A dance laboratory for experiments in touch, sensing, struggle, collaboration, support, resistance, and relationship. We will work with failure more than flow, with struggle more than ease. The goal of the class is to extend the proposals and possibilities of Contact Improvisation. How do we engage, critique, and evolve the practices of Contact Improvisation? What are its limitations in relation to performance, contemporary art, choreographic innovation and intervention? Focused on duet partnerships, we will also consider the influence of the duet (as practice, as representation) on solo and group dancing.

Contact Improvisation, more than any other development in European and American dance, challenged the hierarchy of the vertical body, attempted to democratize body parts, challenged the role of gender in dance partnering, and disrupted deeply embodied choreographic and institutional habits. Post/Contact questions and celebrates the resistance to Contact Improvisation in today’s dance and performance. 1960-70s dance experimentation was heavily influenced by pop culture and youth rebellion, including hippy culture and activist projects (anti-war, feminism, black power…). How do contemporary dance practices erase, engage or embody these influences? How do we negotiate CI’s hippy tendencies and identities? What happens when dance research becomes a lifestyle?