the philosophy of movement
The above animation deals with the degrees of freedom present in a contact improvisation based dance.
Hypothesis 1: The rolling connection between dancers is ascendent because it allows for the greatest amount of freedom for each dancer.
Hypothesis 2: Dancers that focus on maintain the highest degree of freedom in their dance create aesthetically flat dances.
CI Training with Andrew Wass
Wednesdays 14:00-15:30
starting 02.09.2026
Intermediate/Advanced
This weekly class is for people who already are familiar with contact improvisation and are ready to go deeper. Through structured scores, focused repetition, and close attention to the body’s mechanics, we will refine the technical skills that support a seasoned CI practice – multiple muscle tonalities, nuanced movement initiation, solo body clarity. These classes will work towards building greater fluency, range, and physical confidence.
Each session combines individual somatic work, partnering pathways, and improvisational scores designed to sharpen listening and responsiveness. Drawing on Material from Paxton’s work, developmental and somatic work, and classic CI practices, we will investigate how gravity, timing, and anatomical awareness can expand what’s possible in the dance.
Participants should expect both feedback and challenge. This is a space to train, question your habits, and discover new pathways through the known and unknown events of contact.
For dancers with existing CI experience who want more: more precision, more range, more understanding.
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Not a member yet? Arrive 10 minutes before class to get your trial session, or use our contact form to reserve your spot!
A brief discussion of gravity on WhatsApp with my Lower Left colleagues in relation to dance styles got me to think about how/if I relate CI to gravity. I do occasionally refer to gravity especially when teaching partnering pathways, of how at the top of the arc a person has no weight because for a moment gravity is no longer acting on them, and how weight lessens as someone goes up and increases as they go down. Making them easier to move on the way up and at the top, rather than down. Also this week in my CI class at Marameo, I referred to the altas vertebra, having people tilt from there to sense the pressure change under their feet.
So one current hypothesis is that the earlier generations of CI practitioners were heavily into gravity because they were looking for an outside source to move and inspire them, rather than predetermined movements. That it was a post-modern move to relinquish agency to an outside source other than the individual’s will to generate the movement, a mode of killing the choreographer.
I tend to focus on the creation, operation, and dissolution of surfaces of contact, i.e., the improvising of the contact surfaces, their number, location, size, degree of pressure rather than gravity.
For me the focus on gravity relates to the first two phases of CI, sensing and mechanizing. Once a dancer is familiar with those phases, they can venture into the third phase – improvising. Another hypothesis is that much of CI teaching remains within sensing and mechanizing, and merely lets the improvising happen as a result of adapting to failed attempts at repeating pathways, at least that is what I would say from a lot of what I see here in Berlin, rather than having the improvising with and in contact be a conscious artistic choice in the moment.
(at some point, I will write more about the three phases of sensing, mechanizing, and improvising)
below are some photos of a performance I did with my son, Eli, at marameo, e.V. in Berlin, Germany on April 11, 2026. We danced to a soundtrack I made. The text is about dreams I had shortly after my father died when I was 22 and questions about fatherhood. The soundscape beneath the text is the sound of Magnesium to performance that gave rise to contact improvisation. The photos were taken by Laurence Chaperon.
First shalt thou take thine partner up to thine shoulder. Then shalt thou turn three times. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number of thine turns, and the number of the turns shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either turneth thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three turns. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third turn, be reached, then slideth thou thine partner down thine back towardeth the floor.
#Kealiinohomoku
It is good anthropology to think of contact improvisation as a form of ethnic dance. Currently, that idea is unacceptable to most Western dance scholars. This lack of agreement shows clearly that something is amiss in the communication of ideas between the scholars of dance and those of anthropology, and this paper is an attempt to bridge that communication gap.
Although claims have been made for universal dance forms or international forms in actuality neither a universal form nor a truly international form of dance is in existence and it is doubtful whether any such dance form can ever exist except in theory.
Nevertheless, contact improvisation is a product of the Western world, and it is a dance form developed by Caucasians who speak Indo-European languages and who share a common European tradition. Granted that contact improvisation is international in that it “belongs” to European countries plus groups of European descendants in the Americas. But, when contact improvisation appears in such countries as Japan or Korea it becomes a borrowed and alien form. Granted also that contact improvisation has had a complex history of influences, this does not undermine its effectiveness as an ethnic form.
So distinctive is the “look” of contact improvisation, that it is probably safe to say that contact improvisation dances graphically rendered by silhouettes would never be mistaken for anything else.
The question is not whether contact improvisation reflects its own heritage. The question is why we seem to need to believe that contact improvisation has somehow become a-cultural. Why are we afraid to call it an ethnic form?
We should indeed speak of ethnic dance forms, and we should not believe that this term is derisive when it includes contact improvisation since contact improvisation reflects the cultural traditions from which it developed.