Mini Touch & Play
On Nov 12-13, 2016, Moti Zemelman and I will host a regional ‘Mini Touch & Play’ in western, MA for anyone interested. We are hoping to recreate some of the summer’s magic.
In July, this past summer, I was invited to teach a Tantra Intensive at the first North American ‘Touch and Play‘ festival in Plainfield, MA. The intensive, ‘The Elephant in the Jam: Eros’, attended by 40+ dancers, was a wild success and a whole lot of fun.
Folks were glowing for weeks afterwards. And, the stories of enormous positive changes and openings in people’s lives, were consistent across the group. I’m not surprised. When we open our lives to connected play, it heals. Let’s do it again!
What is Touch and Play?
Touch and Play is a movement emerging out of the International Contact Improv community, exploring beyond the traditional CI boundaries (see history below).
What is Contact Improv?
Contact Improv is a postmodern form of dance developed by Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark-Smith in the 70’s that uses points of contact to provide the starting point for exploration through improvisational movement. As an intimate form of dance, it is distinguished as a dance of ‘physics not chemistry’.
T & P history (borrowed from the T&P website)
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.