If you're planning a trip, the travel guide is the one you want. This one is for a different situation: you live somewhere, you want to dance regularly, and you're trying to work out whether that's even possible where you are.
The honest answer depends enormously on your city. Some places have had a weekly jam running for two decades. Most places have nothing at all. Both are normal, and the approach is different for each.
How do you find out if there's CI where you live?
Search CI Treasure Hunt for your city. If nothing comes up, widen to your country, then to the nearest large city, then to the region. The full community list is worth scanning directly if your country is small, since you can take in the whole picture at once instead of guessing at city names.
We currently list 290 communities across 68 countries. Coverage is real but very uneven: dense in some regions, thin or absent across large parts of the world.
If your country isn't there at all, you've learned something useful, and you can also help. If you know of a group we don't list, anywhere, send it to us and we'll add it. Most of what's on this site got here exactly that way.
Why a listing can look dead when the scene isn't
This is the part that trips people up, and it's worth knowing before you conclude there's nothing near you.
Most listed communities have no upcoming event showing at any given moment. In our own data it's about 88 percent. Part of that is us: the calendar carries multi-day events, so a group's weekly jam and local classes aren't in it even when we know the group well. The rest is more interesting: a weekly jam that has run every Tuesday for eleven years often isn't published as an "event" anywhere, because everyone who goes already knows. A quarter of the communities we list have no website, no Facebook group and no Instagram between them.
An empty calendar is therefore the normal state, not evidence of a dead scene. A group chat with nothing posted for a month is usually a quiet season. The way to find out is to message someone, which is also how you would have found out thirty years ago.
If there's a scene: how to join it properly
This is where the problem stops being about search and becomes social.
Show up more than once. A single visit tells a community almost nothing about you, and it tells you almost nothing about them. CI communities, especially small ones, open up to people who keep coming back.
Expect every scene to be organized differently. It might be one weekly jam and nothing else. It might be a teacher running a class that feeds an informal jam afterwards. It might be a few overlapping groups that don't entirely talk to each other. Ask people how it works; there's usually no single obvious answer.
Go to classes, not only jams. A jam teaches you by exposure. A class teaches you the specific skills, safe falling, rolling, taking weight, that make jams less overwhelming and less risky. If your scene has both, use both.
The jam etiquette guide covers what a single visit looks like, including how to tell whether a given jam expects prior experience.
What if there's no CI near you?
This is the more common situation, and it has three real answers. None of them is "keep searching."
Check the nearest city, not only your own. CI density clusters around regional hubs instead of spreading evenly, and in many of the countries we list there's only one community at all. Someone in a smaller city often has a real if inconvenient option an hour or two away.
Watch for traveling teachers. Established CI teachers run workshops outside their home base regularly, sometimes annually in the same city. A one-off weekend workshop is worth going to even when it isn't weekly practice, and it's frequently how a local group starts.
Consider starting something. Smaller step than it sounds. Plenty of long-running jams began with two or three people who did a workshop together and kept meeting in a rented room. What it takes is a floor, a fixed time, and persistence for longer than feels reasonable. If you get something going, email us and we'll list it. That's how most of the communities on this site got here.
Going deeper: festivals and intensives
Once you have a regular local practice, the usual next step is a multi-day festival or intensive, or a retreat if you want less teaching and more floor time. It's a different experience from a weekly jam: sustained practice over several days, usually with visiting teachers, usually with people from well beyond your own city.
Cost is a real barrier, and it's worth knowing that sliding-scale pricing is standard and that many festivals offer helper or work-exchange places that reduce or waive the fee. The festival prep guide covers what those weeks look like, and how to do one cheaply.
Rural areas and small countries
If you're genuinely isolated, distance is the constraint and there's no way around saying so. What tends to work is inverting the usual order: treat an annual festival or intensive as your main practice instead of a bonus on top of a local scene, stay in touch between events with the people you meet there, and be the one who eventually starts something once you know enough others who want it too.
Part of CI Treasure Hunt's guide series on Contact Improvisation. Related: Finding CI While Traveling · Jam Etiquette · What Is Contact Improvisation?