Thanksgiving Weekend Workshop
annually 2003 – 2019
Thanksgiving weekend Contact Improv Intensive
with Karl Frost
- Berkeley, California
An annual tradition since 2003, Karl Frost’s most improvised workshop CI of the year, where Karl gives himself wide ranging permission for new explorations, new exercise combinations, non-linearity, and following process and curiosity arising in the moment! Karl pulls from current explorations and his 37 years of CI teaching experience. A workshop for those who already have an introduction to CI and a passion for movement and body-based exploration.
2024 is the “restart” of the series after it was interrupted in 2020 by Covid, as so many things were.
Contact Improvisation is a 50 year old artsport exploring the unique physical possibilities of bodies moving through contact: part “non-martial” martial art, part physical meditation and collaborative bodywork practice, part human roller-coaster.
The workshop will be heavily improvised. Over the days, we meander through an organic mix of technique and poetic exploration of the physical encounter with other.
The technical work cultivates efficiency, kinesthetic pleasure, and physical safety in contact as well as fluid speed and power. A recurring theme is the ability to calmly sense with more somatic detail in more “frames per second”… to sense and to be able to act creatively and functionally on what is sensed.
Art and felt meaning in the dance are the subjects of physical poetics.
While our path will be discovered as we go, you can expect…
- A balance of study and abandon, tight investigations and open questions
- Explorations of release technique and the “passive sequencing” work
- Contact vocabulary: novel lifts and mechanical details
- Questioning ‘meaning’ and poetry of the body
- States of awareness and experiments in mind/body relationship
- The possibility of intentionality and composition juxtaposed with the
impossibility of control of meaning and motion. - The dance both as a physical process and as the poetic interplay of two experiencing beings.
- The interplay of open discovery and compositional intention as experiment and deliberate provocation to novel experience.
A particular curiosity for Karl in 2024 has been CI explored through the metaphor of physical conversation and poetry, where we invest in the development of our ability to physically listen and respond and adapt within the context of mutual physical listening and an aesthetics of sensation and process.
Body work, Mind work, pleasure, intellect, art, and a fair bit of sweat.
See below for Karl’s bio.
Course pre-requisites
This workshop assumes that all have already had some intro to classic, physics-based contact improvisation and are ready to jump fully into CI exploration. For those who are more beginners, you may find it useful to read a bit here about fundamentals of classic, physics-based CI, to sense of the workshop is a good fit. Material will be presented in such a way as to be both useful for athletically available beginners and for more advanced dancers looking to find more dynamic and easeful dancing through re-evaluation of the foundations. My feeling over more than 3 decades of teaching is that the more advanced work that many strive for really is found in diving more deeply into the simple fundamentals and allowing complexity to organically emerge.