Visibly Unstable

C o n t a c t I m p r o v i s a t i o n I n t e n s i v e

Kirstie says:

Since young adulthood, my entire life has been centered around the practice of
dance improvisation. As an artist who has engaged in rigorous practice for over forty years, I
make the case that artistic practice helps to develop resilience in the face of catastrophe.
From my own experience, it seems that embodied intelligence—the heart of
improvisation—is advantageous in the momentous challenge of shifting our consciousness
from a human-centric perspective to a lived understanding that we are an integral part of
the whole of life. I share this perspective through my teaching and performing practices. My
knowledge encompasses knowledges that have been gleaned from focused attention to the
songs emanating from my own body, and that of a long line of movement-explorers, all of
whom added their unique voices and reflections on the times we live through. An attitude
of profound respect and care for all aspects of life arises.

A time out that marries retreat with Intensive, looks at the wider dynamics and implications that CI can have and how the questions of instability and precarity that we encounter in life can be met through the lens of CI. Themes we will be working with is falling with surrender, moving with depth, dancing with relationality that addresses a wider context, collectivity and personal research. We encourage an exchange that is kindled through the collaboration between Kirstie and Laura but includes you, the participant, space, past and future - as being an agentic and meaningful part of the whole that too shares questions, findings and invitations to meet each other and life in new ways.

To make my case, I share how my own art practice that has shaped me—from my firstimpactful encounter with dance improvisation to present turbulent times. This is notintended as some kind of prescription, but rather as an example of how practice can be abedrock of ongoing revelation from which to keep responding to the continual challengesthat life’s unfolding presents.

Laura says:

We are always falling—through space, through time. Yet we convince ourselves otherwise, clinging to illusions of stability. What if falling, and catching ourselves or one another, became not a failure but a practice? A shared responsiveness we cultivate—physically and metaphorically—to move with fragility rather than fear it.

This intensive centres on that practice: developing collective awareness and negotiation, drawing from dances in and out of contact, conversations, and stillness. We will tune into the subtleties that shape our actions and gestures—the in-between spaces where something unnamed begins to unfold. Not linear, not fixed, but alive.

The retreat offers a parallel to how we live: how relationships can support or restrict our freedom to move and be moved; how our connection to land and sky may be deepened; how presence becomes the ground for change, not by redesigning systems, but by embodying new ways of relating—fluid, co-created, and self-aware.

Through Contact Improvisation (CI), we explore meaning-making as a bodily act—shifting focus from thought to presence, from productivity to process. Together, we’ll question how systems like language, ownership, and identity shape us, and how by sensing and sharing, we may begin to move through them differently.