🇦🇹 Contact Improvisation in Austria

Overview

Austria's Contact Improvisation scene runs through city-based communities in Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Linz and Salzburg, several of them decades old. In Graz, a Monday jam has met since 1992, sixteen years before the association that now runs it existed. Uli Schedler, one of its founding participants, oversees the Contact Improvisation programme at Jagati, a nonprofit founded in 2008 for creative dance and movement forms, which also counts Ben Croker among its teachers. The jam meets in the Tanzebene, a sprung-floor hall inside the city-run Probenhaus – Das andere Theater, where the arts collective Wild Care teaches as well, treating Contact Improvisation as its first practice. A city-wide group ties the two together. In Vienna, a long-running jam runs at WUK, a sprawling cultural centre in a former locomotive factory, co-hosted by Sarah Sea Clarke, a lead researcher at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication's Vienna CoLab. Workshops also run at Samdrubling, a movement studio kept by a Buddhist meditation community. In 2012 dance pedagogue Sabine Parzer co-founded Contact Festival Austria and led it as artistic director until 2017; it ran two editions in the city before moving to the Lower Austria countryside in its third year. In Tirol, a weekly jam meets in Innsbruck, and dancer and choreographer Tamara Maksymenko founded the Solo & CI Tirol Festival through her OFFTANZ Tirol association, holding it at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, an international artists' residency in the wooded hills above the city. Linz has its own collective for jams, classes and workshops, and saw the city's first contact festival, ELFi, in 2023. The wider Upper Austria region is home to Linda Maria Wagner, founder of the International Dance Festival at Traunsee and the EmBodyment Festival. South of Vienna, near Reichenau an der Rax in the Lower Austria countryside, Lella Heindl has organized Contact in Paradise at Seminarhaus Flackl since 2023. In Salzburg, Contactus runs a biweekly Sunday class and jam at the tanz_house studio in ARGEkultur. The city is also home to SEAD, the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, an international contemporary dance school founded in 1993 whose training includes Contact Improvisation.

Last updated August 2026