Concept
“Fall in CI” is an intensive gathering in and around Contact Improvisation (CI), where we will research and exchange experiences. Every year we come together with different disciplines that feed Contact Improvisation!
We would be exploring and discovering with Body-Mind Centering into Contact Improvisation in 2025!
Falling into Contact through Body-Mind Centering
Through BMC we will journey toward embodiment—exploring how BMC can support and enrich our practice of Contact Improvisation.
We’ll explore various body systems:
• Bones will guide us in finding internal structure and support—offering grounding for the under-dancer and a sense of lightness and articulation for the over-dancer. We’ll use bones as levers to initiate movement, take flight, lead, and follow.
• The spine will serve as a central axis—an invitation to share our spines in motion, explore inversion, and connect the body’s containers through dynamic alignment and relationship.
• Through the joints, we’ll access mobility, fluid transitions, and the playful ease of falling—opening into the spontaneous dialogue of contact.
• By tuning into the fascia, we’ll connect with the clarity of ligaments, the flow of fluids, and the continuity of movement throughout the whole body. This system supports endless possibilities for reorganization, shaping, directionality, and adaptation to surfaces in relation to gravity.
Throughout this exploration, we’ll attune to our senses—touch, sight, hearing—as pathways to presence. And we’ll return to the heart as our center, grounding the dance in felt connection.
About Fall in CI
As the core team of ci-turkey, we have been collectively studying Contact Improvisation and deepening our understanding of movement research in the past years. We have been working with pioneers and graceful followers of the form here in Turkey and via visiting dance festivals, gatherings, meetings around the world. Besides, we have been inquiring other dance forms and methodologies to connect to our own body-minds, and attend to our partners’. Through our quest we have realized the importance of inter-relational, multi layered pedagogic formation and methodologies of CI and the interdisciplinarity of the CI communities. Some of us have been part of research inquiries in and around CI, i.e. ICI, CIRP, ISSC…
We have been working at our best for sharing our resources with the developing community here in Turkey. Now, we wish to invite to our land, many more informed body-minds of this multi-layered form. We wish to shed light to CI in-forming bodies of knowledge (BMC, Aikido, Alexander Technique, Skinner Releasing Technique, Axis Syllabus, Meditation, Authentic Movement,…), we wish to make visible the collaborative aspect of the learning and teaching of CI, we wish to keep on researching together.
We have been inspired by many organisational formats and made a selection of that we found effective. 3 mornings of intensive, informed by the movement forms which influenced CI, holds place as a grounding for the 7 days of the Fall in CI. We will than have combinations of co-teachings by the teachers. These “Tact of Teaching”s – meaning pedagogical thoughtfulness – are an invitation for teachers to find a point of contact for teaching together. Finding their individual teaching inquires and follow that together with their colleagues’. Assuming that practical knowing-in-action requires pedagogical sensitivity, vigilance, and tact we hope to challenge and inspire the teachers as well as the participants of these sessions.
There is a space for diving into some research in and around CI, sharings and also LABs offered by any interested participant on the spot.
There is lots of time and place for jamming, one2ones and other forms of sharings in the studios and the nature. Each night we have jams of different concepts, such as Music Jam, Silent Jam, Research Jam etc. We will be under eucalyptus trees, accompanied by a little creek, surrounded by orange and lemon gardens in an eco farm, 10 mins away from the Agean Sea.
We are looking forward to “fall” together!