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
 

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.

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These will culminate in proposition of the three teachers and in dismantling our co-living structures. How do we eat together, how do we rest, where do you find safety and what else do you need or want? Breaking normative behaviours, all are invited to play and propose how we share, how we make visible and tangible what concerns us individually and collectively. 

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​Asaf says:

Exploring co-precarity through improvisation, using movement and somatic awareness to engage with the interdependence and vulnerability inherent in our collective existence. Drawing from the writings of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Steve Paxton, to investigate how precariousness—often framed as instability or weakness—can instead become a generative force for connection and transformation. Precarity not as a problem to be solved but as the very ground of improvisational world-making. Through guided exercises inspired by contact improvisation and embodied inquiry, we will experience how improvisation can serve as a practice of co-precarity: an attunement to the ways we are always already vulnerable to and shaped by each other. 

Structured around movement scores that cultivate sensitivity to gravity, support, and disorientation, the workshop invites us to relinquish control, lean into uncertainty, and experience the ethics of mutual reliance. By engaging in collective falling, shifting weight, and destabilizing normative concepts of autonomy, we will reflect on how improvisation can train our capacity to respond to crisis—not by seeking stability, but by embracing adaptability, responsiveness, and co-creation. 

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Harriet says:​

I am drawn to the improvisational space - where time dissolves, and the familiar contours of togetherness shift. The socialised body can fall and the jam, in its unexpectedness, can hold a pure, silly holiness - vital for our return to somatic-centred being. Us – sharing a commitment to the practice, a scent of form; the fleeting clarity of contact improvisation.

I believe CI’s deliverance; its lessons can expand far beyond the dance floor and yet we must start and return there - always. And so, we will dance, lab, listen and find places to teeter on edges, attune to weight - poised for the unexpected from every angle. Testing our agility, resilience, absorption, and rebound, our readiness for the unknown.

What if we welcome every layer of ourselves—physical, psychic, spiritual, martial, the being, the doing, the creator, the warrior, the child, the soft stuff and the bones too. Attuned listening -this is what we are finding - yet it will always take us elsewhere. So, collectively we will play with trust, belief, and acceptance; a radiating practice, perhaps compositional, maybe just human?

Articulation of choice within our own body, discerning how much effort to use as well as within the collective, playing with precarity.

I think we will have fun.