Deepening Contact

 

A long weekend deep dive into mechanical curiosity and sensory dialogue in contact improvisation

With Karl Frost

Friday 17 January through Monday 20 January (MLK weekend), 2025
Berkeley/Oakland,  California

Karl Frost has been exploring and teaching contact improvisation and parallel practices for over 38 years. In this 4 day workshop, Karl will facilitate shared exploration of  deepening awareness, presence, and dialogue in our practice of contact improvisation. We will improvise our way together through the physical/mechanical and the somatic/sensory/psychological.  We approach this in the physical sense of developing finer and more expanded somatic/athletic awareness, interaction, and response.  We also approach this in the sense of personal artistic/psychological inquiry.  Explorations will range from slow and subtle through the more abandoned and dynamic.

On the physical level, we look at dynamic and adaptive good body alignment for soft power, ease, receptivity to weight and support, and expanded range of movement options. Acknowledging our conditioned impulses, we expand off of these to new territories of movement together. Exploring the Passive Sequencing work, we see how relaxing and letting go of reactivity helps us stay more functionally present with each other’s bodies in motion.  We use lift and support vocabulary as pathways to explore principles as well as pursue more open-ended investigations of those principles.

For the felt/artistic/psychological side of the work, Karl pulls from his years of directing interactive performance work rooted in explorations from somatic psychology and experimental theater. We cultivate a fascination with details of sensation. As we focus on details, our sensory world can experience an explosion of variety, novelty, and perhaps ineffable meaning.  We investigate whether we can help each other dive into details and stay present with the moment by ourselves being present and unhurriedly adaptive.

A building focus of the weekend will be the “Deepening” score… a mixing of eyes-closed “Authentic Movement” practice with physical following, adaptation, and relating skills from CI as participatory witness. Eyes closed exploration invites us to let go of our daily social selves to find layers of curiosity and process both aesthetic and psychological hidden underneath. We cultivate a sense of physical poetry and felt sense of meaning in contact exploration and the joy of supporting each other into deeper exploration.

Workshop for those who already have an introduction to CI.  Limit 24 participants.

Logistics

Hours: 7pm-10pm Friday, 12-6pm Saturday, 1pm-7pm Sunday, 10-6pm Monday

Location: Friday – Sunday Western Sky Studio in Berkeley.  Monday Ellen Webb Studio in Oakland

Fees: fees are sliding scale… pay what you can within the range.  

Registration  sliding scale
early: register by 20 December $190 – $400
early: register by 3 January $245 – $400
register after 3 January $300- $400

NOTAFLOF: If you can not afford the lower end, but would like to attend, write to info@bodyreserach.org… usually something can be worked out.

Registration: To register do both of the following…

    • fill out the linked registration form
    • pay registration fees, using one of these options…
      • Zelle to culturalvariant@gmail.com
      • Paypal to culturalvariant@gmail.com (add $5 for this option)

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Karl Frost has been teaching and performing contact and related work in body-based creative process for the over 38 years. He is known internationally for his dynamic and articulate movement style, his rigor in physical research and teaching, and for the edge-pushing nature of his work in both practice and performance. His work, influenced by studies in contemporary release technique, Alexander technique, and martial arts, has been showcased across the states, Canada, Europe, South America, and Israel. His performances, via Body Research Physical Theater, take the body and emotionally and physically felt experience as their reference points, often in highly audience interactive frameworks.

Karl holds a PhD in Ecology (emphasis in Human Ecology and Cultural Evolution Theory), and MFA in Dramatic Arts, and a BA in Physics. He is currently working as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, where he works on visual anthropology (photography and video) and theoretical studies in cultural evolution.