshops on the subject in the U.S. and Europe. In this self continue...

Todos Mis Muertos (All My Dead Ones)(1996) by Merián Soto

OUT-FIT: Merián Soto’s decadent defiance in "Todos Mis Muertos"
by Pedro Alejandro

by Merián Soto and Pedro Alejandro

Some dances are gifts. The directives for the dance simply reveal themselves to me. I follow unquestioningly. This was the process of Todos Mis Muertos. In searching for a practice of Day of the Dead traditions, my approach was to continue...

Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity

by Katja Kolcio

As a college professor, I have mostly taught somatic practices in the context of the American college campus. I use movement as a way for students to establish a personal sense of place, a sense of belonging in one’s own continue...

An interview with Sharon Fridman on Contact Improvisation & Choreography

by Romain Bigé

Ibiza Contact Festival 2014, August 27. Under the pine trees and the blue sky of the island off the coast of Spain, I had the pleasure of conversing with Sharon Fridman after a workshop he offered to some of the continue...

writings, INterventions, interruptions, questions

by mayfield brooks with interview by Karen Nelson

IMPROVISING WHILE BLACK is an interdisciplinary dance project and dance improvisation experiment. The seed for IWB sprouted out of brooks’s personal experience of being racially profiled when driving while black/DWB in San Francisco, California. continue...

A class by Ralph Lemon

remembered by Aretha Aoki

We wrecked the room. continue...

by Melinda Buckwalter

The Card, White on White
Forgetful Snow: three naked white women stand about on a rectangular white shag carpet in a white-walled gallery space illuminated from above by a square of white neon tubes. The audience enters into continue...

The trans-queer formalism of devynnemory/beastproductions

by devynn emory with Liza Coviello

The following is an interview by curator Liza Coviello with choreographer and performer devynn emory. The interview and video documentation of emory's dance works were exhibited at NAPOLEON gallery (Philadelphia, PA) in devynn emory's Personal Public: On Gender Variance in continue...

Steve Paxton talks about how the Stand relates to stage fright and entrainment in Contact Improvisation

edited by Karen Nelson

Steve talked on two different afternoons during the seven-day Breitenbush Jam in March 2014 in Oregon. To accommodate newcomers, the second talk became a multilayered event, with Steve interrupting a recording of his talk to make comments. Talk 1 continue...

LNelson prods HIJACK in Kristin Van Loon’s living room

Minneapolis, March 2014
Lisa Nelson: What about movement? Or: what is the material of dance? I think we’ll agree it’s movement. What part does it play in your work? I’ve read a lot of mention of your choreographic continue...

SK, Rythea Lee, and CQ

Last April, I got an email from a woman I had never met before (referred to here as “SK”), asking for advice about how to handle a particularly disturbing experience she had had at a CI festival. Simply stated, it continue...

distilled choreographic inspirations

by Eliza Larson

[click to order deck through CQ ] Create a design book—something that will inspire you.* These were the directions that inspired me to create Terpsichore’s Deck. I was in the middle of the last semester continue...

by Julia Wallace

The dancer lying on top of me suffocates my delicate lungs and crushes my precious ribs. She’s larger than me, thick and big-boned. Her dark, short hair slides between my curled fingers.
I cannot get up. I cannot roll continue...

Dances Informed by Natural Horsemanship

by JoAnna Mendl Shaw

JoAnna Mendl Shaw has been making site-specific performance works for dancers and horses for over fifteen years. During a guest artist residency at Mount Holyoke College in 1998, she produced a trilogy of works for fifty dancers and six equestrians continue...

(excerpt)

by Nancy Topf

In the pages that follow, Nancy and her student Italica begin a dialogue about the body using images of its physical structures. These images can help us deepen and clarify the way we visualize and sense our structure. We can continue...

by Melinda Buckwalter

One day, while walking down the street together after her class at Eden’s Expressway in New York City, Nancy Topf remarked to me, “You know, this work I am teaching is the original Release Technique.” I was surprised; she never continue...

Seven class descriptions proposing ongoing experiments in dancing and performing under the influence of Contact Improvisation

by Keith Hennessy

1. Improvising Contact, Queering Intimacy
Dancing with bodies while dancing with questions of improvisation, intimacy, social habits (hegemony), and liberation. Is it true that no one is free unless we’re all free? In this workshop, Queer is a perspective, not an identity; an continue...

by Susan Rethorst

There’s nothing in the world like the feeling of being in the studio, working along, and whammo! Something starts to take off, to go wowowowow, juice up. But it doesn’t happen right at the get-go, and it doesn’t happen all continue...

by Daniel Lepkoff

Author’s Note:
In June 2008 at CI36--a celebration of the 36th ­anniversary of Contact Improvisation--I sat on a Founders Panel together with Nita Little, Steve Paxton, and Nancy Stark Smith. I don’t consider myself a founder of Contact continue...

A Further Conversation with Julyen Hamilton [Excerpt]

Interview with Nancy Stark Smith, Part 2.
Dec. 22 & 27, 2009; Jan. 30, 2010

JH: I suppose I want my performances to shed light on human beings--about their concerns, their emotions, and their observations. I think it stems from the fact that I basically come from theatre, which was my introduction to the stage continue...