Touch&Play History

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. We have been enjoying witnessing the effect of our festival on many participants and teachers; we are honored to be a part of this personal and community development. Contact Improvisation continues to evolve. We invite you to be active in its 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. The Touch&Play 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.

Defining a form: Where does Contact Improvisation begin and end?

We want to honor that the Touch&Play project has its roots in the lineage of Contact Improvisation and simultaneously has a tradition of challenging that same form and introducing such diverse influences such as Non-Violent Communication, BDSM and Tantra. At Touch&Play we are not only researching our individual truths and daring ourselves to take new risks and try new somatic approaches, we are also asking what the essential truths of Contact Improvisation are and daring to push the edges of the form into new territory. What is the basic integrity of this form we call Contact Improvisation?  A form that began from a place of curiosity and play, a form that is not institutionalized, codified or owned, a form which is naturally evolving…. We posit that in bringing these other disciplines & practices into our explorations we are enhancing and deepening communication and boundary skills necessary for a healthy and vibrant practice to evolve. Finding the most productive mix of “Classical Contact” and edge exploration is a dynamic equilibrium.  One does need to understand the center of a form before one can know what it’s edges are.  In this light we highly encourage any newcomers to Contact Improvisation who are considering signing up for this event to take classes and go to jams for the next few months before the festival to prepare yourself in understanding the essential physics and social dynamics of the form.