Richard Parker is passionate about the relational and deeply human experience that can be revealed through Contact Improvisation. His workshops are a refined balance of skills, creativity & free exploration, taking participants on a journey into the co-creative wonders of this practice, which always includes a healthy dose of safety and care for one another.

With a grounded and easy-going approach, he loves sharing both his detailed and extensive understanding of the principle movement forms within Contact Improvisation alongside the subtle nuances, helping people to truly embody the fundamental aspects of the dance. Most importantly creating a sense of relational awareness and a sense of togetherness as we co-create within the dance space.

He has been developing his skills and knowledge as a Contact Improvisation (CI) dancer since 2006. Over the years he has extensively trained with many amazing international teachers within CI including Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, KJ Holmes, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, Ray Chung, Martin Keogh, Scott Wells, Benno Voorham & Joerg Hassmann.

Since 2011 he has shared his teaching of CI within Professional, Educational, Festival & Community Organisations as well as organised his own CI Festivals, Retreats and Camps.

“A true love for the form and genuine investigation is at the heart of Richard's teaching. He plans and delivers material in a thoughtful, reflective and thorough way, each exercise leading on to the next fluidly. His gentle, clear and encouraging manner gives students the confidence to push their practice further and his commitment to staying true to the form ensures that others can continue to discover and enjoy the beauty of the dance.”

CI Skils Workshop

Contact Improvisation is a practice of how two or more bodies move together as one in physical contact, within a spontaneously unfolding improvised dance. This requires a conscious and purposeful intention to physically meet, connect and collaborate with our partner. When this begins to happen we open up the possibility to share in surrendering ourselves to the natural and dynamic forces that play themselves through us within this spontaneously unfolding dance.

Within this workshop, we will explore some of the basic principles of how two bodies can move together as one within an improvised contact dance... as well as offering a clear understanding of the boundaries to support safe practice.

CI Creative Workshop

The hands are powerful tools in our lives with a strong connection to our ideas, often used to direct objects in useful ways. Within CI they can be used to guide our partners, manually handling them around our body. They are sometimes used to read or follow our partner's movement as well as being useful when we need to protect ourselves from a collision. In this session we will creatively explore ways to connect, suggest and give direction with other parts of our body rather than using our hands, inviting our partners into the possibility of a less directive and more consensual co-creative dance.

CI Evening Jam

Arriving, Warming Up and Connecting into a flow of CI

Asher is based in Dartington and loves being and interacting with the land and elements; he’s practised Contact Improvisation, dance, physical theatre, teaching and leading workshops for a quarter-century. These are interconnected. He's taught CI internationally since 2008.

I love teaching CI as, with a little interconnected training, guiding and focusing on the physics inherent in us all, and the myriad ways to relate, we free up a world of creativity, exploration, connecting, celebration and being together.

In CI dance, play and being, I love the practice of trusting ourselves and others (while keeping safe) – I am open to feeling creative within the context – to inhabit the realm as mine (and ours) and explore the unknown. I enjoy re-seeing the known afresh.

I focus on being off-balance - from where surprise, connection and magic can happen - and free - yet focused and caring. I am particularly interested in the interplay of spaciousness and intimacy - whole group scores and solo, the partner or trio…, within the social and physical environment.

I focus on re-investing dynamics into a dance flow – horizontal to vertical, flying to rolling on the ground. I also play (interrupting flow). I am also loving slowing down, feeling the finest vibrations and the smallest of dances – exquisite.

CI Skills Workshop

In CI, the whole space is our play space. Opening to travelling our dances through the dance field - solo, duet, trio or more, spacious, or intimate – invites in freshness, a dance with the environment and all the beings in it. It also invests a fluid momentum in our dance that we may harness – horizontal travel to vertical energy (up or down) and vertical energy – hops, jumps, leaps, skips, all possibilities of flying - into horizontal momentum.

Inertia is not a state of stillness. It is the 'desire' for movement (or stillness) to continue in the state and direction it is in. When we put just a little energy into travelling, the reward can may be an easy, breezy, light, soft and dynamic experience…

CI Evening Jam

Shaking, jumping, and impulses relieve tension, stress and superfluous adrenalin. Fun too! From small vibrations to large ‘waves’ we’ll meet and warm up!

Morning Practice

Arriving in silence, arriving in our bodies, hearts and minds, we will settle into sitting meditation. From there, with a partner, we will move, witness, yet not performing. We will share about our own experiences.

I have been teaching movement, dance, and Contact Improvisation for the past 12 years. My training is mostly a mix of self-enquiry and self-led study into how the body moves and how we move through life.

I have always been a kind of explorer and researcher of life. Always asking questions. Generally a little outside of convention. For the past 12 years, my offering has been facilitating the exploration of movement and dance, mostly improvisation, inquiring into the nature of relationships and being here.

I have a deep interest in the 'unseen', that which connects us all as the fabric of life. Sometimes life is smooth and delicious and often it's as clunky as hell. I'm constantly learning how to gracefully bring it all to the table.” I co-run the Touch&Play Gathering UK and currently co-hold the Totnes Contact Improvisation community.

Teachers who have influenced my journey have been Adam Bradpiece my teacher in the enquiry of embodied consciousness, Helen Poynor - environmental movement, Joerg Hassman and Daniel Werner - Contact Improvisation and everybody I have danced, moved and enquired within that time.

CI Creative Workshop

Come home to the substance of your own body, your place of being in the world. Slip deeply inside and know pleasure inside your own skin. Dwell in the realms of your desires, wants and wishes. Feel deeply met and held by another. This is a workshop about intimacy. It's about embodiment and it’s about knowing what you want and feeling from the inside. We will explore, through words, through touch and through movement. A both personal and connecting journey.

My name is Alexandra, a professional contemporary dancer and movement teacher, originally from Greece, based in Cornwall, UK.

Experiential anatomy, body awareness, touch and improvisation mark my pathway. I am vocationally trained and experienced in contact improvisation, authentic movement, kinetic awareness, physical theatre, somatics, and yoga.

From the first moment in 2004, that Contact Impro came into my life, I fell in love with the form. I consider it a spiritual practice as it brings to your awareness the way you communicate with yourself and others.

In addition to facilitating weekly Contact Improvisation classes in Cornwall, I am currently, working as a bodyworker and yoga teacher and training to become TRE (Trauma and Tension Releasing exercises) provider and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist.

When teaching contact improvisation my primary interest is to hold a safe space for each person's unique creativity to emerge and take part in the mosaic we are building together as a community in space at any given moment. My versatile background as an actress, professional dancer, trauma-informed bodyworker, yoga teacher and currently Biodynamic Craniosacral therapist trainee of course definitely affects my teaching style.

Driven by a genuine curiosity (like a child) on the ways that all of the above affect our movement and relationships, I like my sessions to be meetings of playfulness and sharing space/ touch/ shapes/ weight/ tools/ thoughts. At the core of my beliefs is that improvisation cannot actually be taught. The only thing we can do is share tools and hold a safe space for the participants to unfold.

CI Skills Workshop

When I no longer hold my weight (or breath) but I share it, giving it generously, that is when I actually become lighter, and not heavier, in a dance. Sounds paradoxical? Weight is an opportunity that opens up a world of possibilities.

Morning Practice

Cultivating the skill of 'landing on' rather than 'crashing into' our forever supporting partner, the earth, is absolutely essential to enhance our contact improv practice. Exploring the relations between our body and the floor and embracing the possibilities gravity holds, are the 2 key elements to befriending the floor.

Referred to as the ‘dancing bass meister’, by Barre Philipps, David Leahy has dedicated the last 20 years to navigating the area between music and dance. Originally from New Zealand, David works as an improvising double bass player, contact-improvising dancer, composer, educator, and researcher. He is a prominent member of the London free improvised music scene and is a long-standing member of the London Improvisers Orchestra, as well as various other improvisation ensembles across Europe.

David's PhD, Musicians in Space (2020), explores what happens when the performance of free improvisation expands outwards into space, so as to remove the physical separation between the performer and the audience. David works as both a lecturer and dance musician in the dance faculty of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, in London. For further information, please go to www.dafmusic.com.

CI Creativity Workshop

The Underscore, devised by Nancy Stark Smith, is a framework CI that takes the dancer through many of the commonly occurring states of awareness that occur during a jam.

The Music-based Underscore is my translation of the practice for improvising musicians and I always look forward to facilitating a combined underscore where the two disciplines work through the practice together.

As is customary, I will introduce the Underscores to everyone new to the practice prior to the session commencing.

Morning Practice

Contemplative Dance Practice or CDP, which has been characterised as a "dancer's meditation" or a "meditator's dance", was developed by Barbara Dilley. It brings together meditation and dance improvisation practices. CDP is a 20 minute period of seated meditation, a 20 minute period of personal movement and awareness warm-up, followed by a 20 minute period of open dancing. It ends with a short period of meditation.

The dance improvisation can include anything from complete stillness to vigorous movement through space. As we shall, it is usually practised with no musical accompaniment and with eyes inwardly focused to encourage inner attention and self-direction. There may be a palpable sense of discovery and revelation, of the weight or lightness of being, of individual truths and feelings experienced and expressed through movement.

First being introduced to Contact improvisation through CI jams, YiQing (YQ) found it impressive to witness the cohesion of bodies dancing together without choreographed moves.

She continues her curiosity by actively participating in contact improvisation festivals, as well as facilitating workshops and lab sessions on her own to unfold the questions that arise from practice and CI jam.

Currently pursuing her master's study in dance science, she continues to feed her curiosity about the relationship between bodies and gravity through practising CI.

In my personal practice, contact improvisation is a tool for me to study the relationship between gravity and the possible functions of the human musculoskeletal system.

Drawing inspiration from my formal training in Chinese Classical dance and contemporary dance, I find it enjoyable to discover movement waves of the bodies through contact improvisation.

Studying the body as an individual, understanding and having a sense of awareness of our own body structure and movement is part of the foundation to explore and build trust in contact improvisation.

Specifically great at staying off the ground, my current focus and interest are finding a sense of continuity while dancing with another body through raw energy, risk-taking, and reflexive responses.

CI Skills Workshop

Do you find it difficult, insecure, or scary to be lifted when practising Contact Improvisation? Do you often worry you will crush the body that you are dancing with? In this session, we will explore possibilities to be lifted, challenge and safely confront our fear through the primary principle of contact improvisation.

Evening Jam Warm Up

Finding efficiency moving in and out of the floor, finding ways to enter the centre of another body to start sharing weight, and dance!

Dancer, singer, drummer, dance and music performer, and CI teacher since 2016, teaching a weekly class in Brighton. Enjoys nature, wild swimming, theatre and comedy impro.

Performed music and dance on various stages of the world, events and festivals. Fell in love with CI and cannot stop dancing. DJ and host of World Music Dance Journeys - ecstatic dance wave with freestyle and contact improvisation.

Creative listening and being ready for the unknown. Smooth switching between deep listening and supportive leading while being open and ready for surprises. Developing practice of solo, duo, trio, and quartet movement and connection with the group.

The dance of dynamics when the tempo and speed are in constant change while being prepared for a never-ending surprise - being totally in the moment while hyper-aware bringing safety and minimising risk of contusions for everyone. Making the dance satisfying.

Late Night CI Jams

Stone loves hosting inspiring CI jams and playing an eclectic mix of music for you to dance with. Starting with meditative soundscapes that weave into subtle pieces with soft rhythms, all played at low volumes, allowing the dancers to connect with each other on a deep level. His 'Late Night Jam' playlist will be mysterious and magical, airy and quiet. Each jam session starts with a short gently led warm-up.