Welcome to the CI36 Training Intensive!
If you are registered for the Training Intensive, you will indicate your ranked class preferences (your choices for both morning and afternoon periods) on-line prior to your arrival (all TI registrants will receive an email with detailed instructions for this) or when you check-in at Juniata College. Remember that check-in is from 2-5:30pm on June 8! Final class lists will be posted before breakfast on Monday morning, June 9.
All classes are mixed level and assume some experience with Contact Improvisation. A few classes advise more than a beginning level experience with CI but most will be workable for all levels.
For your safety and the safety of those around you, please take care to work within your range, dancing with sensitivity to your own body and your partner, and remaining attentive to the space around you. Ask for help when needed.
Enjoy!
CI36 Hub
THE SCHEDULE:
MORNING CLASSES (11am–1:30pm)
Andrew Harwood
Nita Little
Nancy Stark Smith
Benno Voorham
AFTERNOON CLASSES (3:45–6:15pm)
Ray Chung
Martin Hughes
Nina Martin
Mary Prestidge
CLASS DESCRIPTIONS:
Andrew Harwood (Montreal, Canada)Being Ready
Because of the sophisticated nature of this workshop, this intensive is for those with a solid grasp of Contact fundamentals. What does it mean to be ready to dance at any time, with anyone, anywhere? There are no set formulas or specific manners to achieving this state of readiness. There is, however, an attitude and a state of body-mind that can be cultivated which can help bring us to that place of total alertness. Being completely attentive and always prepared on all levels will enable us to go beyond thinking our way through the dance and help us be attuned to what is actually taking place. This full presence also allows us to be freed of the mental chatter, planning ahead, and judgment, which so often overrides the body's ability to make appropriate split-second choices. In this way the improvisations can be entirely physical, playful, heartfelt, surprising and enjoyable. Explored themes will include: tumbling, flying, use of variable speeds, use of direct action and initiation, resistance, disappearance, subtle and surprising ways of moving weight, flowing through unfamiliar circumstances, extending our personal range of movement, and integrating our imagination and our heart.
Nita Little (California, USA)The Physicality of the Mind in Contact Improvisation
The mind is boundless, the body is bound; bringing them into one experience increases the potential of both. This workshop defines levels of physical attention and engages states of experience that support creative freedom in the relationships of CI. Through enabling a light touch, redefining the tactile realm, and developing new skill sets such as "assembling and disassembling," we can enhance rapport within ourselves, with one another and the earth we play on. A working knowledge of CI is assumed for this class.
Nancy Stark Smith (Massachusetts, USA)Contact: Deepening the Form
Returning to the simple sensation-al premises of Contact Improvisation in order to stimulate more depth and range in our dancing. We’ll focus on several specific forces and principles basic to CI and reintegrate them into our ongoing practice. Going for the mystery of the phenomenon through the clarity and simplicity of the form.
Benno Voorham (Sweden; The Netherlands)Improvising Contact Improvisation
In my teaching and performance work I have always been fascinated by the creative and imaginative potential of Contact Improvisation. Being in its essence a form that enters the realm of human dialogue and interaction, Contact Improvisation is for me a body of work in which we can play with our imagination in a very playful way.
The beginning of each class will be directed towards developing an awakened and listening body. From there we will create dances in which we will focus on clarifying and fine-tuning our intentions. We will use different improvisational scores in which Contact Improvisation will be our common ground.
Ray Chung (California, USA)Dyads, Triads and More: Contact Beyond Duets
Using Contact Improvisation as a foundation, we will create ways to improvise dancing in duo, trio, and ensemble. We will survey CI essentials, with a focus on efficient use of technical skills, to develop a facility for, and availability to, changing physical states and levels of touch and weight. We will work with strategies for moving "out of the box" of the duet form, expanding our range of choices of how to include more than one other dancer while moving seamlessly into and out of contact. Come prepared for focused playfulness within committed practice.
Martin Hughes (Melbourne, Australia)The Flying Jigsaw
Dancing Contact Improvisation is so much like a moving three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle -- where you are one of the pieces! This is tough enough when you are staying on the ground but then you try to add "flying"! Of course, the most sublime flying comes out of the flow of the dance, as a natural extension of what you were doing before (and will continue to do after). But there are some simple techniques and practices that can help.
In these classes we'll be exploring the moving jigsaw of Contact: how to "read" the momentum and trajectory of your own movement as well as that of the bodies you are dancing with; making sense of the information you are receiving and getting more articulate about the "messages" you are sending. We will also be trying out all the things I've learnt to help find your way up and down with safety, as well as all the things I know about being the "support," to take that extra weight (or not!).
These classes are open to all levels of experience but may not be appropriate for those who are just beginning their exploration of Contact.
Nina Martin (Texas, USA)Contact Improvisation – From a Body/Brain Approach
Every session will deeply investigate the Contact form as a newly creative practice. We will work on how to keep original, individual impulses flowing while dancing in "harmony" with another. We find new ways of dancing with a partner by examining different kinetic and neurological states in the contact flow through ReWire: Dancing States which is a system that explores motivating movement from a Kinetic State and from a Neurological State. The first trains us to recognize the body’s desire to move and the second state trains us to work from the brain in a pure way that bypasses "Mind" as much as possible. The dancing that ensues from these avenues of investigation is truly authentic and offers a fresh vocabulary for your Contact dancing by breaking habitual patterns that foreclose on other opportunities for expression. Concepts from Articulating the Solo Body and Ensemble Thinking will also inform this series of classes.
Mary Prestidge (Liverpool, UK)Doing More with Less
For these classes at CI36, I would like to focus on developing awareness of the pathways of force and counter force as we move in contact. I am interested to find the mental application and physical ways to do less with muscular effort and more with energetic and "Ki" activity.