Fall into Contact

with Karthik Rajmohan and Andrew Wass

About the Workshop

This intensive invites practitioners of contact improvisation into a sustained and rigorous investigation of the principles at the heart of the form. Over four Saturdays, you will guided through technical solo material drawn from practices such as Steve Paxton's Material for the Spine, using the architecture of the axial body as a foundation - attending to the spine's capacity for initiation, yielding, and response, and how that intelligence radiates outward through the limbs and into shared space. Solo body work will serve as preparation for contact and as a practice in its own right.

We will then move into practices to build a strong foundation for partnering, acquiring new vocabulary, and fully inhabit known pathways: lifts, falls, rides, and the transitions between them. How to initiate, ride through, and extend ideas through movement. The goal is for improvisation to feel less random and more like a fluid, real-time creative conversation.

The aim of this series is to develop a grounded and conscious sense of self leading to a safer space within the dynamic possibilities of dance. From this foundation, the space becomes safer through caution, competence and awareness. Over time, this supports your progression toward more technical fluency, compositional thinking, and the capacity for collective decision-making within the dance.

Throughout the series there will be moments of watching and being watched, of offering and receiving feedback, of developing the witness as an active practice alongside the dancing. The last session will close with a lo-tech, no-tech showing: an informal, unadorned presentation of the work as it has developed, followed by an open jam.