7-Week Contact Improvisation Series with Em Liptow and Len Foyle, Open Level
Schedule
Tue May 14 2024 at 07:00 pm
Location
Shared Visions Retreat Center - Murphey School | Hillsborough, NC
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Tuesdays May 14-June 25 7-9pm
Shared Visions Retreat Center (LAC Satellite Space)
3717 Murphy School Road, Durham, NC
This series provides an immersive dive into the fundamental skills, concepts, and techniques of Contact Improvisation practice, providing a solid foundation for a lifetime of play. It is a great opportunity to get your CI practice started for the first time or to deepen your engagement with the form. An incredible group of humans will come together to dance, grow, and learn together over the 7 weeks!
We will start from the ground up building awareness, listening, trust, and safety. By the end of the series you’ll be playing freely in solo, duet, and group improvisations, and finding your flow with weight sharing, momentum, and lifts. Over the course of the 7 weeks you’ll gain the skills you need to:
* Navigate emotional safety, boundaries, and consent in touch-based dancing.
* Share weight safely.
* Move with more efficiency, ease, and creative expression.
*Finding many doorways into a dance - working with the elements, body systems, and imagination to find fresh states and pathways.
* Developing dances slowly from a place of listening through bodywork and specific practices of attention.
* CI as a social form - bringing our whole selves to the practice and discovering the play, rest, and vitality that the form can bring.
ABOUT CONTACT IMPROVISATION:
Contact Improvisation is an improvisational art-sport with technique focused on touch, weight-sharing, momentum, and an ethic of experimentation with both physical forces and relational dynamics. It’s also a container to research perceptual flexibility, state-shifting, intimacy, mutuality, community, and embodied poetics. While duets are often the most known or visible aspect of CI practice, we practice partnering with physical forces, several people at once, the entire group, imagery, and the space around us. Professional dancers train in the form to improve their partnering skills and generate new material. Amateurs find community, strength, softness, agility, expression, and body-mind-spirit growth. While anyone can touch and improvise without taking a class, the techniques presented in this class will open the doors to more connected and athletic dances, give you basic fluency in a language of interaction shared by practitioners all over the world, and build the groundwork for a community of deep practice here in the Triangle.
DETAILS:
* Please arrive 5-20 minutes early to be ready to begin at 7:00.
* No experience necessary. All body types, ages, and abilities are invited to participate. We will be rolling and moving on the floor and transitioning up and down off of the floor. If you have concerns about the physicality of the class, email us to ask if it seems like a good fit for you~ [email protected]
* Wear comfortable clothing that covers your shoulders and knees (a t-shirt plus sweats or pajama pants is ideal). Layers are also nice since activities will range from quiet and meditative to vigorous.
* Knee pads will be necessary for the class– you can purchase here. https://dancekneepads.com/products/natural-kneepads-pair
THE LAC MAY/JUNE CONTACT IMPROVISATION ECOSYSTEM:
7 Flavors of Jam: Monday Night Jamming Series~ Each week there will be warm-ups provided by different experienced teachers, live improvised music with different musicians, and plenty of time for open jamming and play. Sign up for the entire series to support the event and reduce the per-jam cost (we prefer this!) or drop-in when you can.
MONDAY NIGHT FB EVENT LINK:
https://fb.me/e/gYcJFDkIF
7-Week Spirit and Technique of Contact Improvisation Series on Tuesdays (Open Level) and Wednesdays (Intermediate+)~ Starting in mid-May, Em Liptow and Len Foyle will be co-teaching an open-level/beginner-friendly CI series on Tuesday nights and Coda Badamo-Connors and Toni Craige will be co-teaching a series for more experienced dancers on Wednesday nights. Both series are 7 weeks long, and students must sign up for the entire series~ they will be nourishing learning experiences and spaces to build community connection.
TUESDAY NIGHT FB EVENT LINK:
https://fb.me/e/4jIARHukd
WEDNESDAY NIGHT FB EVENT LINK:
https://fb.me/e/7KKZKPscP
Weekend Events~ We will be hosting our signature 2.5 hour “Contact Improvisation Fundamentals” workshop on Sunday, 4/28 from 3:30-6pm. Come try CI for the first time or re-engage with the basics from a new perspective. This is an ideal way to try out Len and Em’s teaching before committing to the 7-week Tuesday night series.
CI FUNDAMENTALS LINK.
https://fb.me/e/4mJIowCFB
See full CI offerings at LAC here: https://www.livingartscollective.com/contact-improvisation/
COST:
* Class is $140/210/280 sliding scale for the 7 classes ($20/30/40 per class). $210 is the suggested amount, $140 is for those with less access to resources, and $280 is for those with more access to resources. Please pay the highest amount you can comfortably afford. If you’d like to come but cannot afford the lowest price tier, please reach out for a further discount. If you are moved to contribute to a scholarship fund, also let us know that.
* Generally speaking, you must register for the full series in order to participate-- we've found that having a stable group builds safety and depth. Very advanced movers can drop in on a case-by-case basis. Email us to inquire~ [email protected]
REGISTRATION:
* The series is capped at 24 and will fill to capacity. Register early!
Registration is at the bottom of this page: https://www.livingartscollective.com/contact-improvisation/
* There are discounts available for registering for this series early (15%MAYJUNEEARLY), and for two or more series early (30%MAYJUNE2+). Earlybird discounts expire at midnight on Monday, April 29th. You can also get 15% off for registering for 2+ series later in the process (15%MAYJUNE2+). Use codes when you check out via our online system, Acuity.
ABOUT THE TEACHERS~
LEN FOYLE
Len Foyle (they/them), BFA, is a dance maker, improviser, and farmer who engages with the moving body as a source of queer pleasure, social disruption, and self-sustainability. Their perspective is informed by their studies at the London Contemporary Dance School, Virginia Commonwealth University, workshops, jams, and residencies around the world, Aikido, and their years spent in communion with the land and elements, growing food and cultivating the regeneration of soil.
Len is fascinated by the inherent queerness of CI: the proposition and acceptance of failure and disorder, the opportunity to build and nurture worlds that disrupt patriarchal and colonial understandings of bodies and relationships, and the mercurially playful and whimsical nature of jamming.
EM LIPTOW
emily liptow (she/they) is a dancer, performing artist, and facilitator from the watershed of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. She recently moved to Durham to pursue an MFA in Dance/Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis and has been delighted to be a part of the vibrant dance ecosystem here. Following a feeling, she’s found her way into contact improvisation communities on the east coast, Oberlin, Costa Rica, Italy, and Germany. Alongside CI, their practice is shaped by capoeira, Butoh, circle singing, and devised theatre, and their research swirls around sensory experience, ritual, thresholds, and intergenerational community. For em, CI has been a container for study and play, nurturing intimacy with the body, gravity, and neurodivergent ways of being. Moving with other bodies is one of their most favorite things to do, though dancing with trees comes in as a very close second.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER/HOST~ LIVING ARTS COLLECTIVE:
The series is presented by Living Arts Collective, an intersection for artistically embodied experiences. Creating spaces for the exploration and development of artistic freedom and peaceful living. Based in Durham, NC.
Website here: https://www.livingartscollective.com/
CI events here: https://www.livingartscollective.com/contact-improvisation/
Photo credit- Toni Craige
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Where is it happening?
Shared Visions Retreat Center - Murphey School, 4729 Old NC-10, Durham, NC 27705-8519, United States,Hillsborough, North CarolinaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
