Contact Improvisation Weekend Intensive
About this Event
Dive deeper into Contact Improvisation
Join Colours in Contact for a day and a half of movement, learning, experimentation, play, and connection - an immersive experience designed to take you deeper into your contact improvisation practice while sharing the space with a vibrant and diverse community of movers.
This isn’t just a day of classes. It’s a chance to spend extended time in the practice: learning new skills, asking questions, tinkering with ideas, dancing, resting, thinking, playing, and discovering what happens when we give ourselves the time and space to really explore.
We’ll spend the first day moving through a rich mix of facilitated sessions and open exploration, with plenty of opportunities to take what we learn directly into practice. Expect spirals, spinning and advanced lifts, heart-led movement, creative inquiry, a contact improv lab, and lots of time to dance and experiment together. We’ll close the day with a community dinner, then come back together on Sunday for a jam with the broader Colours in Contact community, giving you even more space to integrate, play, and let the practice unfold.
Who is this for?
This intensive is geared toward intermediate to advanced contact improv dancers, as well as professional dancers and experienced movers who are interested in diving deeper into the practice.
You should already have a foundation in contact improv and be comfortable exploring weight-sharing, partnering, and improvisational movement. Some sessions will involve more advanced material, including lifts and spinning pathways, while others will invite depth, curiosity, creativity, and deeper exploration of your own practice.
What we’ll explore
Across the intensive, we’ll move between skill-building, creative exploration, conversation, and open practice. You’ll have opportunities to work with:
Catching the Spin: Explore shoulder lifts, spinning around your base’s head, and spiralling pathways through lifts, developing the timing, awareness, and physical skills to catch and ride the spin.
The Quiet Roar: Awakening Instinct & Heart: Drawing from Pablo's Mayan Kaqchikel roots, we will explore the concept of k’u’x in order to connect to the heart as a place of vitality, feeling, connection, and knowing. We’ll explore heart-led movement and the relationship between body, mind, spirit, and connection. This broadening and focusing of awareness will prove as a powerful tool to expand your capacity to atune and adapt rather than become stuck and disconnected in the unknown.
Contact Improv Lab: Bring something you’ve been wanting to figure out, a question you’ve been sitting with, or simply a willingness to play. We’ll tinker, experiment, share ideas, and learn from one another.
Practice & Open Jams: Take the material into your own dancing, revisit ideas, experiment with different partners, and discover what emerges when there’s time to actually play with what you’ve learned.
Why Colours in Contact?
Colours in Contact was created to build a contact improv community where more people can feel that there is a place for them. We’re committed to creating a diverse, welcoming space where different bodies, backgrounds, movement histories, perspectives, and ways of being can meet through the practice.
Our approach is rooted in curiosity, connection, consent, creativity, and play. We care about developing skills while also asking bigger questions: How do we listen? How do we adapt? How do we stay connected to ourselves while connecting with another person? And what becomes possible when we give ourselves permission to explore?
This immersion brings that spirit into a longer, deeper container, with time to learn, question, experiment, dance, and simply be together.
Meet your facilitators
Julien has been a longtime mover in the Colours in Contact community and has spent the past year or so travelling internationally, immersing himself in contact improv communities around the world, learning from different teachers and practitioners, and developing his own practice and teaching. He’s bringing those experiences back to Toronto to share what he’s been discovering.
Emma & Pablo are the co-founders of Colours in Contact, bringing over two decades of combined experience in Contact Improv and movement. Their practice is rooted in movement, connection, play, presence, and curiosity, alongside a strong commitment to diversity, care, communication, and empowerment. They create spaces where people can develop their skills, take risks, ask questions, and explore the possibilities of embodied connection while feeling supported to make their own choices and find their own way into the dance.
Together, we’ll create an immersive experience that moves between skill and sensation, structure and freedom, learning and play, with plenty of room for you to bring your own experience into the mix.
And then we keep dancing...
Your intensive doesn’t end when Saturday does. On Sunday, you’ll get to join our broader contact improv community for a jam, with a chance to integrate what you’ve explored, dance with new people, unwind, and enjoy the practice without an agenda as we close the weekend together.
Early bird pricing is available until September 30.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to write to us:
[email protected]
IG/FB @coloursincontact
(647) 985-7811
We can’t wait to move with you!
Saturday, October 17
🕑: 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Arrivals & Open Warm-Up
Host: Unguided
Info: Take some time to land, settle into the space, and warm up in whatever way your body needs. Please arrive early so you have plenty of time to arrive, prepare, and feel ready for the day ahead.
🕑: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Catching the Spin
Host: Facilitator: Julien
Info: Dive into the dynamic world of spinning lifts, exploring shoulder lifts, spiralling pathways, and spinning around your base’s head. Build the skills and timing needed to catch and ride the spin with more confidence.
🕑: 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Catching the Spin: Practice Jam
Host: Practice Jam
Info: Take what you’ve learned into an open practice jam, with space to play and integrate spinning lifts, spirals, and head-level pathways. A chance to revisit the material at your own pace.
🕑: 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Lunch Break
Host: Unstructured
Info: Take a break to refuel and recharge. Bring your lunch to enjoy in the studio, or head out to a nearby park or restaurant, just make sure you’re back in the studio by 1:15 pm, as we’ll be starting the afternoon session right on time.
🕑: 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
The Quiet Roar: Awakening Instinct & Heart
Host: Facilitator: Pablo
Info: Drawing on the Guatemalan tradition of k’u’x - the heart as a place of vitality, connection, and knowing - this session invites us into deeper relationship with ourselves and one another. We’ll explore what happens when we let the heart lead, bringing mind, body, and spirit into conversation and awakening our instinct to connect, feel, and come alive.
🕑: 03:00 PM - 03:10 PM
Short Break
Host: Unstructured
Info: A short pause to come back to yourself, reset, and refuel. Find a moment to ground, grab some water or a snack, and take a bio break before we dive back in.
🕑: 03:10 PM - 04:00 PM
Contact Improv Lab
Host: Facilitated by Julien, Pablo & Emma
Info: A space to tinker, question, experiment, and learn from one another. Bring an idea you’ve been wanting to explore, a question you’ve been puzzling over, or simply come ready to mess around, play, and discover alongside other curious movers.
🕑: 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Contact Improv Jam
Host: Open Jam
Info: We’ll begin with a 10-minute grounding start, led by Emma, giving us space to transition from a full day of learning and dancing into the open jam. Then, let everything you’ve explored throughout the day inform your dance; it'll be a space to integrate, play, experiment, and follow what’s present.
🕑: 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Group Dinner
Host: Group-Led
Info: Let’s keep the connection going off the dance floor, share a meal together and discuss the day. We’ll choose a spot in the neighbourhood and head out as a group for some good food, conversation, and community.
Sunday, October 18
🕑: 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Contact Improv Jam
Host: Facilitators: Emma & Pablo
Info: After a full day of learning, experimenting, and dancing together on the Saturday, we’ll open the space to the broader contact improv community. Use this jam to put your new skills into practice, revisit ideas from the intensive, explore with new partners, and let yourself unwind as we bring the weekend to a close.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 17.31 to CAD 139.78
