CONTACT @ the DOJO
Contact Improvisation (CI) class & jam
Mixed level, open to beginners and advanced
2025
1st & 3rd Sundays
3/16: Neige Christenson — Trio Play
3:00–6:00 pm
3:00 Class, 4:30 Jam.
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Mar 16: Trio Play! w/ Neige Christenson
CI is primarily a duet form, but there are wonderful possibilities when a third element becomes a creative and exciting enhancement to a dance. We will explore approaches to connecting with multiple partners by offering a presence that supports momentum in a delightful way. We’ll practice listening and entering smoothly, joining to encourage lovely melting falls, and moments of easy suspension and flow. Opening up possibilities for six-legged creatures at play!
Neige Christenson has enjoyed decades of exploring, teaching and performing Contact Improvisation, supported and enriched by the practice of Authentic Movement. She holds an MA in Expressive Arts Therapy from Lesley University, and is a graduate of the National Theater Institute and Smith College. She loves the way a Contact Improvisation duet can be a metaphor for human relationship and also be an abstract expression of life-force energy. Her teaching encourages opening the improvisational mind and body to full presence and connection with self and other. Performance and dance portraits can be found here: Her writings on the improvised life and our relationship to this earth have appeared in Contact Quarterly; The Sun magazine; Fire in the Womb: Mothers and Creativity; and Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring our Place in the Natural World.
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Once a month Patrick Crowley teaches the contact improvisation class, and once a month he curates other teachers who hold and convey Contact Improvisation with a comprehensive depth. Contact @ the Dojo began in Oct 2021, meeting 2 Sundays a month.
Dojo comes from “Do-”, a variation of Tao/Dao (the way) and “jo” (immersive learning space).
CLASS (general description)
A broad range of Contact Improvisation will be explored — states, skills, scores/Underscore, artistic practice, life learnings.
In Contact @ the Dojo, dancers play with movement pathways in contact with a partner — in relationship with gravity, momentum, inertia, and friction. We work with ease and natural tone in our tissues and neurology. We explore rolling, falling, and flying in CI with the safety of mats as our floor.
The slow and subtle brings us to the big and enthusiastic, and vice versa. Centering, perception, integrated body, solo/follow/lead/3rd entity, reflexes, experimentation, readiness, rigor, heart, awareness, and enlivening will all be in the mix.
January Workshop 2012 © Emily BowmanJAM
The jam will be open space to play and practice — with music and possible structure/warm-up.
For those experienced and new to CI, honoring different abilities. ~10–25 people. Please read Health safety agreements: gist — come w/ no symptoms. Please arrive a little early.
What is Contact Improvisation?
(Park in parking lot to right of building. Come in entrance in parking lot. Go in and upstairs to right.)
Dojo Etiquette:
- Take shoes off outside the door
- Bow to space when entering & exiting.
- Hygiene & what to wear: bathe that day. Clean feet, cut & filed toenails. Wash or sanitize hands upon entering. Wear pants that are free to move in — no belts. Little/no jewelry, no belt buckles.
Other Info:
- Please come early (5-15 min) to leave enough time (for finding the Dojo, parking, settling in the space, and making payment if you haven’t).
- The Dojo is in the center of Florence: 30 N Maple St, #14, Florence, MA 01062. Upstairs.
- Health safety: come with no symptoms; no exposure to someone with illness in the last 3 days. Health safety agreements
- Here is my approach to CI.
- Be ready. The class can be quite physical and there is a lot input, in a number of ways. You may not be able to do everything so you can always modify and/or witness/take breaks.
- Bathrooms are downstairs to right.
Aikido of Northampton Dojo © Emily Bowman