The Netherlands
11-16 July 2023
4th Contact Improvisation Festival
JAM SWEET/SOUR
How to make CI jamming an interesting, enjoyable practice? This question is especially relevant for people who are new to this form, but it also comes up for long-term CI dancers. I jam regularly for more than 20 years by now. I still enjoy it and I still learn from it. In this intensive I want to share some strategies and tools around how to enter a jam, how to feel involved, find a focus, and shift focus during jamming.
We’ll address and explore issues around dancing, watching, resting, studying, choice making, caring, fear, self-protection, finding and dropping energy, connection, and artistic pleasure while jamming. We will spend time not only on jam pleasure strategies and jam survival strategies but also on some basic technical issues like rolling, centre to centre work, gradually giving weight to a partner and (importantly) taking weight off again. Overall, we will use the class to support each other in expanding our repertoires as jammers and CI dancers
SUSANNE MARTIN
I am an improvisation-based choreographer, performer, teacher, and researcher. Contexts in which I taught CI in the past include: CI festivals in Freiburg, Ukraine, Moldova, and Bucharest; professional dancer training Gothenburg; university dance programs in Northampton and Middlesex, UK.
Besides practicing and teaching CI I present my work internationally in solo performances, collaborative stage works, lecture performances, and workshops. In my teaching I focus on what I call sense-ability, response-ability, and play. In my performance practice I focus on the exciting tensions between improvisation, meaning making, total involvement, and ironic distancing. In my research I focus on artistic research methods, critical narrations of the aging body (publication “Dancing Age(ing)” 2017), and improvisation as pathway for learning and knowledge production. Festivals that presented my performances include: International Dance and Theatre Festival (Gothenburg), Aerowaves (London), Nottdance (Nottingham), Opera Estate Veneto (Bassano del Grappa), Tanec Praha (Prague). In my current postdoctoral research project at EPFL, Switzerland I examine dance improvisation in its potential to rethink and advance processes of learning and researching in a technical university. My practice of and love for CI informs all these doings.
