A dance session for contact improvisation

Contact meets Contemporary 2017

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

You can see my complete workshop schedule here


Notes

See the website of Contact meets Contemporary

[Top Photo: Contact meets Contemporary (July 2017) by Ana Marina Jimenez]

Leave a Reply