QUEER: Collaborative Power of Contact Improvisation

About this event

Collaborative Power of Contact Improvisation is a week-long invitation to practice CI while sharing survival practices. We understand that much of the world is overwhelmed by dynamics of power and domination, and we want to respond by sharing power and engaging in relational ways of being. Drawing inspiration from The Love Makers Company, we build on the question: What can we do together that we cannot do alone? — to challenge ourselves in our dancing and to create micropolitical modes of response together. This year we are joined by Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud (The Love Makers Company), who will guide us through queer, practical, and fantastical collective survival skills centered on love, toward collective flourishing. Together we will explore ways of approaching touch and improvisation where agency is not negotiated, but respected and supported. The event is structured with a workshop each morning, labs in the afternoon, and jams in the evening, with open spaces to co-create over the course of the week. Workshop description: At the heart of this Contact Improvisation (CI) workshop is a queer survival practice in relation to the extreme precarity of our times. Drawing on our individual and collective identities and our research in CI and choreography, we dive into the possibilities of a rigorous, playful, and powerful Contact Improvisation. Through this, how can queerness help us find collective and responsible power through CI? How can we reconnect with queer ancestors and the martial art of CI as we navigate toward the future? We will work with different qualities and types of touch, intention and impact, technical skill-building, falling and falling together, grappling, and intense, sweaty collaborative dances. We will work in different configurations: solo, duo, trio, small group, and whole group. We will approach Contact Improvisation as a generous and high-risk practice, developing skills to navigate what has the potential to be fatal. The central question of our research is: What can we do together that we cannot do alone? We will practice mutual care while navigating the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relation to one another. We practice and teach Contact Improvisation from queer, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives. This will be a space centered on queer, trans, and BIPOC people, where everyone is welcome. Labs description: The afternoon labs are spaces of collective experimentation, where what emerges from the morning practice meets broader micropolitical questions that we will attempt to answer through dancing. The labs are porous, reflective, co-created spaces dedicated to testing, failing, feeling, and discovering together. We will practice through movement scores, sharing, and collective conversation. The facilitated labs will follow a progression and will be spaces focused on opening up questions and research. Throughout the week, the group will be invited to propose their own scores, conversations, or formats to experiment with.