Begin with your own body.
Notice how you organize around gravity, the floor and effort. Build options for falling, rolling, redirecting momentum and moving between levels.
A progressive journey into the foundations of Contact Improvisation through technical practice, somatic exploration and dancing.
Choose your activities →VenueDe Wending
Class19:30–20:30
Beginner friendly
Open jam20:30–21:30
Included in the €5 Class + Jam ticket
Upcoming datesAutumn 2026
October7, 14, 21
November4, 11, 18
Special full-jam evenings28 October + 25 November
19:30–21:30 · Open jam only · No class
Class + Jam series
About the classes
Listening becomes movement.
Contact Improvisation is an improvised dance practice shaped by attention, touch, gravity and change. These classes offer a progressive way into the form through technical exercises, somatic exploration and open dancing.
Stay clear while moving together.
Explore touch, changing points of contact, shared weight, support and physical invitations. Practise giving, receiving, pausing and redirecting without losing choice.
Let the dance be co-created.
Listen, propose and respond without fixing who leads or follows. Include your partner, the floor, the room and everything changing around you.
A shared enquiry
How can two people become one continuously adapting movement system while each remains attentive, autonomous and free to choose?
There is no fixed vocabulary to reproduce. Technique expands what is possible, and attention helps us recognize what the dance needs now.
Different perspectives, one unfolding practice
Two voices.
One shared enquiry.
The series is guided by Cristhy Mattos and Juliano Vendemiatti.
Cristhy Mattos
Technical, perceptual and relational foundationsCristhy Mattos is an architect and Contact Improvisation dancer whose work connects architectural and bodily structures through sensing weight, organising support and composing in real time.
She began practising Contact Improvisation in Brazil in 2011 with Ricardo Neves, following a decade of Iyengar Yoga training with Vanessa de Lucca. She later expanded her studies in the United States and Europe, and deepened her somatic understanding with Juliano Vendemiatti.
Cristhy continues to explore Contact Improvisation through research labs in the Netherlands and co-leads the Open Contact Improvisation Performance Laboratory in Amsterdam, which focuses on performance research. Her current explorations combine precision and play with a deep softening of the body, cultivating attentiveness, fluid partnering and compositional awareness.
In this seriesCristhy Mattos will focus primarily on working with gravity, falling, weight, momentum, support, points of contact, spatial awareness and the development of a shared dance. Her approach uses technique as a way to increase availability: giving the body more possibilities while cultivating sensitivity, curiosity and play.
Juliano Vendemiatti
Somatic practice and Feldenkrais-informed explorationJuliano Vendemiatti is a Delft-based interdisciplinary artist and somatic educator with a background in music, dance and multimedia. A certified Mind Body Studies practitioner, he has taught movement and interdisciplinary arts workshops internationally for more than a decade.
In this seriesJuliano Vendemiatti will bring somatic practice and insights from Dr. Feldenkrais’s studies into Contact Improvisation, creating space to investigate how we sense, organize and adapt the body before and during contact.
Across the series, these approaches meet around a common exploration:
How can we become more available to what is happening now?
Available to ourselves.Available to another person.Available to space.Available to gravity.Available to change.
And eventually, available enough that instead of two people trying to make a dance happen, the dance begins to emerge between them.
Tickets
€5 per activity.
Choose one or more.
Every Class + Jam evening and every extended Jam-only evening costs €5. Select a single activity or choose several tickets and pay for them together.
Choose your activity tickets
The registration form includes all remaining Class + Jam and Jam-only dates. Select one ticket or any combination of dates; the total is calculated at €5 per selected activity so you can pay for multiple tickets together.
Open registration form →Choose and pay
Select your dates.
Pay €5 per activity.
- 01
Select one or more eligible activities in the registration form.
- 02
Each selected Class + Jam or Jam-only date counts as one €5 activity ticket.
- 03
Send the form. We will reply with availability, payment instructions and practical information.
- 04
Your selected places are secured once payment has been received.
Extended monthly jams
JAM ONLY.
On these evenings there is no class. The full two-hour session is an open Contact Improvisation jam.
19:30–21:30 · €5
Reserve this jam →19:30–21:30 · €5
Reserve this jam →Somatics as part of the practice
Another kind
of listening.
Alongside the technical work, somatic and Feldenkrais-inspired explorations will invite us to slow down and notice how movement is organized from within.
Through attention, sensation and curiosity, we will investigate unnecessary effort, habitual movement patterns, skeletal support and the many ways the body can reorganize when meeting gravity, the floor or another person.
Before we can perceive another body clearly, we need to become more sensitive to our own.
The somatic work therefore does not sit beside Contact Improvisation as a separate practice. It becomes one of the ways through which we learn Contact Improvisation.
Who is it for?
New to the form,
or returning to its foundations.
The series is designed for people who are new to Contact Improvisation as well as dancers who would like to revisit its foundations with more attention and depth.
No previous Contact Improvisation experience is necessary.
The classes are progressive, and participation in the full series is encouraged so that physical skills, perception, trust and shared understanding can develop over time.
Technique gives us possibilities.
Somatic awareness helps us perceive them.
Listening connects us.
And improvisation allows us to create something together that neither person could have created alone.
Before you arrive
Come as you are.
Move at your own pace.
Comfortable clothes that allow free movement and cover the knees and shoulders. Remove sharp jewellery and accessories.
Water, curiosity and respect for your own limits. You do not need a partner or previous dance experience.
Participation is always voluntary. You can pause, redirect, say no or leave a dance at any moment.