Classes and Workshops
Beginning–Intermediate Contact Improvisation
TUE, 6:30-8:30pm $12 drop-in, or $15 and stay for the Jam
This class series is sequential, but drop-ins are encouraged; the best learning experience comes from trying out the styles of at least 3 teachers. We welcome you to learn Beginning Intermediate Contact Improvisation and deepen your flexibility, kinesthetic awareness, and choices for contemporary movement and partnering. We encourage you to explore both the discipline and play of this dance form with both class study and jam practice.
CounterPULSE Contact Improvisation Jam
TUE, 8:30-11:30pm $5
This event is San Francisco’s longest-running Contact Improvisation Jam, and is a quiet, no-music jam. However, acoustic musicians are welcome to ask the group to play for a portion of a jam. For your first time, we recommend taking class before attending your first jam. If you have questions about how to participate during Jam, please ask at the Registration Table during the event, our staff are happy to help.
FEBRUARY 2012 CLASS with Ralf Jaroschinski
DECEMBER 2011 and JANUARY 2012 CLASS with Ali Woolwich
Finding Lightness
Pictured: Ali Woolwich and MaryAnn Brooks
In Contact Improvisation (CI), having honed facility for giving and receiving a range of modulations of weight and pressure is key to finding satisfying complexity in the dance. Whether you’re a bigger/taller person interested in not squashing, or you’re a smaller/shorter person wanting to encourage more weight/pressure, lightness is a crucial question. This Class Series will address lightness: how to find it (giving/getting), how to alter your habits and presumptions to increase it, how to integrate it into your improvisational choices, and how to revel in the shifts and subtleties it brings into well-worn dance patterns. Through exercises and score play, we will address the nexus of physical skills and awareness tunings that will install/upgrade lightness as a reliable choice in our dancing.
Ali Woolwich has been working in Contact Improvisation (CI) for 22 years, and has taught CI since 1996. Ali has produced workshops, live performance and media through HumilitySwim in the SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, and New Mexico. Ali teaches dance/performance in university, studio professional and recreational venues, and in years as a dance teacher has worked with professional dancers, children, gay teens, queer women and trans men, integrated classes of disabled and non-disabled dancers, and seniors. A Lighting Designer and Theatrical Electrician (union Local 16), Ali is a founding staff A/V Tech at CounterPULSE. Ali is Co-Director of CIRF: Contact Improvisation Research Forum, which provides year-round CI events and training (see: ci-rf.org). Ali credits Peggy Schwartz, Keriac, KJ Holmes and Karl Frost as primary CI teachers. Ali’s performance work and teaching is influenced by training as filmmaker and classical musician, and through 20 years of training in post-modern dance/theater, Release Techniques (Joe Goode Performance Group, Lower Left, Umo Ensemble, Kathleen Hermesdorf and Joan Skinner), yoga and massage practice. Currently, Ali is investigating queer tango as a source for partnering innovation. More info: www.humilityswim.org
NOVEMBER 2011 CLASS with Rossana Alves
Fluid Dancing
Photographer: Unknown; Pictured: Rossana Alves and partner
This class will be grounded in Somatic Principals as a way to provide support, ease of movement and efficiency into our dancing. We will refine and deepen Contact Improvisation skills such as: rolling, surfing, falling, weight sharing, grounding, listening and lifting, allowing us to use our perceptions in a fluid and dynamic way. By awakening our physical and sensory awareness, we will be able to find our own ground as well as to create dialogue with others, opening up new possibilities for creativity and expression in solos, duets and group improvisation.
Rossana Alves, born and raised in Brazil, is a dancer, dance teacher and performer. She has been practicing Contact Improvisation for 13 years, teaching classes and participating in festivals in Brazil, Argentina and USA. Currently based in the Bay Area, she recently graduated from Moving On Center and has been studying at the School for Body-Mind Centering, as well as performing with Oakland Improv Collective.
SEPTEMBER & OCTOBER 2011 CLASS with Kristen Greco (SEP) and Daniel Bear Davis (OCT)
Tigers, Dragons, Skills & Scores
This class will cultivate skills for CI utilizing somatic principles and concepts from qi gong. We will dance from the floor to flying, and have a blast disorienting and reorienting in all the places in between. We will also experiment with group scores, bringing in a range of tools and textures for tactile communication.
Kristen Greco has directed, performed, and taught internationally in Mexico, Canada, South America, and Europe both independently and with The Carpetbag Brigade since 2000. Kristen most recently performed with Syzygy Butoh (CO), Human Nature Dance Theatre (AZ), and Live Art Installations (Denmark). Kristen holds a BA in Studio Arts/Performance from University of Colorado and a somatic education certificate from Moving on Center’s School of Participatory Arts. Kristen serves as guest faculty at USF teaching CI and partnering techniques. Kristen’s current research includes how access to different perceptive lenses can affect our habits, somatic processes, and performance experiences.
Daniel Bear Davis has been teaching and dancing CI and improvisational composition for 13 years. For 5 years his focus has been co-directing the dance theatre company, Shah and Blah Productions and performing with acrobatic stilt theatre company, The Carpetbag Brigade. He is currently an Axis Syllabus teacher candidate and his study with Frey Faust has been instrumental in developing the concepts that inform his CI practice in addition to his background as a bodyworker in myo-fascial release. His performance work has been presented in Estonia at The Imagining Bodies Symposium, at the SF International Arts Festival, and the SEEDS Festival and (with Kristen Greco) E|MERGE residency at Earthdance. Daniel has also performed with Felix Ruckert in Berlin, and on a suspended welded sphere with Copenhagen’s Live Art Installations (formerly Half Machine). He has performed full evening improvisations with Nita Little and Erika Tsimbrovsky in SF. His approach to CI is one of constant research into the expansion of range and choice.
Contact Improvisation Class Series Teacher List for 2011/12:
November: Rossana Alves
December & January: Ali Woolwich
February: Ralf Jaroschinski
March: Miriam Wolodarski
