CI Treasure HuntAlpha

About CI Treasure Hunt

CI Treasure Hunt is a directory of contact improvisation festivals, intensives, workshops, teachers, venues and local communities worldwide. It is free to use, carries no advertising, and you do not need an account to browse it.

It is run by one person, Jan Auras, with help from organizers and dancers who send in listings and corrections.

Why it exists

I spent a vacation in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria without dancing. I looked for a jam, found nothing current, and assumed there was not much happening there. After I got home I found out that there had been a WhatsApp group the whole time, with regular jams in it, and that everyone local knew about it. Nobody had hidden anything from me. I simply had no way in.

That had happened to me before, in other cities, and I had always filed it as bad luck. This time it looked like a pattern instead.

Contact improvisation used to be findable from the outside. Jams and festivals were announced on websites, on mailing lists, and later in Facebook groups you could search for and read without joining. The contact-improvisation@yahoogroups.com list ran from 2001 until 2020 and was, for years, where European CI news went.

That information did not disappear. It moved into WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram groups, which is a better home for the people already in them: an admin can post tonight's venue change to exactly the people affected, and nobody outside the room gets a notification. It also means the entire local scene is now invisible to anyone standing outside it. Search engines cannot see a WhatsApp group. Neither can a dancer who just moved to the city, or someone visiting for two weeks.

Traveling dancers feel this first and worst. You can be in a city with an active weekly jam and a thriving community, and have no idea, because the only door is a link somebody has to hand you.

So on the winter solstice, 21 December 2025, I started a Telegram group and began collecting links.

The whole idea at that point was Telegram groups. Just a list of them, one per city, so that the next person arriving somewhere would have the door I had not had. Then WhatsApp groups, because that is what half the world's jams actually use. Then Signal, websites, mailing lists, Facebook groups, whatever a given community had chosen as its home.

Where the name comes from

Honestly, from what the work felt like. Where is the Berlin group. Is there one in Lisbon. Someone mentioned a jam in Taipei, where do you even ask. Every link took a conversation, a friend of a friend, a lucky search. It felt like a treasure hunt, so that is what I called it, half as a joke.

The other half is not a joke. A weekly jam that has quietly run for years, in a borrowed room, held together by a few people who never asked for credit, is a treasure. Most of them are invisible from outside the city they are in.

How the calendar started

I wanted an event calendar fairly early on. I did not start with one, and that was on purpose. A list of festivals is useful mostly to people already inside the scene, and the problem I had walked into was the one before that: no way in at all. So the groups came first.

The nudge to actually build it came from inside the Telegram group. In February 2026, someone asked whether they could share their festival there. Somebody wanting to post something is a better reason to build it than my own plan for it was, so that is when I started listing worldwide CI festivals and intensives.

It began with international festivals of four days and more, which are the events people plan trips around and the hardest to hear about in time. Weekend workshops of two and three days were added recently.

The website launched in an early version on 25 June 2026.

The goal is not to replace anyone's group chat. It is to give the closed door a public street address: a place where you can find a city's community, an event's dates, and the people who run it, and then go join whatever chat they actually use.

What is on it today

Right now the site lists 363 upcoming and past events across 47 countries, 97 venues, 515 teacher and organizer profiles, and 290 local communities in 68 countries. Past (and canceled) events stay online instead of being deleted, so the calendar doubles as a record of what the scene has actually been doing.

What gets listed, and what does not

The calendar takes events of two days or more: festivals, intensives, retreats, camps, trainings, and weekend workshops.

Single jams, weekly classes and one-day workshops are not listed, and that is a deliberate limit. A weekly jam changes venue, skips a holiday, moves to a summer schedule, and a directory maintained from the outside will always be a few weeks behind the truth on it. Local Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Line and Facebook groups do that job better. What the site does instead is list the group itself, so you can find your local jam by finding the people who run it. That is what the communities directory is for.

There is a second boundary worth naming. The site is built around contact improvisation, but CI does not happen in isolation: the same festivals often program dance improvisation, Body-Mind Centering and authentic movement, frequently with the same teachers. Where those appear alongside CI, they are listed and tagged as what they are.

Where the listings come from

Two ways, and both are visible on the page.

Most events are researched and entered by hand from the organizer's own public announcement: their website, their festival page, their public Facebook or Telegram post. I go through them one at a time and read each one before it goes on the site. Each listing is a summary that links back to the organizer's own page, which is where tickets, full schedules and the detail live.

AI helps with the research and the writing. It is how one person can keep a directory this size current across this many countries.

The rest are submitted by organizers directly, through the submission form or by email. Everything is read by a person before it goes live, which is why publishing is not instant.

If you are listed here and would rather not be, or something about your listing is wrong, one email fixes it: hello@citreasurehunt.com.

What it costs, and how it is paid for

Browsing is free. Submitting an event is free. Claiming your teacher profile is free. No account is needed to look at anything, there is no advertising on the site, and you are not tracked across other websites.

The running costs are small and I cover them myself: hosting, the domain, the database, some map tiles. The larger cost is time, and there is a lot of it in here.

If the site is useful to you and you want to help keep it running, there is a donation link in the footer. That is how it is funded today, and it does not buy anyone a better listing.

Whether donations carry it long term, I do not know yet. If they do not, I will have to look at other ways to cover the costs, and I will write about it on this page. Browsing and (basic) listings stay free.

Who is behind it

Dancing contact improvisation since 2014, with workshops, courses and trainings alongside Sabine Parzer, Ivan Baucia, Elske Seidel, Angela-Mara Florant, Jörg Hassmann, Nita Little, Adrian Russi, Barbara Berti, Eszter Gál, Peter Pleyer, Kira Kirsch, Mirva Mäkinen, Anjelica Doniy and Andrew Wass, among others. I have also facilitated labs and jams myself now and then, more as a facilitator than a teacher. I dance mostly in Germany, with time in Greece, Argentina, Denmark and Bali too.

I am also the person who answers hello@citreasurehunt.com, so when you write, you are not writing to a support queue.

Getting in touch

Corrections, missing events, and people telling me I have their festival's dates wrong are all welcome. The data is only as good as the people who bother to point at the broken parts.