Physical Intelligence: A Contact Improvisation Intensive

This two-day intensive is an invitation to get underneath the magic of Contact Improvisation and explore the physical skills that make it possible.
Contact Improvisation asks us to develop a kind of physical intelligence that is responsive, relaxed, and ready. The dance is created in real time, through an ongoing conversation with gravity, momentum, sensation, and another person’s body. Rather than simply learning a repertoire of lifts or predetermined pathways, we’ll explore the physical principles that allow movement to emerge spontaneously: knowing where your own center is, finding and refining a shared center with another person, and learning how to move over, under, through, and around each other’s centers.
The goal is not to eliminate risk or unpredictability, but to develop the awareness and physical skill to meet them. We’ll practice tracking the constant micro-shifts of weight, balance, momentum, and sensation that tell us what is possible in any given moment. Through this kind of listening, falling becomes information, instability becomes possibility, and lifts can emerge as a natural consequence of two bodies organizing themselves together.
The weekend will unfold through a progression of three essential layers:
1. Find Your Center
We begin with the relationship to our own body: skeletal support, alignment, gravity, balance, and weight.
Where is my center? How do I organize my structure? How can I move from a place of support rather than muscular effort?
2. Find Your Center Through Another
Once another body enters the equation, the experience of center changes.
Through leaning, counterbalance, shared support, and weight exchange, we discover that two people can create a new center together. We’ll explore how to listen through physical contact, respond to another person’s weight, and build structures that neither body could create alone.
3. Get Over It / Get Under It
From shared balance we move into the vertical dimension of Contact Improvisation.
How does one person’s center move over or under another? What makes a lift possible? How do we give weight, receive weight, support another body, and allow ourselves to be supported?
Rather than treating lifts as tricks to be learned, we’ll investigate the physical principles that make lifting and being lifted sustainable, responsive, and improvisational.
Know your own weight → receive another’s weight → share weight → redirect weight → lift and be lifted.
Throughout the weekend, we’ll weave in experiments in community play: simple relational exercises and minimal-contact practices designed to help us become comfortable sharing space, making contact, and developing trust before moving into greater physical risk.
These practices create a bridge between solo movement and full-bodied contact, offering ways to connect without immediately asking the body to surrender weight.
There will be jams and open-ended practice throughout the weekend, giving us opportunities to take the material out of the exercises and into real-time improvisation.
This is Contact Improvisation as a physical practice: grounded, curious, skillful, and alive.
Come ready to move, learn, play, touch, fall, support, listen, and discover what becomes possible when two bodies learn how to organize themselves together.
INVESTMENT
Access Rate— $250
Sustainer Rate — $300
Pay-it-forward Rate — $350
Please register only if you can commit to attending. Tickets are nonrefundable if you cancel; see the full cancellation policy on the registration page.
SCHEDULE
9-10: Contempletive Dance Practice
10:15–1:00 — Morning workshop
1:00–2:30 — Lunch break: Bring your own meals
2:30–4 — Afternoon workshop
4:30-6 -- Jam
*same schedule on Saturday and Sunday.
Shannon Sahaja is a somatic educator, dance artist, and movement facilitator with more than two decades of experience exploring the body as a source of intelligence, creativity, and connection.
She holds a BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase and has studied extensively with many of the early pioneers of Contact Improvisation, including Nancy Stark Smith. Her teaching brings together a deep understanding of the mechanics of weight sharing with curiosity, play, attunement, and improvisation.
Shannon is also a longtime yoga teacher and meditation practitioner. Eight years of living and teaching at Harbin Hot Springs, along with her mentorship with Angela Farmer, deeply shaped her approach to embodied practice.
From 2017–2024, Shannon helped hold and cultivate the community of Ecstatic Dance Oakland while teaching Yoga and Contact Improvisation.
Her work includes Experiments in Communal Play, Nesting & Resting: The Art of Togetherness, Contact Improvisation intensives, retreats, and other embodied explorations.
Shannon creates spaces where technical learning and physical intelligence meet playfulness, presence, connection, and the unexpected.