We present a rare opportunity for Contact Improvisation practitioners to deepen their dance by one of the early pioneers of CI, Nita Little.
The workshop is aimed for those with a baseline of CI, feel comfortable sharing weight and have experience listening to bodies in motion.
Date : 24-25 June 2023 (2 day workshop)
Time: 9.30 Arrive, 10am start, finish for 4.30pm
Location: St Michaels Memorial Parish Hall Park Lane, Bristol BS2 8BE
Ticket Cost:
£80 early bird
£100 (if booking is made after the 15th May)
• A discounted ticket is available for anyone who is committed to their practice but would find it unaffordable. Please enquire below for more details.
Payment:
Paypal: bristolcontactresearch@gmail.com
(please select friends or family)
For bank transfer/or any other queries please email: bristolcontactresearch@gmail.com
Please use Ref: “Nita Little (your initials)” on payments
Class Description
Co-Creative Practices in Contact Improvisation: Worlding Two as One
Beyond the Beginning level – dancers must have a Contact Improv practice.
Contact Improvisation was born through the idea that everybody knows how to move within a sea of gravity. The body will show up, reflexively, to meet its environment. Indeed, at an early stage, Steve Paxton refused to actually teach the dance that by then already had a name. The notion that contact is something we do together, rather than at each other, or on each other, came about through the repetition of the agreement to care, for oneself, for one’s partner, and for the rest of whatever was nearby… the children rolling under our feet. The emphasis on good will was necessary to keep everyone safe under conditions that were highly uncertain. This developed stratospheric levels of awareness and capacities of attention that most people don’t experience. Eventually we became so capable that we could let go of generating the dance and just let the dance itself take over because movement arose in milli-seconds of consciously noted experience organized by a far larger form. Readiness to move was there, in those milliseconds. Where one’s body began and another’s ended was insignificant to the passage of information within the immediacy of dancemaking. Fifty-one years later, this has developed into insight into co-creative practices and levels of relations that speak to the making of dance that is no longer a negotiation. How do we move beyond merely dealing with one another? What else is there? This workshop will be an immersion in practices that support a physicality ready to engage co-creatively in dances that release practiced pathways, are built on the physicality of attention, rely on movement principles, have organizational integrity, and embody care.
Nita Little is an activist for relational intelligence through improvisational dance practices that began with the emergence and development of Contact Improvisation in 1972. This path was provoked by Steve Paxton. The only remaining Contact Improvisation (CI) teacher who was a member of the initial core of CI pioneers, Nita has remained on the cutting edge of this practice, training generations of Contact Improvisation practitioners and teachers worldwide. A performer, choreographer, and dance theorist, Little received her PhD in Performance Studies in 2014. She returns to international touring invited by dance companies, festivals, conferences and universities to teach, lecture, and compose emergent events. Her writing investigates ecological actions of attention and the creative potentials present in entangled relations. She directs an international network of dance research ensembles – the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (the ISSC).