A reference for the terms that come up regularly in Contact Improvisation (CI) classes, jams, and conversation. New to CI? Start with What Is Contact Improvisation?. This page is built to be looked up term by term, not read start to finish.
Principles and movement concepts Backspace · Center-to-center · Counterbalance · Falling · Listening · Momentum · Negative space · Off-balance · Point of contact · Reaching · Release · Score · Small dance · Spirals · Weight-sharing · Witnessing · Yielding
Formats and gatherings Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP) · Festival · Intensive · Jam · Lab · Silent festival · Silent jam · Underscore
Terms from adjacent practices Authentic Movement · Axis Syllabus · Body-Mind Centering (BMC) · Conscious dance · Material for the Spine · Partnering · Somatic movement
Principles and movement concepts
Backspace
The space behind you, out of sight. CI pays deliberate attention to it. Lifts often happen onto or from the back, dancers move back to back, and a lot of a duet happens outside what either person can see. Orienting toward the backspace instead of always leading forward changes what you sense. It asks for more listening and less prediction.
Center-to-center
Contact between the dancers' physical centers, the lower belly, sometimes called the hara, roughly where the body's center of mass sits. When two centers come close and the supporting skeleton is stacked underneath, weight travels through bone instead of being held by muscle. That is what makes carrying a full-grown adult possible without strength. The same weight offered at arm's length sits on a much longer lever and costs far more effort for the same result.
Counterbalance
Two dancers leaning away from each other while staying connected at a shared point, each person's weight balancing the other's. The stability comes from the opposition itself. Neither dancer could hold the shape alone. Often used early in teaching, because it's real weight-sharing that doesn't require lifts or floor work.
Falling
Going with gravity instead of bracing against it, and treating a fall as movement to travel through, not an accident to prevent. CI borrows heavily here from Aikido, where practitioners spend years learning to drop out of a loss of balance and roll back up without injury. Paxton trained in Aikido from 1964, and it shows in how CI teaches falling. This is one of the few things in CI genuinely worth learning in a class rather than picking up at a jam.
Listening
Attending through touch, weight, and peripheral senses to what a partner is actually doing and offering, not imposing a plan. CI gets described as a listening practice as much as a moving one.
Momentum
Using energy already in motion instead of initiating every action muscularly. Much of what looks effortless or acrobatic in CI is momentum being redirected, not strength being applied.
Negative space
Dancing where the other body isn't, moving in relation to a partner through the empty space around them rather than through contact. A CI duet doesn't have to be touching continuously. Negative space is the part of the dance that happens out of contact, and it's as much a part of the form as weight-sharing.
Off-balance
Moving through and from imbalance, not toward a stable center. Falling and catching both happen from here. CI treats off-balance as material to work with, not something to avoid.
Point of contact
The place where two dancers' bodies are touching. It rarely stays fixed. It travels across the dancers' bodies by rolling (the contact area itself turning over), sliding (two surfaces moving against each other without losing touch), or pivoting (rotating around a fixed point). Following that travel instead of planning it is close to the physical core of what CI is.
Reaching
Extending into space or toward a partner, through a limb or through the whole body. It does two jobs. Reaching into space gives you something to move from: the extended limb becomes a support, and orienting outward lets you find strength without gripping. At the point of contact, both dancers are usually reaching gently toward each other, and that mutual reach is what keeps the contact alive. Change the direction of your reaching and the contact changes or ends with it. Reaching matters in lifts too, where a body that extends is easier to support than one that collapses.
Release
Letting go of unnecessary muscular holding so weight can travel through the skeleton into the floor or a partner. Connected to the release-technique lineage in postmodern dance. It underlies most of the other principles here, because weight can't be shared cleanly through a tense body.
Score
A set of rules, structures, or constraints that shape an improvisation, from a single instruction to a multi-hour form like the Underscore. It sets the conditions an improvisation happens within. The movements themselves stay open, which is what separates a score from choreography.
Small dance
An exercise originated by Steve Paxton: standing still and noticing the tiny, constant postural adjustments the body makes to stay upright, the barely visible dance of balance itself. Used as a way into sensing weight and structure before adding motion or a partner.
Spirals
Rotational, helical pathways through the body. A primary way dancers travel into and out of the floor, and around a partner, without stopping and restarting the movement.
Weight-sharing
Giving physical weight to a partner, by leaning, falling, being caught, lifting or being lifted. Touch alone isn't weight-sharing; the weight has to actually transfer. This is the defining physical premise of CI. The two sides of it are giving weight, committing real weight into the contact, and taking weight or receiving weight, supporting a partner's weight, ideally through skeletal structure and not muscular effort. Both trade back and forth continuously.
Witnessing
Watching from the edge of a jam with real attention, as opposed to simply sitting out. It's treated as a way of taking part. CI shares the term with Authentic Movement, where the mover/witness pair is the basic structure, and CI labs and scores sometimes use it in that more formal sense. At an ordinary jam it's informal: when the room's attention gathers around one duet, the people watching are witnessing it. See the jam etiquette guide.
Yielding
Meeting an incoming force, usually gravity, but also a partner's weight or push, by moving with it gradually and smoothly rather than resisting or collapsing. The term comes from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's developmental movement work (see Body-Mind Centering), where yielding to gravity is described as the body's very first movement. It isn't passive. Done gradually enough, the movement also counteracts the force it's responding to, and it stays readable to a partner, who can sense it and respond. Related to release and to giving weight, but describes the quality of the response itself, not the letting-go of tension or the weight being handed over.
Formats and gatherings
Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP)
A movement meditation practice developed by Barbara Dilley, who taught it from around 1980 at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (renamed Naropa University in 1999). Dilley also danced in the June 1972 group that named Contact Improvisation, which is part of why the two practices keep turning up at the same events. A session moves through sitting meditation, then a personal awareness practice, then a group practice called Open Space, closing with discussion. Different from CI in lineage and intent, coming from Buddhist contemplative practice rather than postmodern dance research, though the two overlap in many communities and often share practitioners and venues.
Festival
A larger multi-day gathering combining classes, jams, and often performances, usually drawing dancers from well beyond the local community. See upcoming festivals.
Intensive
A multi-day or multi-week period of concentrated CI training, usually with a smaller and more consistent group than a festival. Depth over breadth.
Intensives also run inside festivals. A festival may offer two or three in parallel: you choose one at the start and stay with it, and with its teachers, for the whole event, in a group that doesn't change, while other classes run alongside for everyone else. Some festivals run a morning and an evening intensive with different teachers and the same group of dancers. See upcoming intensives.
Jam
An open, informal gathering where anyone present can dance with anyone else, usually with a warm-up period before open dancing begins. Typically leaderless, with no central instructor guiding the session. The most common entry point into a CI community. Multi-day jams are listed as long jams.
Lab
Also called a research session. A more exploratory, less performance-oriented gathering focused on one physical question or theme. Often used by experienced practitioners, or by teachers developing new material.
Labs usually make room for talking, which is the clearest practical difference from a jam. Stopping to describe what just happened, or to agree on what to try next, is part of the form. The same conversation on a jam floor would often be felt as an intrusion.
Silent festival
A multi-day CI event held in silence, either with no talking at all for its whole length or with speech confined to set times. The aim is a more meditative, internally directed practice, with what passes between dancers staying physical instead of verbal. These run in several countries. Some are structured festivals with classes, intensives and focus jams; others are retreats with no teaching at all, where facilitators only hold the space. Each event sets its own terms, including whether phones are put away for the duration.
Not the same as a silent jam, which refers to the absence of music.
Silent jam
A jam held without music. Common in CI, and a deliberate choice rather than an absence. Music tends to unify a room's mood and rhythm, and many hosts would rather dancers follow physical sensation and each other. CI doesn't follow music the way most social dances do.
Underscore
A long-form score for improvisation developed by Nancy Stark Smith from the early 1990s, usually danced over three to four hours. It gives names, and a graphic symbol each, to more than twenty states a dancer can be in: settling and sensing gravity alone, circulating among others, entering and leaving contact duets, opening out into whole-group improvisation, resting, reflecting.
The naming is the substance of it. Most of what the Underscore names goes on at any jam anyway, unnoticed and unspoken, and giving the states names lets a whole room recognize together where it is. Stark Smith described the score as the key to a map instead of the map itself, "instructions just cryptic enough to get you oriented". There is a broad arc from solo through group and back to rest, but it isn't a queue: dancers enter and leave states in their own time, and a state can come round again.
It's practiced worldwide, and once a year near the northern summer solstice as the Global Underscore, danced for four hours simultaneously at 90 or more sites at once. Newcomers are normally talked through the score before taking part.
Terms from adjacent practices
Authentic Movement
A movement practice built on a pair of roles: a mover, who moves with eyes closed following inner impulse, and a witness, who watches without directing. It grew out of Mary Starks Whitehouse's work, which she called Movement-in-depth, and was developed into the mover/witness discipline largely by Janet Adler. Separate from CI in lineage and intent, though the two overlap in practitioners and venues, and CI borrows the term witnessing from it (see Witnessing).
Axis Syllabus
A reference system for human movement assembled by Frey Faust, drawing on anatomy, biomechanics and physics, not on any one dance style. Faust is a second-generation contact improviser out of the 1980s New York scene, which is part of why the two circles overlap so heavily: Axis Syllabus classes are a common sight on CI festival programs, and a lot of CI teachers have studied it. It is not a dance form and not a style of CI. It's an analytical framework for how bodies move, used alongside CI, not instead of it.
Body-Mind Centering (BMC)
An approach to movement and body awareness founded by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, studying the body through its systems and through the developmental movement patterns infants pass through. Its vocabulary has fed into CI teaching, most visibly in the idea of yielding (see Yielding). Like Authentic Movement, it's a distinct practice with its own training, not a branch of CI.
Conscious dance
An umbrella term sometimes used for movement practices oriented around self-inquiry, embodiment, or personal process rather than performance or technique, covering practices like 5Rhythms, Ecstatic Dance, and Open Floor (see the comparison guide). Some festivals draw dancers from both conscious dance and CI communities. Whether CI itself counts as part of that category varies by community and isn't settled; this glossary doesn't take a position on it.
Material for the Spine
Steve Paxton's own long-running movement research, developed after CI and studied by many CI teachers. It's solo work, not partner work, focused on the spine and pelvis and on fine internal sensation. Usually described as a companion practice to CI, not a part of it.
Partnering
A general term, used across ballet, contemporary dance, and ballroom, for the technique of moving in weighted contact with another dancer. CI is built entirely around partnering and continuous weight-sharing, but partnering itself is a broader skill CI shares with many other dance forms, not something unique to it.
Somatic movement
An umbrella term for practices that work from internal sensation, attention and the felt experience of moving, instead of from an external shape to be achieved. It covers a wide and loosely bounded field, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Continuum and others among them. It's the label that turns up most often alongside CI in event listings, and many CI teachers hold a training in one somatic practice or another. CI itself is usually described as somatically informed, not as a somatic practice in its own right, though where the line falls depends who you ask.
Part of CI Treasure Hunt's guide series on Contact Improvisation. Start here: What Is Contact Improvisation? · Next: Jam Etiquette