Overview
Contact Improvisation's roots in Portugal trace to Isabel Valverde, who practiced the form for over 20 years across Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Riverside before returning to Lisbon in 2006 to co-found one of the city's first organized Contact Improvisation jams. Lisbon's wider scene includes the general Contact Improvisation Lisboa community, and choreographer Rita Vilhena, active in CI since 2005 and teaching at Escola Superior de Dança, who holds a weekly Friday practice and jam through her own Partícula Extravagante.
South of the city, in the Arrábida Natural Park near Palmela, SerVIVO is a cooperative co-living retreat with Jo Bruhn as a resident teacher. It's also home to Pedro Paz's Arrábida Dance Labs, a Contact Improvisation and somatics gathering running since 2016, now approaching its 33rd edition, alongside weekly practice through his Move in Touch sessions.
In Sintra, the Assembly collective runs programs described as "Making Space for Change" out of Quinta Ten Chi, a retreat centre stewarded since 1978 at the foot of the Sintra mountains. Among its facilitators is Francisco Borges, born in the Azores and now based in Sintra.
On the Algarve coast, Estúdio Yucca in Cabanas de Tavira, a former tile-making pottery studio reimagined in 2020 by dancer Bárbara Ramos and painter Tom Leamon, hosts retreats and residencies. Further along the coast, Quinta Braz in Santo Estevão is an established host of the Portugal Contact Festival, organized through Volker Eschmann's international Forgotten Land community. Regular local jams run at venues across the region as well, including La Casa del Corpo in Lagos. A shared community links practitioners across the Algarve and neighboring Alentejo more broadly.
Inland, an ecological farm near Covilhã in the Beira Interior region, Quinta Fonte dos Passos, is dedicated to communal life and Contact Improvisation practice, anchored locally by a Beira Interior community group. Porto has its own growing circle of practitioners as well.
The Azores have their own community of practitioners, and in 2026 welcomed their first taste of Innercore, an annual Contact Improvisation and movement festival founded in 2023 by Diana Pinto and Pedro Magalhães, when the festival brought its first island edition to São Miguel with Francisco Borges facilitating. A national Contact Improvisation Portugal community ties the country's regional groups together.
Last updated August 2026
