Contact Improvisation: A Queer High-Risk Practice with Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud

Name: Contact Improvisation: A Queer High-Risk Practice with Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud
Start: 2026-07-11T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-07-12T14:00:00+01:00
Location: Dance Base

Schedule

Sat, 11 Jul, 2026 at 10:00 am to Sun, 12 Jul, 2026 at 02:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Dance Base | Edinburgh, SC

Contact Improvisation: A Queer High-Risk Practice
with Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud
Saturday 11th July 10:00-17:00
Sunday 12th July 10:00-14:00
£70 Earlybird | £80 Standard
(Covers attendance for both days)
The core of this contact improvisation workshop is a queer survival practice. Drawing from our individual and collective identities, CI research, martial arts, and choreographic research we dive into the possibilities of what rigorous and playful contact improvisation can be. 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. The central question of our research is: What can we do together that we cannot do alone?
We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with moving together. This will be a queer, trans, and BIPoC centered space where everyone is welcome.
This intensive will be followed by Open CI Jam 15:00-17:00 - booking required.

Makisig Akin (they/them)
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany and Denver, Colorado. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I co-founded The Love Makers Company, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I have been practicing Contact Improvisation for 15 years and have taught in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, ImpulzTanz, Tanzfabrik Schule, Brown University and The Field Center, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. My orientation to teaching is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. www.makisigakin.com
Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; collaboration is central. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics nationally and internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik, ImPuls Tanz, Freiburg Contact Festival, Israeli Contact Improvisation Festival, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Italy Contact Festival, The Field Center, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among other. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers Company. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder and am trained in the Feldenkrais® Method.