BIPoC Contact Improvisation

The BIPoC Contact Improvisation + Jam offers individuals who identify as BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) a space of learning and practicing Contact Improvisation with others who fall within the BIPoC intersectional identities. We attempt to create a space of empowerment and safer space to explore skills, touch, and intimacy of Contact improvisation. The space will focus on dancing, sharing, moving at the speed of trust (adrienne maree brown), community dreaming, and thriving as we empower each other through community and dance.

While it is important to have the ability for all to work together across differences, it is also valuable and crucial to do some work separately in race-based affinity groups. This offers BIPoC folx as learning and practicing space that is free of or with less emotional labor that comes when sharing space with white individuals or in predominantly white spaces.

Makisig Akin (they/them): I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was born and raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. Holding Queer and BIPoC spaces is an integral part of my artist activism. I hold spaces, both choreographically and educationally, by examining how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a potential creative healing process. My orientation to Contact Improvisation is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, bouldering/climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I have been practicing Contact Improvisation for 13 years and have taught in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, The Field Center, BeingTouch, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. Important Collaborators and teachers include mayfield brooks, Jason Tsou, Anya Cloud, Nara Virgens, Eric Geiger, Ajani Brannum, and taisha paggett, among others. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I am also a co-founder with Nara Virgens of the Emerging Change Tanzfestival, a dance festival featuring and curating Queer and BIPoC Artists and their collaborators.  www.makisigakin.com

Yusa Jacobo (she/they): I am a queer artist from South America living in Germany. Growing up in Argentina, I studied choreography and composition in dance at the National University of the Arts of Buenos Aires (UNA) with a focus on somatics and improvisation. I am dedicated to artistic and pedagogical research and consider the body as the matrix of my practices, which move between dance, ceramics and poetry. I am interested in the intersection of micropolitics, art, somatics and social change. I have been practising contact improvisation for ten years. In 2022, I participated in a six-month dance residency at Oberlin College-Ohio (USA) with a group of international dancers as part of CI's 50th anniversary, culminating in a festival called -CI@50 CriticalMass-. As a facilitator, I have given classes and workshops on dance (CI, improvisation and somatics) and ceramics in Argentina, Brazil, the USA, Lisbon, Brussels, Tbilisi and Germany. As a performer, I am currently working on a piece entitled ‘Cracks in Time and the Appearance of New Goddesses’, a ceremonial performance that combines dance theatre, science fiction, club beats and storytelling, directed by Aisha Konaté.