Nita Little Workshop · 24–28 March 2027
Diving into the Fabric of Touch: Technical & Relational Practices in the Movement of Contact Improvisation
With Nita Little · Delft or surrounding area
Apply for the workshop
2027
Daily, including a one-hour break
Venue to be confirmed
Contact
Improvisation
This workshop is a dive into the fabric of touch that is key to our relational practices in the movement of Contact Improvisation – and for many of us, in the living of life itself. The material will be steeped in somatic communication. This adventure into our movement life begins within ourselves, but moves outwardly, to where selfhood refuses to be stable, set and limiting. Instead, its instability is key to its creativity, the play that appears when our relational communication is fluid, movement scores throughout our time will make this connection.
We will form and reform what we know as touch, exploring how this touch translates into the flow of movement. We increase the strength of our moving together with the human and the more than human worlds we also are.
Creative, thoughtful, heart based, skill based, our learning will be anchored in the core principles of Contact Improvisation, such as: how to move weight like water – actions of cascading. The details of touching within weight exchange. The rising and hanging of the body – each mode significant to communication. How attention lives in the very small. Extending to form surfaces that arc. Learning to trust the physicality of our extended intelligence that underlies reflexive action. The availability of many forms of temporal engagement.
Our movement practices will include lots of dancing both as skills building and exploration, although, in many cases these will be the same thing.
Nita Little
Nita Little investigates embodied attention within improvisational and technical movement practices with a concentration on the technicities of both creative and relational practices. Through ensemble dance improvisation practice and performance she works toward a future that recognizes our environmental entanglements and values many forms of embodied communication, recognizing that the quality of an embodied state determines the potentials of its relational capacities.
A dance researcher, theorist/artist, and one of the founding developers of Contact Improvisation (CI) she teaches around the globe, guiding one of its forward leading edges. She began over 50 years ago, working alongside her teacher at Bennington College, Steve Paxton, on materials that became CI (1972) and was a participant in the earliest performances and teaching that helped it to become significant within dance and dance communities. Within CI’s first year she developed a curiosity about the relationship of the (physical) mind and relational events. Now, she investigates ecological actions of embodied attention, particularly with respect to somatic communication between humans and beyond.
Nita received her PhD in Performance Studies with a focus on the articulation of presence and creative actions of attention (2014). Her life work is inclusive of mindbody training, performing, choreographing, researching and writing about the ethics, politics and entanglement of somatic relations. With a world-wide audience for her teaching, dance making, and lecturing, she is an activist for relational intelligence and an advocate for dancers as embodied researchers, marking and exposing a field of human relational potentials.
She is executive director of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC, 2016), a network of laboratories populated by dancer researchers and associate research experts from diverse fields. She lives near Seattle, in the USA. Currently she tours throughout the year and may be found on 6 continents.
She invites you to get her monthly newsletter available by signing up at: Nita Little’s website ↗.
Teaching & practice
Nita Little
in practice.
Practical information
Planning
your visit.
- Dates
- –.
- Daily schedule
- 10:00–17:00 daily, including a one-hour break.
All times are local (Europe/Amsterdam). - Location
- Delft or surrounding area · Venue to be confirmed.
- Price scale
- €450 / €475 / €490
- Contact by email
- info@artsandmovement.org