Contact Festival Dartington is in its third year as the UK’s only international festival of contact improvisation. In the spirit of the summer dance festivals organised by Steve Paxton and Mary Fulkerson at Dartington College of Arts in the 1980s, CFD formed to support the rigorous, delightful investigation and enquiry which is at the heart of contact improvisation.
Contact Festival Dartington aims to:
- support the development and appreciation of contact and improvisation practices
- facilitate a collaborative learning environment in which principles of movement can be explored by practitioners of all levels of experience
- promote research into the applications and implications of contact improvisation practice for different contexts including movement education, somatic studies, performance training, health and wellbeing, choreographic practice, medical research, social sciences, experiential learning and philosophy
- encourage questioning of the impact and application of contact improvisation practice in different contexts through dialogues, presentations of research, performances and shared workshop experience
CFD is a small festival in which all participants are invited to join in a programme of workshops, jams, performances and dialogues which take place in the same studio space from early morning until late evening. No parallel sessions means that the activities of the week promote a shared language and research experience among all members of the group.
Three international teachers are featured each year. Charlie Morrissey, a Dartington alumni and dance artist based in Brighton, UK, teaches a two-day intensive during each year of the festival and is joined in 2013 by Ezster Gal of Budapest, Hungary, Karen Nelson of Seattle, USA and Kayla Dougan Bowtell UK. In addition to Charlie Morrissey, teachers at past CFDs have included:
2012 Mirva Makinen (Finland), Lucia Walker (UK) and Kayla Dougan Bowtell (UK)
2011 Kathy Crick (UK) and Riccardo Meneghini (Italy/UK)
For more information: www.contactfestivaldartington.com