CONNECTION AND CHOICE THROUGH SYSTEM OF SUPPORT

In this intensive we will research 4 body systems: skeletal, respiratory, fascial and digestive, and how attention to each one can support more connection and choice in our dancing. Each day we will highlight one of the body systems through solo
and hands on research that will evolve into contact improvisation. In addition to investigating each of the body systems we will explore the interconnectivity of the systems and how as we dance our attention can flow between systems to weave a beautiful tapestry of interconnectivity and creative choices.
Themes we will explore:
Skeletal: ground and rebound, accuracy in alignment through the bones and joints, whole skeleton organization to earth and space through the point of contact. Respiratory: pathway of breath from the tip of the nostrils to the pelvic floor,
lightness, space, inner/outer, offering/receiving, yes/and/improvisation Fascial: the largest sensory system, nuanced communication about weight, direction and tempo with ourselves and our partners through different layers of
fascial touch(skin, superficial, deep, periosteum).
Digestive: relationship of mouth/jaw to the belly and the pelvic floor, receiving nourishment/offering expression, differentiating areas of contrasting tone in the body

THE SOMATIC DIMENSION OF CONTACT IMPROVISATION

The term “somatic” comes from the Greek “soma,” meaning body . Somatic practices invite us to rediscover bodily intelligence: it’s not just about moving the body, but about listening to it, perceiving it, and understanding the subtlest languages that emerge through movement.
The intensive aims to explore the somatics of Contact by recognizing it as a somatic practice in its own right. We will investigate the somatic aspects through his language, his vision and his unique way of generating bodily knowledge. The founders of Contact Improvisation deliberately left the discipline open, without rigid boundaries, encouraging freedom of expression. In this space of possibility, everyone is invited to define their own personal framework for exploration and research within a broader framework.
In Contact Improvisation, “Somatics and Research coincide,” and the reason lies in that intricate process called improvisation . The body’s responses are simultaneously a somatic process and a continuous discovery that fuels the dance.
This vision will explore the physiological and behavioral processes of the Nervous System, the Fascia, the dynamics of patterns, the state of the body/mind, touch, and how all these systems intertwine to generate a creative and truly improvised dance.

LISTENING FROM THE GROUND OF JOY

What if the ground of our meeting is joy — a place from which we listen? What if we allow questions to shape the space between us, letting them guide how we move, meet, and imagine what comes next?
These classes invite you to explore movement rooted in Contact Improvisation and the Ilan Lev Method. We will work with images, playfulness, and the joy of meeting in motion.
Our practice supports a state in which movement can be witnessed as it unfolds — invited by questions rather than controlled. From this place, dancing becomes an act of attunement: a dialogue with the unknown, shaped by presence and
responsiveness. Through touch, weight, and shared attention, we will explore how grounding can open space for curiosity, trust, and joy. Together, we stay connected to ourselves while meeting the other, allowing joy to arise as a lived, embodied experience of being present in the dancing body. Together, we will explore solo and group practices of listening, attunement, and shared timing. We will sense how a collective body begins to emerge when we allow the future to speak through us.

SENSORY LANDSCAPES: SOLO & SOMATIC BODYWORK INTO CONTACT IMPROVISATION

This class is an invitation to sense, to slow down, and to let movement unfold from within.
Through somatic bodywork and solo explorations, we attune to the inner landscapes of breath, weight, and tissue—wakening a body that perceives before it moves.
From this grounded sensitivity, we expand into space, meeting gravity as a partner and discovering how inner contact becomes the ground for relational dance. Step by step, the solo transforms into an open field of awareness, where sensing,
touch, and improvisation weave together. Rooted in somatic principles of Feldenkrais method – the proposal allows Contact
Improvisation to emerge not as a technique, but as a living conversation between bodies, spaces, and sensations. We will take the time to move, to think and to share.

HOW WE SURVIVE OURSELVES

This contact improvisation workshop is a highly physical queer love-centered survival practice that is rooted in the physics and politics of we. We will consider the conditions of our bodies in relationship with the conditions of the current world
as we train skills (practical and fantastical) for surviving and thriving within a dance and beyond. We will take on contact improvisation as a generous and high-risk practice. We will build skills for navigating around that which has potential to be
fatal with skill, care, artistry, and accountability. We will use those skills to aim toward tenderness, wildness, and joy and see what happens. We will create spherical readiness to open pathways for multiple options in every moment. We will work with re-training the reflexes, falling and failing together, disorientation, specificity and subtlety of touch, tethering, endurance and duration, queering, impact, and more. We will sweat and we will listen – both more profusely than we
thought was possible. We will radically orient, disorient, and re-orient through the we and notice what emerges.
We will work in shifting constellations of we: solo, duet, trio, small group, whole group. This is a focused research space for people who are committed to questioning through the body and who are hungry to be in the unknown. We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with one another.

DANCE OF INTERBEING

We will experience our body as a continuous transforming-circulating-meeting-communicating process related to inner and outer environment.
Listening will be the door to experience ‘inter-being’ which is the nature of the universe. Contact improvisation is the great tool, map and state to be tuned to discover this inter-related-body which is dance of interbeing. We will dive into the active, physical and subtle listening state together with questions and curiosities.
When we listen fully, everything/every moments around and within us starts to reveal their music, dance and poem. we will discover what is happening and being created as an interconnected momentary body thourgh CI.
“Listening with the Whole Body” into a deeper inquiry of the textures, attitudes, and methodologies of in-betweenness, inter-being and interbody. This workshop explores the dance that arises between things with relationships – between events,landscapes, songs, and poems. It is a dance of contact improvisation where the body becomes the very space between, inviting participants into a process of attentive reading, deep listening, and embodied inquiry.
The human body itself is a living ecology-a dynamic confluence of elements, states, and flows. Within his living system, innumerable dimensions of betweenness emerge. Through Contact Improvisation, participants will engage in a rigorous and experiential investigation of these inter-relational dynamics-between bodies, within bodies, and across space and time.

This workshop invites dancers to immerse themselves in a journey of relational embodiment, where the individual self recedes, allowing the fullness of the in-between to come into presence through movement. We will experience that our dancing bodies are the continuously changing, growing and resonating with past and future supported by the safe fluid environment. Body as forest which embraces all the different living creatures such as all the cells, different systems,
organs will be investigated.
Relationship between inner and outer spaces, silence and dynamics, being filled and being emptied, listening and expressing, boundaries and beyond boundaries, centering and no-centering, rhythmic play through contemplativeness and playfulness will be researched together.
Touch, voice, somatic approach, Body-Mind Centering, Poong-gyung, GAMU, improvisation dance, contact, play, including solo research, partnering, writing, group work will be shared and played duriNg the workshop. Let’s dance together not to forget we are born to dance!
Areas of Inquiry Include:
Connection to the feet, Center-to-center relationship, Integration of head and tail, Relationships within structural axes, Fluid water body, The specificity and reciprocity of touch, The spatial-temporal dynamics of calling and being called, Circulation between form and flow, The interrelationship between dance and music, Dance as poetic writing and reading,
The potential to fully inhabit every moment and space, Sensory interstices, Simultaneity of stillness and dynamism, Spectrum between perception and action, The spatial-temporal dimensions of contact, Rooting and growing.

OMNIDIRECTIONAL NEGOTIATION

Often, while dancing, our awareness is dominated by one or two juicy points of contact, while many other touch events fly by unnoticed. In this class, we’ll experiment with ways to bring attention and curiosity to these “hidden” points of contact, and to engage with multiple points simultaneously. We will also experiment, in a playful way, with ways to hold different intentions than our partner(s) while still staying in contact and connection.

Approaching Contact Improvisation as a moving, open-ended question we’ll play with points of featherweight touch, points of short time duration, points which are ‘unnecessary’ for physical safety. At first glance those points of contact may not seem to have much to offer in function of doing something, but they can be a training ground for expanding an active attention, and an expanded attention has the possibility to lead us into unexpected movements and timings. Either way, this state of expanded, active attention is a particular pleasure for me and one of my main sources of joy in dancing Contact Improvisation.

Relaxing our goal orientation, we will look for the play and pleasure in small fulcrums, tiny resistances, physical disagreements and unexpected constellations of touch. 

COMMON BODY, DANCING PRESENCE

This workshop explores deep listening to the body and the encounter through Contact Improvisation, cultivating presence, intimacy, and subtle complicity. Participants explore to move without leading, trusting the body and the shared moment, experiencing intimacy as presence rather than intention. We will research on those different topics:
-Intimacy with Myself – Breath and body awareness, exploring each body part and integrating movement.
-Intimacy with the Other Through the Gaze – Meeting others through eye contact, exploring comfort and boundaries.
-Walking Synchronies: Creating a Common World – Hands on shoulders, one hand on pelvis, alternating hands, spirals and circles, exaggeration and creative chaos, returning to small gestures, role swaps, walking embrace.
-Presence and Common Sustain Facing a Partner – Mutual support and sustained presence on the floor.
-Emerging Joints: The Connected Body – Mobilization of head, torso, pelvis, and legs, exchanging roles, then unfolding into free dance.
-Trio: Exploring Neutral Intimacy Through Touch and Movement – Lying observation, balance and rocking, extremity flow, simultaneous limb mobilization, active movement, directed movement, role reversal and support.
-From Ground to Chaos – Pairs descend and ascend to the floor in progressively shorter times while maintaining contact.
-Trios: Neutral Transmission – A neutral center transmits information between bodies, tuning subtle movement and adjusting roles.
The workshop cultivates a shared physical and emotional field — a common body sustained by attention, listening, and presence.

DISSOLVING

This class will begin with a somatic deep dive meditation to dissolve into our tissues, into the soil and with extra-terrestrial space. Dispersing and spreading we will explore our bodies as collections of force, coalescing, disassembling and assimilating. We will apply dissolving in how we touch and make contact with other surfaces and people and also explore dissolving in practices of giving and receiving weight, whereby attending to the spaces that precipitate between us, we will work on extending and sustaining the connection with our partners. By travelling through time, and coming and going between partners we will develop this work with weight, exploring aspects of falling, speed and momentum and making way for light buoyant dancing and floating forms of flight.

SMALL WINGS, BIG WINGS

Falling, and flying! Catching the momentum. Suspending the time. That’s for sure ! How ? We shall find out!
Let ́s give some more love and attention to our arms, to our beautiful wings, which can carry us into gracious flights and effortless lifts. We can paint and brush, swing and reach. We can expand our dancing kinesphere through our wings – they are continuing up until the sky!
Arms are an extension of our spine, rooted to our center, and the ground. Through arms we can navigate and invite directions, reach, counterbalance, lengthen. We can suspend, and hang in the air, we can stretch the time. We can enter into wonderful spirals and multi-dimensional spheres facilitated by our arms.
By regulating the tone on our arms, “frame of the arms”, and around our shoulder girdle, we can support different ways of lifting each other, moving dynamically through the space. Spiraling our hearts, and directing our wings – can facilitate
variety of pathways to smooth shoulder lifts or smaller weight transitions!
We will use different methods to learn about our arms – explorative bodywork, experiential anatomy, imaginary landscapes, specific technical information about functionality of lifts and mobile support. Pathways, patterns and magic !
Let’s find out more about our wings!

EVERYTHING COMES ALIVE

Jules Beckman, is an transdisciplinary performing artist and teacher from the USA living in France since 2002. He has been making work collaboratively, teaching, and touring steadily in dance, theater, performance and circus since
1987. He is artistic director of transminuko (https://www.transminuko.com) Some collaborations include Needcompany, Collectif AOC, Libertivore, I.D.A./Mark Tompkins, Cahin-caha, Lhasa De Sela, Contraband/Sara Shelton, Anna Halprin,
Jess Curtis, Stanya Kahn, Stephanie Maher and Keith Hennessy.
Jules’ work has brought him to thirty countries. He has taught at Centre National des Art du Cirque, Impulstanz, DOCH, University of Dance and Circus, Canaldanse, MADE in France, Connecticut College, Prescott College New College of California,and several Contact Improv Festivals including Freiburg, Grenoble, Barcelona, Moab, Budapest and Ibiza.

“I began learning CI in San Francisco in 1988, as a member of Sara Shelton-Mann’s performance group Contraband. We were passionate about mixing CI with other forms, experimenting wildly, using CI to respond to spiritual and political
concerns. CI remains a context for liberation and community building, a laboratory of hybrid play, a physical prayer, a contemporary expression of the ecstatic dance lineage, a radical practice of decentralized power, an apt metaphor for myriad forms of relationship, a hothouse of connection and empowerment.”

C.I. POETIC PERFORMANCE

This workshop will invite participants to practice putting the typical and special physical, attentional, interactive and somatic understandings characteristic of Contact Improvisation practice into a broad compositional context.
I propose: To dance a lot in pairs and to & jam a lot. To watch each other from inside our dances, as watcher-participants in dances and jams, and as audiences.
To treasure the internal, somatic experience while emphasizing attention to the objective reality of the dance that exists beyond the private realm. To avoid proposing rules or methods. To offer focused and disciplined ways to develop sensitivity to compositional parameters .
To allow the detailed studies that we practice to emerge from and be gifted back to the magical, poetic, intuitive practice of improvising in movement. To integrate the specifics of Contact Improvisation into a general field of attention to the
parameters of presence, time and space. To explore phrasing, vertical space, proximity, intention levels, adaptive-directive
phases of movement, dispositions towards space, addressing levels. To dedicate ourselves to taking armour off rather than putting it on because armour resists transformation and lack of transformation limits compositional and
performance possibilities.
To notice that armour isn’t always hard – it can also be soft. To study the breath because it is always a fundamental feature of the composition and of the complex poetic meaning, whether we notice it or not when we dance – an attentive watcher is always tuned to the breath of the dancer, and through the breath to the poetics of the dance.
To deepen the sense of our dancing as already performance rather than creating a performance.
The idea of performance proposes an audience. It proposes a desire to make sense, to have structure, to have grammar and syntax that invites a watcher into a world that has coherence and transformation; a world that may resonate with the watcher. The dancer is the first watcher of their own dance, just as the poet is the first reader of their poem and the musician is the first listener to their music. The watcher also wants to make sense of what they watch.