Contact Weekly: Ottawa Contact Improvisation Class & Jam

Contact Dance as a Practice of Connection, Wisdom & Freedom

We meet weekly almost every Sunday of the year - to practice the art of Contact Improvisation, with instructor Kristen Lewis and, occasionally, visiting guest artists.

Sundays, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Winter/Spring/Summer Term: January 11, 2026 to July 26, 2026.

Class is held on the gorgeous wood floors at the Ottawa Dance Directive, 2 Daly Street in Downtown Ottawa.

$25 on eventbrite.

Sunday contact dance class - a fixture.

The context for the practice in general is this: to experience Contact Improvisation as a rigorous but also extremely fun/interesting artform, one that meets a variety of needs hard to meet elsewhere:

1) a chance to explore deep, embodied habits of relating to self and other;

2) intellectual curiosity about the play of bodies in relation to space/gravity/other bodies;

3) an experiment in improvised touch in a container in which the intention is not to form romantic partnership, hence freeing touch from the expectation of pleasing/being pleased;

4) an artistic offering in which the creative act gets made then dissolved, over and over; 5) a chance to experience the ground of reality without the intervention of linguistic habits and in the presence of other bodies, hence facilitating deep but not dissociative meditative states;

6) just a really fun time to get weird and deep with a group of others actually interested in something as radical and brave as improvising movement in close contact with other bodies.

The teacher: Kristen Lewis (www.kristenlewis.org) approaches contact dance as a vital way to uncover deep habits of the self in relation to other, and to remake those habits along more expansive, life-serving lines--done playfully, gently, with rigour, with discipline, and with style.

Her dance practice goes back to the early 1980s and 1990s in Halifax at Halifax Dance, the Halifax Ballet Theatre, and the Maritime Academy of Gymnastics/Nova Gold, evolved through various phases in the interim, including a period of intense practice and study on Salt Spring Island from 2010 to 2017, with immersion in the Laban work and the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

Her choreograpic and performance art work has appeared in venues as diverse as: The Dance Centre and What Lab in Vancouver, All Saint's Church on Salt Spring Island, the Movement Studio at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C., the Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, ON, the Wall Street Bull (top of) in New York City, the Marine Venus monument in Halifax, N.S., the Alchemy Fest in Ottawa, and at the International Theatre Research Conference in Iceland (remotely via her colleague the late theatre artist Kit Danowski)--and points in between.

When not teaching Contact Improvisation, Kristen is either engaged in conversation with friends, meditating, navigating the delights of life as a newbie divorce lawyer, teaching ballet, studying martial arts, and, also, doing quite a bit of lounging, when possible.

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