Nita Little | Advanced CI Practitioner Workshops | Berkeley, CA

Name: Nita Little | Advanced CI Practitioner Workshops | Berkeley, CA
Start: 2025-09-26T10:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-30T16:00:00-07:00
Location: Berkeley Finnish Hall

Schedule

Fri, 26 Sep, 2025 at 10:00 am to Tue, 30 Sep, 2025 at 04:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Berkeley Finnish Hall | Berkeley, CA

Technical, Ethical, Creative, and Relational: Transcendent Practices in Contact Improvisation with Nita Little
3 Day: Sept 26-28, 10am-4pm - For advanced beginners and beyond
5 Day: Sept 26-30, 10am-4pm - For advanced CI practitioners
APPLY HERE: https://forms.gle/97iHPNayWFyPoLHf7
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Workshop Description: The study of CI conditions the physicality of our relational practices. Technical, Ethical, Creative, and Relational, this open workshop seeks to guide CI dancers into thickening the
breadth of choices that shape the dances we make through a physical understanding that with more choice our practice has more nuance. We will seek to understand the basis for the choices we currently are making and register when they are upholding our life values, and how. We seek congruence. There is a correspondence between our technical capacities and our ability to physically embody our values, including our creative play, and our capacity to communicate. This agreement between choice, action, and relational values is a defining reason to deepen our practice, always.
This workshop series includes a 3 day weekend open to advanced beginners and beyond. It concludes with two days with a small group of advanced CI practitioners engaged in technical, creative and compositional practices. Our work will culminate in a public performance (optional). From solo work to CI ensembles, this intensive will concentrate on understanding how the materials of CI can be shaped, scored, and contextualized to hold meaningful experience and communicative language, both for dancers and within the work’s artistic formation, its ground. Participants are invited to consider structuring work as well as performing in the work shaped by others.
Please refer to Nita’s Website for a description of skills levels in the practice of Contact Improvisation: https://www.nitalittle.com/levels
Dates+Times: Friday 9/26 to 9/30 at Finnish Hall (1970 Chestnut St, Berkeley, CA 94702)
- Friday, Sept 26: 10:00am - 4:00pm
- Saturday, Sept 27: 10:00am - 4:00pm
- Sunday, Sept 28: 10:00am - 4:00pm + Community Jam 7-9pm
- Monday, Sept 29: 10:00am - 4:00pm
- Tuesday, Sept 30: 10:00am - 4:00pm
Thursday, October 2: 7:00-8:00pm optional performance for the full 5 day participants only
The workshop will consist of two parts: 3 full days in a larger group followed by 2 full days of deeper study with a smaller group, all advanced practitioners.
Friday, Saturday & Sunday Only: $500-$600 / Early bird rate by 9/1: $475
Full 5-day Advanced Practitioners Only (Fri-Tue): $650 - $750 / Early bird rate by 9/1: $625
Prices are sliding scale as a way to provide options for the ranges of financial income. Please self-assess honestly. Contributions on the higher end of the sliding scale make it possible for us to offer this range to support those who are unemployed or in lower income brackets.
No refunds but you are able to transfer/sell your ticket to another CI dancer with approval.
Biography: Nita Little investigates embodied attention within movement practices with a concentration on the technicalities of both creative and relational practices. Through ensemble dance improvisation practice and performance she works toward a future that recognizes our environmental entanglements and values many forms of embodied communication. A dance researcher, theorist/artist, and one of the founding developers of Contact Improvisation (CI) she teaches around the globe, guiding one of its forward leading edges. She began 50 years ago, working with Steve Paxton on materials that became CI (1972) and was a participant in the earliest performances and teaching that helped it to become significant within dance and dance communities. Within CI’s first year she developed a curiosity about the relationship of the (physical) mind and relational events. Now, she investigates ecological actions of embodied attention, particularly with respect to somatic communication between humans and beyond.
Nita received her PhD in Performance Studies with a focus on the articulation of presence and creative actions of attention (2014). Her life work is inclusive of mindbody training, performing, choreographing, researching and writing about the ethics, politics and entanglement of somatic relations. With a world-wide audience for her teaching, dance making, and lecturing, she is an activist for relational intelligence and an advocate for dancers as embodied researchers. She looks forward to returning to direct the internationally active Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC, 2016), a network of laboratories populated by dancer researchers and associate research experts from diverse fields. She lives near Seattle, in the USA. During the years of worldwide retreat she initiated online classes of “Relational Intelligence” and “Composing Emergence” as well as private coaching which continue. Currently she tours throughout the year and may be found on 6 continents. She invites you to get her monthly newsletter available by signing up at: www.nitalittle.com
This workshop is organized by Alex Weinstein & Shira Yaziv. Contact us directly with any questions at [email protected]
APPLY HERE: https://forms.gle/97iHPNayWFyPoLHf7