The Winter Festival (Saturday & Sunday Afternoons, 2:30-5pm, Registration/Warm-up: 2pm)
Expansive opportunities for dancers of mixed experience levels.
Choose two classes from six options including: Pure Contact, 1-On-1 Instruction,
Tango for Contactors, Contact & Body Mind Centering, Labs, and Mixed Level Contact.
The Fundamentals Intensive (Sat. & Sun. Mornings, 10:30am-1pm, Registration/Warm-up: 10am)
BEGINNERS WELCOME, APPROPRIATE FOR ALL - Two mornings covering the foundational concepts of Contact Improv. Use this opportunity to better understand the common language that makes this dance safer and accessible for all experience levels. (This part limited to 30 people, please register early to assure your spot.)
The Jams - All Jams Open to the Public, Bring Your Friends!
Practice the form! Included with any full Saturday-PLUS-Sunday registration.
Welcome Jam, Friday, 8-10pm
Performance PLUS Live Music & Dance Jam w/ Stephen Katz, Saturday, 7:30-11pm
Closing Structure and Harvesting of what we learned, Sunday, 5-6pm
Everything at One Location - South Boston Yoga, 36 West Broadway, Boston.
Directly at the Broadway Stop on the Red Line (plenty of parking available, too).
At this venue, there is a large space for evening jams and multiple studios available in the afternoons for Festival choices. There is only a single studio open in the mornings, hence the limit of 30 people for the Fundamentals Intensive.
Directions and parking info are here at the South Boston Yoga website.
Schedule Details
Friday, February 11, 2011
Welcome Jam and Registration, 8-10pm.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Registration for Fundamentals Intensive and Warm-up, 10am
Fundamentals Class with Moti Zemelman, promptly at 10:30am - 1pm
Lunch Break (CIB provides light snacks or bring your own), 1-2:30pm
Registration for Winter Festival and Warm Up, 2-2:30pm
Winter Festival Classes, promptly at 2:30 - 5pm
Dinner Break (on your own), 5-7:30pm
Teachers' Performance followed by Music and Dance Jam, w/ Steve Katz 7:30 - 11pm
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Registration and Warm Up, 10am
Fundamentals Class with Moti Zemelman, promptly at 10:30am - 1pm
Lunch Break (CIB provides light snacks or bring your own), 1-2:30pm
Registration for Winter Festival and Warm-up, 2-2:30pm
Winter Festival Classes, promptly at 2:30 - 5pm
Closing Structures (for everyone, includes some dancing), 5-6pm
Pricing Details (Register Early, this event has sold out for the past 3 years)
Winter Festival (afternoons and both evenings): $45 pre-paid/$55 at the door
Fundamentals Intensive (mornings and both evenings): $45 pre-paid/$55 at the door
Expanded Deluxe Festival (all of the above): $75 pre-paid/$100 at the door
Friday Evening Jam: $8-10 sliding scale
Saturday Evening Performance and Live Music and Dance Jam: $10-$15 sliding scale
Single Class Registration (walk in only, space permitting): $30
Registration Details
CIB has joined the 21st century with online registration! Please go to our
REGISTRATION FORM, where you can register, select your classes and pay with a credit card or find check mailing instructions. If, for some reason, you cannot use the form, please email registrations@contactimprovboston.com or call Elizabeth at 617-851-5192.
Class descriptions:
Fundamentals Intensive (Sat. & Sun. Mornings, 10:30am-1pm, Registration/Warm-up, 10am)
The First Step - Staying Present (The Only Step!) with Moti Zemelman
The thing that makes every dance unique is our being there! As our CI skills evolve, we begin to trust in this fact. We learn to answer the question “What do I do now?” by letting the dance decide. You are either awake or asleep, there is no in-between. This workshop offers strategies for staying awake in our dances, as well as introducing tools to become aware of opportunities for lifts, leaps, and connections that would otherwise pass us by.
Winter Festival Choices (Saturday & Sunday Afternoons, 2:30-5pm, Registration/Warm-up, 2pm)
Mixed Level Contact with Felice Wolfzahn (Saturday Afternoon)
Lightening and Deepening
This class will explore contact improvisation with a focus on the “depth of touch". Initially, we'll play with dances that inhibit giving full weight to see what new pathways emerge. We'll see how playing “on the edge” of light weight can offer new possibilities and choices for movement and connection. We'll also delve into the deeper realms and see how we can use the light touch to inform the fuller pathways of sharing full weight. Some experience with Contact Improvisation will be helpful.
Contact and BMC with Christine Cole (Saturday Afternoon)
Moving the Plant Body
Delving into the gentle strength of trees, we will be investigating root systems, the ability to rise away from gravity (turgidity) and the draw towards the light. Using Body-Mind Centering methods of exploration we will warm ourselves into the plant realm: you may just end up growing like moss on your partners flank, hitting them with a dull thump, like a log onto the wet forest floor, or finding yourself in a growing entangelment of a root community. For more about Body-Mind Centering: http:/bodymindcentering.com/About/
Laboratory Session with Brando Bandes (Saturday Afternoon)
This offering is for those who have a foundation of skills in CI and an invested and consistent practice in the form. Labbing is a structure for CI practicioners who want to experiment with ideas/questions and challenge their dancing with a group of their peers. This offering will have three parts: I will lead a short lab as one example of how a lab could be led. We will then discuss the purpose of labbing, how it can be used as a tool to improve your dance and your articulation of the form, as well as the varieties of lab structures and how labbing can build a dedicated ongoing practice group. Finally, we will leave time for ideas/questions from the group and will create a lab (or several labs) together. Coming with ideas and questions is encouraged.
Mixed Level Contact with Catherine Musinsky (Sunday Afternoon)
Harnessing the Electric Body Train: Reflex, Impulse & Reaction in Contact Improv
Contact is an awareness sport. We will observe and follow the sources of our own movement impulses, be they from instinct, intellect, or response. We'll focus on the electrical nature of our impulses and follow the electron streams these impulses beget. We will ride, follow through, meet, merge and flow apart.
Tango for Contact Improv Dancers with Daniel Trenner (Sunday Afternoon)
The Argentine Tango and Contact Improvisation share the same underlying physical vocabulary of connection; body to body, center to center, soul to soul. The communities of dancers that organize and practice the forms, in the USA at least, also share great commonalities.
In this class we will warm up with familiar vocabulary of Improv, and touch base with a familiar dialogue of connection. Then we will explore aspects of Tango's embrace that will give the forms their commonality. Tango dancers often study for years, often gaining quite sophisticated vocabularies of steps, without ever fully embodying the "connection" that contactors understand as a basic skill.
So lastly, we will attempt to share the walking steps of tango in a way that contact dancers may find fluid, engaging, and hopefully palatable to their free form selves.
One-on-Ones: with Festival Teachers and Friends (Sunday Afternoon)
Sign up for a chance to work with a teacher individually for a 15-20 minute lesson!
You can ask a question, work on a particular interest or ask to be taught something specific, or you can just have a dance! There will also be a separate space for jamming during the time when you aren't in your "one-on-one" lesson, so the exploration can continue informally. Sign-ups will be at the festival.
Housing Details
Out-of-towners are welcome and encouraged! We can arrange housing for you in the homes of local community members. Please register early and complete the "Housing Needed" section on the
on-line registration form. Mark Shultz is handling the logistics of housing. If you have questions, e-mail him:
housing@ContactImprovBoston.com
To contact the Registrar or Event Coordinators with questions,
Teacher Bios
Brando Bandes received his Masters Degree in Education from Smith College and is a teaching artist/performer at Enchanted Circle Theater. Brando has been researching and teaching movement practices for over 10 years and has taught and performed CI throughout the United States, Europe, Israel, and Guatemala. For the past five years Brando has been actively engaged in the programming at Earthdance: Dance Retreat Center and has facilitated several major festivals, jams, symposiums, and events at Earthdance. Most recently Brando has taught in Spain, Ontario, Colorado, and has been invited to host the Moab Jam in Utah. He also has taught master classes at Springfield College and Smith College.
Catherine Musinsky has been practicing CI since 1995. Contact Improvisation was the exhilarating answer to a tired feeling she got doing and watching Modern Dance in the MFA program at NYU Tisch School for the Arts. She's been riding the Contact wave ever since. Catherine has traveled with Prometheus, Sabrina Peck Performance Co and Beth Soll, and has choreographed and improvised many performances over the years. She also shoots and edits photos and videos, creates websites, illustrates for science, makes 3D animations, and teaches dance, contact improvisation and yoga in the Boston area. This fall she created the solo "Unchastened" that has been made by director Brynmore Williams into a film about breast cancer, henna, dance and healing
www.unchastened.com.
Christine Cole is a 30 year veteran of Contact Improvisation, as a dancer and teacher. She served on the faculty of the School for Body-Mind Centering and has taught and performed in Northampton, NYC an Europe through out her life. Contact is alive for her - she enjoys the immediacy, grace and ridicularity of it and explores new ways to become more present with the dance.
Daniel Trenner was a mover and shaker in the Jazz, Tap, Modern, and Post Modern dance worlds, from the late 70s until the early 90s. He happened upon Tango in Buenos Aires in 1986 while he was there teaching Jazz and Improvisation, and being one of the founders of Contact Community in Buenos Aires. He was also one of the first dozen young people involved in tango's revival. He studied with, interviewed, filmed and organized for many of the Milongueros, the older generation dancers. He has been called a “Johnny Appleseed of Tango” for his 20 years of touring as a tango teacher. He was one of the early proponents of teaching tango by its elements, and created the first Tango tours to Buenos Aires. He is presently teaching at Smith College, Amherst College, Mt Holyoke College, and the Performing Arts High School (PVPA). Read more about Daniel Trenner at www.danieltrenner.com
Felice Wolfzahn is a veteran teacher of Contact Improvisation. She is currently an adjunct dance professor in the five college dance program as well as other colleges in New England and has performed and taught internationally with such partners as Daniel Lepkoff, Catherine Sands and Patrick Crowley among others. She holds a BFA from The Juiliard School and an MFA from Bennington College. Felice combines her investigations in Contact Improvisations, with Authentic Movement and group scores.
Felice is interested in how dance can be instructional as well as healing and incorporate the whole self into its investigations.
Moti Zemelman, MFA, began practicing Contact Improv 22 years ago. Over the past 15 years he has taught and performed across USA, Canada, Guatemala, Mexico, Europe and Israel. In 2008-09 he taught as Professor of Dance at the Instituto Naciónal de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. As a musician Moti plays vocal-electronic music for Contact Jams and in 2007 released his debut CD, Doorwaves. Other training includes yoga, Action Theater, modern dance, and clowning. He also designs and moderates the international Contact Improv resource website, www.contactimprov.com.
© Catherine Musinsky 2010