Overview
Contact Improvisation reached Czech dancers in 1983, when Karel Vaněk and Eva Černá encountered the form through Kedzie Penfield, Nita Little and the Repertory West company. Under a socialist regime that had largely cut local dance off from developments in the West, the two learned by direct practice and experiment with no one to oversee them. They built their 1991 duet Malé modré nic (Little Blue Nothing) on it, a piece that won the Czechoslovak dance critics' award for performance of the year, and began teaching the form's principles in the early 1990s. Černá went on to write the first Czech academic study of Contact Improvisation, a 1996 master's thesis at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
After the borders opened, international teachers began arriving regularly. Lenka Flory, teaching at the newly founded Duncan Centre Conservatory, brought David Zambrano, Julyen Hamilton and others to Prague through a festival that ran from 1996 to 2003, and the spring Impro Events Prague festival introduced Kirstie Simson, Lisa Nelson and Daniel Lepkoff between 2010 and 2015.
Prague holds the country's most established practice today. Druna, a studio in a vaulted hall on Trojická street, was founded by Zita Pavlištová, who has taught Contact Improvisation there for over a decade and is one of only a handful of CI teachers working in the country. She brings international teachers to Prague, runs regular jams and long jams, and holds an annual summer workshop in the Orlické Mountains. A separate weekly jam meets on Tuesday evenings at Studio K3 on Karlovo náměstí, run by the Available Collective, an art collective working across improvisation, physical theatre, dance and music. Improvisation has been taught at the Duncan Centre Conservatory since the school was founded in 1992.
Brno has its own community, with jams held in the hall of the Vesna association on Údolní street. The city is also home to Kateřina Hanzlíková, a dancer and dance-movement therapist who first encountered Contact Improvisation on an internship in Portugal in 2004 and now teaches it in Brno with an emphasis on movement patterns over technical form. She founded the Bezmezí association, which works to include people facing health and social disadvantages.
Each summer the scene gathers in the countryside for Létanec, a residential festival created in 2019 and now in its eighth edition. Jana Burianová, its founder, runs it with Nikola Jankovic and Giulia Ravarotto at the Létanec Art Center, an old country house in the village of Trstenice renovated around a dance studio and an open-air platform. The festival describes itself as a Czech community gathering, deliberately bringing Czech and visiting dancers together, and treats ecological care as part of CI culture.
Last updated August 2026
