Noticing the New: Contact Improvisation Meets Composition

Yishai Gribetz and Nica Portavia, by Flaviamash Photography

Contact Improvisation and Composition Festival

En Provence

July 19-25, 2025

Noticing the New:

Contact Improvisation Meets Composition

Intensive workshop with Eryn Rosenthal

Social psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as “the simple act of actively noticing new things.” In this intensive, we’ll explore both contact improvisation (CI) and composition as active noticing lab–a way of exploring finer-tuned, dialogue-based nuances of Contact and Improvisation. We’ll practice and build on basic principles of CI: sharpening our listening, sensory perception, and attuning of physical reflexes, and build more nuanced skills in weight-sharing, spirals, and physical listening. We’ll play with momentum, speed and tone: at different depths and different orientations to gravity, in connection with the ground, our partners, and the group.

We’ll also apply and connect these CI skills toward honing compositional awareness: finding variations in group, duet, and individual composition. Examining both CI and composition as relational practice, we’ll practice flowing and tracking our attention and awareness, as we move in and out of different depths and degrees of proximity. If dance is movement and movement is change in time and space, we’ll study emergent dynamics, patterns, rhythm and roles, as well as rolls, shapes, and tonality, as we craft and practice dynamic containers for studying and stirring change.

What is the speed of delight? What are strategies for co-creating? Over the course of this intensive, we’ll gain agility in movement invention and creative, game-based spatial problem solving. We’ll also build our awareness and range of texture, speed, stillness, and other compositional tools to weave a collective tapestry and navigate shared authorship. Open and juicy level class geared toward beginners to advanced. All bodies, abilities, and backgrounds are actively welcome.

Bradley Teal Ellis and Eryn Rosenthal in 60% OFF ALL CUSTOM FRAMING*. Photo by Rob Sanchez.

Bio

Eryn Rosenthal is a choreographer, director and social practice artist. Her classes investigate listening and empowerment, play and joy as forces that shift what’s possible when we come together. Eryn’s body-based work examines questions of democracy and social fabric, dreams and meaning-making within local and international contexts, grounded in ongoing collaborations with artists and activists in Chile, South Africa, Spain, and the US. She is proud to be an active member of international contact improvisation (CI) teacher exchange networks, teaching and facilitating at the Freiburg Festival (DE), ECITE, the Market Theatre Lab (SA), La Universidad Complutense (SP), UMass-Amherst and elsewhere since 2003. Eryn’s trauma-informed practice combines contact improvisation, oral history, poetry and experimental performance to examine intimate and historical aspects of socio-political change. Her ongoing series The Doors Project investigates transitions–political, social, personal– through site-based performance in different doorways around the world. She is also a founding co-director of the Sedimento Collaborative in Chile/NYC, co-developing Sediment: Studies in Movement and Memory.

Eryn has worked with dance artists Sello Pesa, Tommy DeFrantz, and Sol Picó; poet Elizabeth Alexander; and documentary theater pioneer Anna Deavere Smith. Eryn’s research and performance have been recognized with awards from the Center for Artistic Activism for work on US voting rights, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain and an Open Society Institute President’s Grant to South Africa, among elsewhere. Eryn previously served as a King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor and inaugural Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building and Inclusion Initiatives at the University of Michigan. She currently teaches at Yale University, with the original arts/humanities seminars Dance and Democracy: Movement Improvisation and Liberation Pedagogies, and Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions. www.erynrosenthal.com

Contact Improvisation and Composition Festival

En Provence

July 19-25, 2025

Schedule:

The other intensive is with the fabulous contact improvisation teacher, organizer and performer Nica Portavia. Bio and workshop description on festival website.