In July 2017, I attended the Contact meets Contemporary dance festival in Göttingen, Germany. It’s a week long festival for contact improvisation with contemporary dance elements – people with backgrounds in either dance form – or both, attend the festival which gives it ‘an edge’. I kept a dance diary and recorded my experience and thoughts – presented here.
I attended 16 workshops over the week-long festival . The festival included a number of intensives, and I attended the one for contemporary dance – taught by Olivia Court-Mesa & Yochai Ginton – which was scheduled over four morning sessions. There were dance sessions for contact improvisation (‘jams’) every evening of the festival, and early morning sessions to warm up before breakfast. I attended them all!
On the opening session of the festival, we sat in a circle on the floor of the Gymnasium where it was held, and reeled off our names and where we were from. It took about five minutes as there were more than 200 people attending; about half of them from Germany with the remainder mostly from other European Countries.
‘if I have one piece of advice for you,
it’s to do one thing less’
Jörg Hassmann, festival organiser
One of the organisers Jörg Hassmann, opened the festival saying: if I have one piece of advice for you, it’s to do one thing less. Of course, I completely ignored this advice and I had a great time although a very exhausting one!
Workshop highlights
- Jörg Hassmann, CI Essentials
- Daniel Werner, Water dance
- Olivia Court-Mesa & Yochai Ginton, Contemporary Dance Intensive (first session; last session including my thoughts it)
- Markus Hoft, City dance performance
You can see my complete workshop schedule here
[Top Photo: Contact meets Contemporary (July 2017) by Ana Marina Jimenez]
See the website of Contact meets Contemporary