Contact Improvisation
Educational Lab
winter 2025

Deepening on the Principles of Contact Improvisation (CI)
First 3-month Cycle of Weekly Training CI Classes

With Christina Klissiouni

Suitable for:

Dancers and individuals with movement experience, both professionals and amateurs.

Workshop Dates:

9/1, 16/1, 23/1, 30/1, 6/2, 13/2, 20/2, 27/2, 6/3, 13/3, 20/3, 27/3

For your participation in this lab series of classes, a continuous exploration of CI developing skills based on the fundamentals is required. Dancers and individuals with a background in somatic practices, martial arts, yoga, or similar disciplines are also welcome to join.

Contact Improvisation is an evolution of contemporary dance and improvisation, widely practiced internationally. This year, we are celebrating 52 years of CI. The practice is based on an open framework that combines somatic techniques, martial arts, contemporary dance, performance art, and therapeutic approaches based on the meditative aspects of movement. It focuses on the dancer’s physical training, cultivating a body that is both “soft and strong”. The dancer’s skills develop through the sensorial awareness and one’s expansion of physical perception brought by touch and expanded attention.

Our goal is for the learning of this technique to be an exploratory process, where the dancer can apply their experience from contemporary dance or any other movement system in a creative way, allowing themselves to reposition and redefine their relationship with dance and self-expression.

In this lab, we propose a systematic approach with weekly lessons designed to deepen and expand our experience of Contact Improvisation. We’ll focus on our relationship with gravity, exploring the forces that shape our movements. Using somatic techniques, we create an awareness-based framework that enhances the functionality of our movement. We connect the center to the periphery, as we cultivate sensorial movement perception; we nurture the flow of energy, drawing on Steve Paxton’s practice of ‘small dance’—the meditative quality in CI.

Topics we explore include:

  • The practice of listening and expanding attention in an environment that is constantly in motion.
  • Developmental movement.
  • Counterbalancing, rolling, sliding, surfing
  • Elasticity and connectivity (fascia web system).
  • Support with flow.
  • Balancing forces.
  • The relationship between the center and its periphery.
  • Awareness of habits embedded in body posture.
  • The neutral space and its importance for movement expression.
  • Playing with gravity, pressure, and variations in energy intensity, we explore how the tone of our touch and the way we meet another’s body create a framework for kinesthetic dialogue. This becomes a vocabulary of communication rooted in connection, where we experience ourselves deeply as our physical responses are mirrored by the other dancer through contact.
  • Techniques/skills that allow the dancer to suspend in the air effortlessly while being supported. We practice movement patterns that enhance connections in the body to allow natural movement expression, such as rolling, spiraling, ways of using leverage for support, dynamically falling with momentum, jumping, and balancing forces.
  • How can we creatively and safely shift the ways we react or respond to movement?
  • Stage presence and interpretation. Improvisational scores.

Contact Improvisation fosters fluid, three-dimensional movement, allowing the journey to unfold organically and functionally within the body. The dancer flows effortlessly, shifting between levels, ways of support, playing with rhythm and time, dynamics, and directions. Each movement choice is guided by the body’s structures and the relationships of forces within it, shaped by our somatic self-awareness. Through this process, improvisation invites us to explore the unconscious patterns that influence our decision making. Grounded in research, curiosity, and playfulness, Contact Improvisation broadens our expressive potential. Dance becomes captivating, rich with meaning, and creates space for the new, the changing, and the transformative.

Left top 2: Photographer Thaleia Nouarou
Left bottom: Photographer Sissy Morfi

Gallery: Teaching intensive workshop in CI Festival – Freiburg, 2014
Photographer: Patrick Beelaert

Gallery:

The thinking body,
the body that speaks

payment by bank deposit

Piraeus, IBAN: GR31 0171 0030 0060 0301 0117 551
Or in AlphaBank, IBAN: GR30 0140 3530 3530 0210 1025 504

Deposit process

The commission of 4 euros is borne by the depositor. If the amount is deposited from another bank - it needs to be added to the total amount. At the same time, please write the justification in your statement.