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CONTACT IMPROVISATION

Anker 1
What is contact improvisation?

For me, contact improvisation is encounter, listening to impulses, leaning against one another, dancing, jumping, rolling, playing with gravity, leading and following, quality of touch, immersion in the flow of movement, pause from assessments, contact, being in the moment, surprise, unplanned. ..

How can I learn contact improvisation?

Steve Paxton, one of the founders of Contact Improvisation, sums it up, I think, when he says "You can't teach Contact Improvisation - the dance is the teacher"

"You can't teach Contact Improvisation - the dance is the teacher"

Because I am most interested in the game, the unexpected and improvisation in contact improvisation, in my workshops I teach helpful principles such as deep grounding with the earth, reversibility, shedding weight, the "rolling point" and leaving a lot of leeway To find out for yourself with it. Learning takes place in motion and in contact with one another.

It's not about acrobatics or the "right" moove, although sometimes we can find ourselves at dizzying heights unexpectedly. The magic of this "dance form" lies in the immediacy of what happens when I meet you in your vitality.

At a jam, I lead a warm-up for about the first half an hour, which should support us with our attention to arrive completely at home, to allow the body to be soft and permeable and to come into contact with one another with ease.

Then there is free improvisation.

In order to be able to better listen to the movement impulses, contact improvisation was originally danced without music. I don't use music on my jams or we are accompanied by wonderful live musicians.

I don't offer any jams or workshops in Freiburg yet-

but can still come!

Anker 2
What is the movement play room?

My son always wanted to go to the jams. He likes to dance contact improvisation for his life. Since the jams are usually too late for the adults and the children also bring a very unique quality through their love of movement and liveliness, I created a jam especially for children and adults called the Movement-Play-Room. It is intended for all small and large people who want to meet without words, with their liveliness and touchability. We let our bodies talk to each other - sometimes wild, sometimes tender. There is room for everything, the bully and the meek, the strength, the thundering waves of joy of life, the exhaustion and the silence.

We meet directly in physical contact, as in contact improvisation, and I also provide a little selected material in order to inspire the imagination and play opportunities.

In Freiburg I do not yet offer a space for movement and play-

but can still come!

Anker 3
What is political about contact improvisation?

In dance it becomes clear: what we can create together far exceeds the possibilities of the individual. In doing so, however, we do not get very far with the desire to control. Rather, it is about surrender, letting go, allowing liveliness, being awake and letting it happen. We experience and feel these new abilities directly in our body and I believe that this anchoring of the new paradigm in ourselves can help us to go new ways in our daily life that contribute to the change in the world Takes a direction that serves life ...

Contactimprovisation_Freiburg

To spread these ideas, my colleague Heike Pourian and I created a new format:

 

"Too good to be true ..." the lecture danced

We dance contact improvisation. We are giving a lecture. Simultaneously.

The bystanders in the circle around us see, hear and feel what it could mean to live in a world

that our hearts know is possible.

In the meantime, the danced lecture has already been danced over 25 times, in different line-ups, at conferences, wearing gift culture, at Transition Town movements and community projects. If you want to invite us to show the lecture as part of an event, you can find more information here. We are very happy that the dance we performed reached the hearts of so many people.

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