Receiving What Arrives – Contact Improvisation as Instant Composition
What if we stop trying to decide what the dance should be and instead become available to what is already arriving?
This class is an exploration of Contact Improvisation as a practice of listening, relationship, and instant composition. Rather than focusing on technique or learning particular movement patterns, we will use simple physical scores to investigate how movement can emerge between bodies, the floor, and the space around us.
We will work with touch, weight, gravity, momentum, and attention. We will explore how to receive information from another body, sense where an impulse is coming from, and allow it to transform our movement without losing our own organization. We will also explore moments of not knowing: noticing an impulse without immediately following it, staying with something longer than expected, and allowing another dancer or the environment to change what we are already doing.
As the class develops, individual and partner explorations will become simple instant-composition scores. We will play with attention, pauses, repetition, changing conditions, and collective movement, discovering how a few clear invitations can create complex and unpredictable dances.
The aim is not to create a performance or make movement look interesting, but to become curious about what happens when we listen closely enough for something unexpected to emerge.
There will be space for individual research as well as dancing with others, so that each person can discover their own movement while remaining part of a constantly changing collective landscape.
This class is for CI dancers who enjoy research, experimentation, and the space between structure and freedom.
Teacher Bio
Anna is a Contact Improvisation teacher, dancer, and body therapist based in Antwerpen, Belgium. She has been dancing Contact Improvisation since 2006 and teaching CI in Belgium since 2018, in different cities and contexts. She trained as a Contact Improvisation teacher in Freiburg.
She holds a Master’s degree in Religion Studies from the University of Humanity and a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Dance and Developmental Movement. Her background also includes long-term training in art therapy and healing pedagogy, as well as professional training in bodywork.
Anna’s teaching and research focus on the relationship between Contact Improvisation, attention, physical listening, and Instant Composition. She is interested in how we receive information through touch, weight, momentum, and space while maintaining our own physical organization and supporting shared movement.
Her classes combine clear physical tasks, partner work, and simple compositional scores with space for individual research. She explores attention, support, changing conditions, impulse and choice, and the relationship between movement and performance.
She is particularly interested in how staying with what is already happening – rather than constantly searching for something new – can reveal unexpected movement possibilities and create a richer sense of connection and composition.
Receiving What Arrives – Contact Improvisation as Instant Composition
Anna Svetlitskaya