Contact Improv Weekend Intensive
Weekend Intensive: October 17 + 18
Dive deeper into contact improvisation
Join Colours in Contact for a day and a half of movement, learning, experimentation, play, and connection - an immersive experience designed to take you deeper into your contact improvisation practice while sharing the space with a vibrant and diverse community of movers.
This isn’t just a day of classes. It’s a chance to spend extended time in the practice: learning new skills, asking questions, tinkering with ideas, dancing, resting, thinking, playing, and discovering what happens when we give ourselves the time and space to really explore.
We’ll spend the first day moving through a rich mix of facilitated sessions and open exploration, with plenty of opportunities to take what we learn directly into practice. Expect spirals, spinning and advanced lifts, heart-led movement, creative inquiry, a contact improv lab, and lots of time to dance and experiment together. We’ll close the day with a community dinner, then come back together on Sunday for a jam with the broader Colours in Contact community, giving you even more space to integrate, play, and let the practice unfold.
Who is this for?
This intensive is geared toward intermediate to advanced contact improv dancers, as well as professional dancers and experienced movers who are interested in diving deeper into the practice.
You should already have a foundation in contact improv and be comfortable exploring weight-sharing, partnering, and improvisational movement. Some sessions will involve more advanced material, including lifts and spinning pathways, while others will invite depth, curiosity, creativity, and deeper exploration of your own practice.
What we'll explore
Across the intensive, we’ll move between skill-building, creative exploration, conversation, and open practice. You’ll have opportunities to work with:
Catching the Spin: Explore shoulder lifts, spinning around your base’s head, and spiralling pathways through lifts, developing the timing, awareness, and physical skills to catch and ride the spin.
The Quiet Roar: Awakening Instinct & Heart: Drawing from Pablo's Mayan Kaqchikel roots, we will explore the concept of k’u’x in order to connect to the heart as a place of vitality, feeling, connection, and knowing. We’ll explore heart-led movement and the relationship between body, mind, spirit, and connection. This broadening and focusing of awareness will prove as a powerful tool to expand your capacity to atune and adapt rather than become stuck and disconnected in the unknown.
Contact Improv Lab: Bring something you’ve been wanting to figure out, a question you’ve been sitting with, or simply a willingness to play. We’ll tinker, experiment, share ideas, and learn from one another.
Practice & Open Jams: Take the material into your own dancing, revisit ideas, experiment with different partners, and discover what emerges when there’s time to actually play with what you’ve learned.
