Queer Contact Improvisation Class & Jam

It's our intention to create a queer space of empowerment, connection, and transformation through the research and practice of Contact Improvisation.  We propose a class followed by a jam that will support sharing, questioning, slowing down and seeing ourselves and one another with empathy, accountability, and collective care. We understand empowerment as an active process through consent and the practice of detecting and articulating our own needs and the needs of others within/through our dancing. 

The class will explore fundamental principles of Contact Improvisation and tools for joyful and rigorous jamming. The class and the following jam aim to center queer folx to create a queer, feminist and accountable space. We invite both beginners and folx of all dance backgrounds/experience. Let’s explore Contact Improvisation skills, questions, consent, boundaries, accountability, risk, intimacy, trust, physics, and movement together in a research oriented context. With our diverse bodies we’ll share weight, touch, contact, and dancing that foster nourishment away from heteronormativity, gender normativity, and racism in the dance world and beyond. What if Contact Improvisation can be a practice of resistance, connection, and empowerment?

 

“Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person, or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show partial picture” (hooks 1994)

Covid?
We are learning to co-create a safer, more responsible space.
COVID still plays a role for some individuals among us. In order to allow immune compressed people and other vulnerable groups to come, we ask you to come only if you have no symptoms, and also to take an antigen/rapid test beforehand . There is also a big chance that some of us prefer to wear masks (FFP2) and/or only dance with people who do. So please take a mask as an option as well.


↪ TEACHERS BIOGRAPHIES

Makisig Akin (they/them): Choreographer. Dance Artist. Facilitator. Activist.  I am a queer, transgender Filipino born and raised in the Philippines. My artistic work focuses on strengthening the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. Since graduating from University of California Los Angeles with Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography in June 2019 from the department of World Arts and Cultures Dance, I have been in the quest to further understanding how to use the platforms of dance and theatre to engage with socio-political topics in the perspective of queer and BIPOC individuals. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. I am interested in reimagining the process of making-dances. How can the process serve the dancers as they continue to have agency in directing the trajectory of the work? How can they create a community that functions beyond identity while honoring identity? My physical dance background includes but is not limited to: Filipino Traditional Dance, Contact Improvisation, Kung Fu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing and Contemporary Dance. 

 

Anya Cloud (she/her): I am originally from Alaska, and currently living in the land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe people in Colorado. As a queer, cis-gender, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; intersectional collaboration is central to my work. I am devoted to practicing, researching, teaching, and performing experimental contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and somatics through anti-oppression methodologies. I have been practicing contact improvisation for 20 years and regularly teach, practice, and perform internationally. I orient with contact improvisation as a fundamentally queer form. My work has been produced/supported by Movement Research, Workshop Foundation, freeskewl, Screen Dance Festival Stockholm, La MaMa, Los Angeles PerformancePractice, REDCAT, Tanzquartier, and Guatemala Department of Culture among others. I have worked with and/or performed for Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark Smith, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karen Schaffman, Karen Nelson, Makisig Akin and Nhu Nguyen among others. I hold an MFA in Dance Theatre and trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under the direction of Elizabeth Beringer. I am currently Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Colorado Boulder. www.anyacloud.com