Tuning into spherical forces

Contact Improvisation residency dedicated to open-ended exploration through laboratories and jams

The residency aims to create an environment for dedicated practitioners and emerging facilitators to gather, offering conditions that support their practice in Contact Improvisation (CI). it is an opportunity to meet people who are passionate about the practice, both locally and internationally, expanding their understanding of CI through different perspectives, approaches, and possibilities for future collaboration.

The long-durational nature of the residency creates possibilities to travel through many creative depths of the practice and ourselves. Over time, the residency becomes more than a space for practice — it becomes a way of living together, where we encounter how we hold space collectively, take care of one another, share responsibilities, and move through the everyday together. In this way, the residency becomes a reflection of life itself, allowing what we learn through being together to travel beyond the practice space and into our everyday lives.

Shared Invitation

This gathering is an invitation to enter into attunement and listening, to connect more deeply with the forces beneath our feet and the vastness of space, and to explore the potential depth of dance and creative practice through our inherent innovative spirit.

“Dancing What Is Already Here” — Contact Improvisation invites us into the immediacy of the relationships between bodies, gravity, space, and time. This residency is an invitation to deepen our practice of this relational intelligence: to dance from presence, attention, and a collaborative attitude, and to practice improvisation as a living way of meeting the world.

Program outline

The practice of learning and inquiry will take shape through jams, laboratories, performance sharings, and workshops. These sessions will be co-led and co-created.

The residency structure is designed in a way where each part develops into the next, shaping and creating conditions for the practice to reveal itself and for materials to be cultivated. In a broader sense, the whole residency is a form of laboratory.

how do we understand what is a lab and jam space

In Contact Improvisation, the laboratory (lab) is a living space for sharing curiosity and questions within the practice, experimenting together, discovering, and posing new questions — an open field of research. It is deeply connected to the history of Steve Paxton and his fellow postmodern dancers working together in the 1970s, who prioritised collaboration over the individual, challenged boundaries between dance and daily life, between different art disciplines, and between art and audience, and collectively questioned “what can be dance?”

The lab is both personal inquiry and collective research. As participants, individuals question and move from their own autonomy, while every member’s questions and perspectives hold equal value. The lab involves proposing and experimenting with scores, specific materials of the form, and cultivating and developing structures; inquiring through the present-moment curiosities of the individual and collective, and weaving together time for dancing and a creative practice environment.

The space prioritises curiosity itself over specific outcomes, expanding perspectives through questions rather than answers, and mutual support through deep listening as a generous gift. It also fosters horizontal relationships, where everyone meets as researchers, free from fixed “teacher/student” roles.

A Contact Improvisation jam functions as a collective practice environment in which participants engage in ongoing embodied inquiry through improvisational dance. While a facilitator is present to hold the space and support safety, the jam itself remains a shared, decentralized practice shaped by the participants. Interdependence and mutual attentiveness constitute a generative field for practice, enabling dancers to explore relational, perceptual, and compositional dimensions of movement.

Participants move with whoever is present—across levels of experience and familiarity—while maintaining responsibility for their own well-being and that of others. Periods of resting at the periphery of the space, witnessing, writing, and reflective observation are recognized as integral components of the practice, allowing for shifts between embodied participation and critical or contemplative modes of engagement.

Curatorial intentions 

It is intended as a long-form container for embodied research, reflection, and integration, supporting both individual and wider collective exploration. we see this residency as a place for practitioners to strengthen and deepen their embodied understanding of the practice, while supporting their individual curiosities and developing their facilitation.

Who Is It For?

This residency welcomes Contact Improvisation practitioners who have an embodied foundational understanding of the underlying approaches and principles of the practice. It is for those who are curious to deepen their practice, those in the early stages of facilitating Contact Improvisation, and those who are interested in exploring facilitation in the future.

Physical readiness (the ability to give and receive weight and to move with it in a dynamic dialogue), somatic awareness, and relational listening are essential foundations for engaging in the shared experimentation and deeper inquiry that this residency invites.

We warmly welcome inquiries from practitioners around the world who feel connected to this invitation and would like to join us. If you are curious to know more, please write to us for further information.