Susan Coates playing with momentum, plus giving and receiving weight in Contact Improvisation
Susan Coates playing with momentum, plus giving and receiving weight in Contact Improvisation
Delicate-Wash-Spin-Cycle: Fundamentals of Contact Improvisation
Date: Saturday, November 6th, 2010 3-6pm
Location: Packing House Center for the Arts, 835 E. 50th Avenue, Denver
Cost: $35
Registration: Contact Susan Coates at susan@livinglaundry.org to hold your spot. Checks payable to Living Laundry and mail to 3349 Elizabeth St., Denver, CO, 80205 postmarked no later than October 28th. See www.livinglaundry.org for more information about this workshop and other Living Laundry offerings.
Description
In this workshop we will explore the fundamentals of Contact Improvisation–from surrender to the point of contact, falling and rising spirals, and momentum to effortless partner lifts and ensemble movement. We will also introduce a feedback model to help you get what you want from your dances. You are invited to bring your humanity and your humor to this form! Great for non-dancers and performers wanting to expand their movement toolkit. All experience levels welcome. Kneepads provided.
“Contact Improvisation is a dance form, originated by American choreographer Steve Paxton in 1972, based on the communication between two or more moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia.
The body, in order to open to these sensations, must learn to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.
Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one’s basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.”
From Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and other Moving Ideas, by Nancy Stark Smith and David Koteen, available through Contact Editions.
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