Touch and Play: Embodying an Intimate Language

Contact Improvisation continues to evolve. We invite you to be active in it’s evolution by exploring the ways in which our verbal and non-verbal communication enhances our connections. Learn to articulate your intentions, boundaries and desires in the dance more clearly and honestly to deepen our connections with ourselves, our partners and our community.

Touch & Play festivals have a history of exploring the edges of what CI can be and are known as events in which personal and communal celebration and growth reach new levels.

The Touch&Play Project started in 2010 as a platform to challenge the practice of Contact Improvisation (CI) as it existed at that time. Through a first festival in Berlin teachers of CI and a range of other body-based practices were invited to explore the ‘Chemistry in Contact’  by inviting in participants’ emotions, sexuality, aggression, politics and everything else often kept out of our dances. The event was a success and the material reverberated around the European and N. American contact communities raising discussions on the boundaries of our practice and the perceived (un)safety of our attempts to exclude our chemistry from our dances.

Successive T&P events have focussed on the exploration of the ‘Edges of Contact’ by working one specific frontier (e.g. the Contact community, children and families) or by providing spaces where all edges are equally welcome. The T&P Project is run as a disseminated network of interested researchers, teachers and practitioners whereby any individual or group is encouraged to voice their own questions or concerns and to create a safe space to have them addressed in an authentic and playful manner.

This year’s theme of Communication takes us into a deepening of the dance through verbal and nonverbal communication techniques, styles, skills and approaches. We aim to bring, explore, and open all of ourselves: the communicator, the sensual, the sexy, the playful, the curious, the powerful, the receptive. Through this wide lens we continue to question the relationship of Chemistry and Physics in this vast expanse of dance we call Contact Improvisation.

A full schedule and updated information about the teachers, class descriptions and intensive descriptions will soon be added!

For any questions please contact us at: contact@touchandplay.org