Good news. Our weekly contact improv night has resumed and is taking place this winter/spring each Sunday from 7-9 p.m. in Sarasota at the Rising Tide center.
The night starts with a half hour of instruction/tips followed by an hour and a half of open-ended contact jam. We play mix CDs full of songs that are great for contact. A jam is basically like a dance, but people are doing Contact Improv individually or with each other.
Our jams are typically oriented towards massage, stretching and dance. You will have the chance to play, practice, experiment and enjoy. You can do as much or as little as you like, and take breaks as often as you want to relax, do yoga, or even take a nap. There is a water cooler at the center, though feel free to bring your own water. No food.
The cost is $7. There is no need to register - just come by.
Rising Tide is located at 5102 Swift Road in Sarasota, about 3 blocks north of Clark and 3 blocks south of Proctor. Click here for directions. It is 5 minutes from Siesta Key, 10 minutes off 75, 10 minutes from downtown Sarasota, one hour south of Tampa, one hour north of Ft. Myers, 45 minutes south of St. Pete, 30 minutes south of Bradenton and 30 minutes north of Venice. There is plenty of parking and a sign out front. Note that the name is a bit hard to make out, but there is a large blue circle in the middle of the sign.
If you're interested in volunteering or getting on our email list, click here. For more information, contact Peter at peter [at] dailysource [dot] org, his cell 617-459-7709 or his landline 941-706-3380.
What Contact Improv is
Here is the best description we've seen so far:
Contact Improvisation is a moving massage. It is a dance that fine tunes your senses and wakes up your ability to listen and respond to what is happening in the moment. If you could do Aikido, surf, wrestle and dance at the same time, you would have an idea of what Contact Improvisation feels like. What makes Contact different from other dance is that partners are often moving in and out of physical contact while rolling, spiraling, springing and falling. They find ways to "enjoy the ride" and improvise while mutually supporting and following each others movements. The dancing is unpredictable and inspired by the physical and energetic contact the partners share. - Ernie Adams
It is very hard to describe yet this article in the Village Voice does a great job, and if you're new we recommend you read it.
Photos
Regular Contact Improv jams take place in over one hundred cities and towns world-wide. To see photos of CI, click the links below.
Assorted photos and videos from around the U.S.
Videos
History
Contact began over thirty years ago at Oberlin College in Ohio and has spread across the U.S. and the globe. You can read about the origins at Wikipedia, in this article in the Village Voice and at this Oberlin College page.
Other links
If you Google contact improv, you will get thousands of hits. These are the links we recommend most:
Contactimprov.net - global directory of Contact Improv groups, jams and classes
Contact Quarterly - a quarterly journal of Contact Improv articles
Earthdance - a center in Massachusetts largely oriented towards Contact Improv
Contactimprov.com - world events map, photos, videos, discussions, announcements, and hundreds of Contact Improv links
Martinkeogh.com - schedule, interviews and writings of one of the top teachers of Contact
Contactimprov.tribe.net - events, photos, listings, and discussion topics related to Contact Improv
Contact Improv events - over 100 weekly Contact Improv events around the world
Spread the Word
Please spread the word to your friends and acquaintances in Sarasota, Bradenton, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Nokomis, Venice and North Port by telling them about this or giving them the link to our site.
Another way you can support this, if you have a web site or page (including a myspace page), is to link to our site so more people will come to it and it will show up higher on search engine results.