Please email us if you have any questions about attending.

These structures were developed during various research periods, CI workshop intensives and performances. Many have continued to evolve over the years and have led to deepening our grasp of CI and expanding our choice-making. They are simultaneously playful and artistic, and foster the unleashing of our creative imagination. These compositions vary in simplicity and complexity, in duration and dynamics, and in spatial design or atmospheres/ecologies. They are done in duets, in small groups or as an entire ensemble. The scores harness our focus and encourage the shaping of something resonant together with another or others, while expanding our compositional awareness outward as we dive into deeper layers of nuance and refinement in contact/improvisation.Lots of time will be spent dancing during this workshop.

My wish for this time together is to create a vibrant, inclusive, and safe container for the practice of Contact Improvisation. For me this means thinking of others and the spaces we inhabit as important and worthy of consideration, creating an environment that is respectful and caring, approaching consent as an ongoing and active practice which in turn generates conscious intention, and action. I will listen, observe and offer what I have learned from five decades of experience. I do not have all the answers, but will strive to create a focused space that aims to promote inclusivity and respect throughout our shared time together.

About Andrew:

Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood is renowned as a leading light in the field of dance improvisation. He is an internationally recognized 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 rigorous artistic practices as sophisticated performing art forms.

He first studied and then performed with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, Nita Little and Kurt Siddal, the instigators of Contact Improvisation. His journey has continued to evolve through the development of consciousness, various investigations of perceptual awareness as well as an abundance of collaborative performances around the globe with the likes of Peter Bingham, Chris Aiken, Ray Chung, Daniel Lepkoff, Kirstie Simpson, Alito Alessi, Karen Nelson, K.J. Holmes, Lisa Nelson, Julyen Hamilton, Benno Voorham and Benoit Lachambre, to name a few.

Formerly founder and artistic director of AH HA Productions (2000–2014) he also danced for the companies of Marie Chouinard, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Jo Lechay, Joint Forces and Fulcrum, as well as the improvisational dance collectives Discovery Bal, The Echo Case and The Improvisational Movement Fund. Still passionate about teaching, he transforms his training and performance experience into a personal language, which he has shared throughout the world since 1977. He was awarded the Canada Council of the Arts Jacqueline Lemieux Award in 2000.