The Ecological Approach to Contact Improvisation
Schedule
Sat Sep 06 2025 at 01:00 pm to 05:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
107 E Preston Street , Baltimore, MD, United States, Maryland 21202 | Baltimore, MD
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Physical communication through contact improvisation offers immediate, high-bandwidth feedback that reveals the quality of partnership—unlike verbal communication with its slow, guarded feedback loops.This workshop explores Contact Improvisation (CI) through ecological dynamics—understanding movement as emergent relationships between bodies and environments. Conceived in the 1970s by Steve Paxton, CI centers on physical dialogue between bodies in contact. Through an ecological lens, this becomes a complex adaptive system where dancers perceive and act upon affordances that emerge within their dance ecology.
Blending theory with practice, this workshop employs a constraints-led approach where movement solutions emerge naturally through carefully designed tasks. Rather than prescribing techniques, we'll create environments that guide your exploration of fundamental CI skills: falling & rolling to build anti-fragility, listening and somatic attunement, entering/exiting dances with delight and curiosity, surfing momentum, weight-sharing, and finding lifts.
You'll learn to attune to information-rich variables including your partner's shifting weight and support offerings. Through carefully manipulated task and environmental constraints, you'll experience how coordination emerges organically as we examine self-organization, degeneracy (multiple solutions for similar tasks), and direct learning. This approach makes this workshop accessible and challenging for practitioners of all skill levels.
Brief discussions on ecological dynamics will punctuate embodied practices. We'll progress from simple partnered tasks to complex group dynamics, culminating in a "Jam" where you'll apply concepts in the 'representative environment' of contact improvisation.
By workshop end, you'll have developed enhanced perceptual-motor skills and gained an embodied understanding of ecological dynamics applied to contact improvisation. You'll experience movement as participating in the ongoing dialogue between body and world—discovering solutions through the elegant simplicity of a constraints-led approach.
Join us and step into the vast landscape of physical communication, human connection, and unrestrained creativity with contact improvisation.
The workshop will be led by Bren Veziroglu, whose teaching approach emerges from the same ecological principles explored in this workshop. Bren is a movement educator with over a decade of professional teaching experience. He brings an interdisciplinary approach blending scientific understanding with personal exploration. His teaching style emphasizes scalability, engagement, and physicality, empowering thousands through in-person instruction and his YouTube channel, Bren Teaches Movement. Bren holds a M.S. in Kinesiology from San Jose State University, a dual B.S. in Biochemistry and Biology from Brandeis University, and is a Certified Performance and Sport Scientist & CSCS from the NSCA.
Register at https://www.tribebaltimore.com/events
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Where is it happening?
107 E Preston Street , Baltimore, MD, United States, Maryland 21202Event Location & Nearby Stays:
