NITA LITTLE WORKSHOP
Co-Creative Practices in Contact Improvisation: Worlding Two as One

We are very pleased to have Nita Little back at Wainsgate to teach this workshop. Her last visit was so rich with information, insight, rigorous practice and learning, and it was a lot of fun too with a great group of people attending.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Contact Improvisation was born through the idea that everybody knows how to move within a sea of gravity. The body will show up, reflexively, to meet its environment. Indeed, at an early stage, Steve Paxton refused to actually teach the dance that by then already had a name. The notion that contact is something we do together, rather than at each other, or on each other, came about through the repetition of the agreement to care, for oneself, for one’s partner, and for the rest of whatever was nearby… the children rolling under our feet. The emphasis on good will was necessary to keep everyone safe under conditions that were highly uncertain. This developed stratospheric levels of awareness and capacities of attention that most people don’t experience. Eventually we became so capable that we could let go of generating the dance and just let the dance itself take over because movement arose in milli-seconds of consciously noted experience organized by a far larger form. Readiness to move was there, in those milliseconds. Where one’s body began and another’s ended was insignificant to the passage of information within the immediacy of dancemaking. Fifty-one years later, this has developed into insight into co-creative practices and levels of relations that speak to the making of dance that is no longer a negotiation. How do we move beyond merely dealing with one another?  What else is there?

This workshop will be an immersion in practices that support a physicality ready to engage co-creatively in dances that release practiced pathways, are built on the physicality of attention, rely on movement principles, have organizational integrity, and most importantly, embody care.