Overview
Contact Improvisation reached Germany in the late 1970s, when Christine Vilardo, alongside Jacalyn Carley, began offering public workshops in West Berlin before Tanzfabrik Berlin's founding in 1978; the practice became one of the collective's founding disciplines, cemented from 1986 through annual summer intensives taught in part by visiting American teachers like Bob Rease. Potsdam has its own thread reaching back almost as far: fabrik Potsdam's founding event in 1991, a Pentecost jam, made the young dance centre in what was then East Germany one of the centres of the German and international CI scene; the jam continues today as Pfingstjam, now held in Oderberg outside Berlin. Freiburg's tradition is younger but became the country's most international: in 2000, Barbara Stahlberger, Benno Enderlein, and Eckhard Müller founded contactfestival freiburg, building on Benno's own CI jams dating back to 1991 and Eckhard's Blackforestjam, which ran through the early 2000s. Formalized as an association in 2002, it became Europe's first international Contact Improvisation festival and remains one of the largest today.
Berlin and Freiburg are still the country's two biggest centers. Berlin carries the largest concentration of teachers and organizers anywhere in Germany, spread across studios including Tanzfabrik itself, marameo Berlin, Studio2 at Kunstquartier Bethanien, Eden Studios, and PHYNIXtanzt. Freiburg's contactfestival still runs annually, alongside a CI teacher-training program and an active local jam scene centered at Studio Pro Arte.
A great deal is also happening elsewhere. In Cologne, Hassan Aftabruyan has run motionlab.cologne since 2016, drawing an unusually dense calendar of touring international teachers rather than building a large resident community. Leipzig holds its own long-running fixture, the Contact Impro Festival Leipzig, now in its seventh edition. Munich has a regular local jam and community of its own. In Hamburg, Angela-Mara Florant has taught Contact Improvisation since 2005 and has co-directed the dance studio Triade since 2015, alongside organizing the Nordtanz Festival.
Beyond these hubs, the scene is genuinely federal: dozens of city and regional groups run their own practice, from Augsburg and Dresden to Karlsruhe and Trier, including cross-city networks like Tabeko linking practitioners across Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Mainz, more than any single summary can name individually. Göttingen was once a hub of its own, home to both Contact meets Contemporary and, through 2019, the OsterImproFestival. The latter still runs today, though it has since relocated to Schönsee in the Bavarian Forest. What ties the wider federal scene together isn't a national association but a mailing-list lineage: a Berlin-founded Yahoo group, active from 2001 to 2020, succeeded by a German-language list still running today, reaching German-speaking practitioners beyond Germany's own borders into Austria and Switzerland.
Last updated August 2026
