Shop Talk: Contact Improvisation and Futurist Perspectives

A.P.E.@Hawley Presents:

Build-A-Floor Celebration Festival: Honoring floors for dancing and the lineage of Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Contact Improvisation

Thursday-Sunday, May 2-5

Project host: Andrea Olsen

The Workroom at 33 Hawley and Shepherd’s Barn at Historic Northampton

Northampton, MA USA

Saturday May 4

Shop Talk: Contact Improvisation and Futurist Perspectives

Panel Discussion on the lineage of Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Contact Improvisation with Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, & Sarah Young

2-4 PM, The Workroom

“The floor is the environment, the other, the world.” - Build-A-Floor Project endorsement by Christie Svane 2020

Drawing on their years of experience dancing and teaching contact improvisation and their engagements with Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton about the form, Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, and Sarah Young will look at contact improvisation from a historical and futurist perspective. They will consider aspects of its fifty-year evolution and ask questions about how it might continue to grow. Considerations will likely include the contexts where CI is practiced, how it is taught, and its relevance within the broader contexts of dance.

Sliding scale: 0-$20 (Income supports festival artists)

*Photo by Stephen Petegorsky.

Host or Publisher A.P.E.