SPECIAL DELIVERY with Chris Aiken, Ray Chung and Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood

V-Day UPDATE: For all Lovers of Contact we are adding an Early Bird significant discount for the RAR workshop. Sign up before it flies away. CLARIFICATION: The original event (15 hrs workshop with Andrew and Ray was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak. Finally, all the ducks are in a row and we are rewarded for the wait by Chris joining us to form a: **S P E C I A L D E L I V E R Y** with CHRIS AIKEN, RAY CHUNG & ANDREW de LOTBINIÈRE HARWOOD (a golden opportunity to begin the next 50 years of Contact improvisation) This time we are planning TWO workshops instead of one. Can be taken separately. Deatils TBA. Please stay tuned and mark yourself for going/interested. **COMPOSITIONAL AWARENESS IN CONTACT IMPROVISATION** This workshop is for people with ongoing experience in contact improvisation. As we ground ourselves in the core principles of CI, focusing on the dynamics and subtleties of touch, tone, texture, weight, momentum, and moving support, we will expand our awareness to include space, time, image, gesture and feeling, through solo, duet, trio and ensemble dancing. We will consider how a lightly held compositional awareness and feeling can support our efforts to connect and find meaning when we are dancing. The workshop will involve specific improvisation investigations, perceptual tunings, principles of design and scores aimed at integrating CI within a greater creative universe. We seek a quality of attention that shifts from self to other, to the environment and the ever-changing atmospheres in the room and the world at large, and back, to engage with innovative possibilities for individual and collective improvisation. We view this work not only as a means for creative expression but as a means for developing our capacity to collaborate and build a community that holds space for each individual. **RESILIENCY AND RESOURCEFULNESS IN CONTACT IMPROVISATION** This workshop is intended for practitioners with a solid ongoing background in contact improvisation with at least one year of continuous study and or practice of the form. As we enter the next phase of this evolving dance form that has changed the face of contemporary dance, we will appreciate how essential touch and movement are to our sense of self and being in the world. CI offers us a playing field for the development of resiliency and creativity, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves participants informed, centered and enlivened. Making contact with another being implies forging a universe where we may take risks, exchange, communicate and witness. In this workshop, various themes will be investigated such as developing our: - **agility**—the facility to efficiently adapt to physical challenges; how we can be agile in our intellectual and mental decision making - **resourcefulness**—the capacity to use our abilities and the resources around us to solve emergent problems as we develop our skills and abilities - a**cumen** - quickness, accuracy, keenness of judgement and the aptitude to perceive what is important - **acceptance -** the courage to embrace all aspects of the dancing even when it seems awkward or clumsy; allowing ourselves to stumble out of the box of what is familiar and accepted, while staying safe and engaged. - **resilience**—developing the quality of being conversant with and within the spectrum of possibilities as they present themselves in our improvisations with others This training will emphasize the potential and necessity of improvising one’s responses to the moment in ways that are nourishing on both a physical and emotional level while opening our minds to the possibilities of reinventing our practice and tuning to the emergent tasks of dancing. Short Bios **Ray Chung** is a teacher, artist, and engineer who has a passion for dancing that he likes to share with other people. His main focus is improvisation and he has worked with Contact Improvisation since 1979 as part of improvisational performance practice. **Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood** is renowned internationally as a pioneer of contact improvisation (CI) and a master teacher/performer in both real-time composition and CI. For over forty-seven years he has dedicated himself to the research, development, education, collaboration and dissemination of these artistic practices as sophisticated movement disciplines and performing art forms. **Chris Aiken** is an internationally recognized performer and teacher of dance improvisation and contact improvisation. His approach has been guided by the effort to link our poetic sensibility with the capacity to engage ecologically through perception, action, and imagination. His work has been shaped by years of practice in the Alexander Technique, Gyrokinesis, ideokinesis, yoga, and fascial body work and movement training. He is a Professor of Dance at Smith College.