ANTONIA CRAIGE graduated from Wesleyan University in May 2009. Twenty-two years old, she has been teaching yoga and making dances for three years.

TONY DEIFELL is a visual artist and social entrepreneur in San Francisco. He has spent over a decade creating youth-generated media projects, including From the Hip, Youth Voice Radio, and ISM—a diversity project using video diaries to address race issues, which was recognized by the White House as a national model of diversity education. He serves as chief strategist for KaBOOM!, is on the board of directors of Active Voice, advises film and television projects, and develops participatory media-making productions, such as wdydwyd? (why do you do what you do?). He taught photography at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC, from 1992 to 1997. www.seeingbeyondsight.org

HANNAH FOX is a professor of dance and theater at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. She is artistic director of Big Apple Playback Theatre and conducts dance theater workshops internationally. Hannah was the founder and director of the 92 St. Y Young Women's Youth Theatre and is the editor of Akimbo: Scenes and Monologues by the Young Women's Theatre Collective. www.bigappleplayback.com

JULYEN HAMILTON is a dancer, director, poet, and teacher. Originally from England, he has been an exponent of innovative performance since the 1970s, composing instantly and working with movement and text, sometimes in collaboration with live musicians or a lighting designer. He teaches and performs throughout the world and lives in Catalonia, Spain with his family. www.julyenhamilton.com

DIETER HEITKAMP, ECKHARD MÜLLER, NORBERT PAPE, and NANCY STARK SMITH are long-term contact improvisation dancers, performers, teachers, and organizers, who are committed to the present and future well-being of that work.

SHIRA LYNN was at one time highly educated and working a respectable job in the city. Now, one can only imagine what she is doing at any given moment, foraging for sustenance in the hills of western Massachusetts.

NINA MARTIN, REBECCA BRYANT, and MARGARET PAEK are Lower Left Performance Collective artists. They collaborate on performance projects and teaching residencies, such as March 2 Marfa and Dance Ranch Marfa. Nina is on faculty at Texas Christian University, Rebecca is on faculty at Purdue University, and Margaret teaches and performs in NYC while also seeking an MFA at Hollins University/ADF. www.lowerleft.org

STEVE PAXTON is an inveterate contactor who is interested in improvisation.

STEPHANIE SKURA, "a major American experimentalist" (Dance Ink) and Bessie Award winner, has taught and performed for twenty-five years throughout the U.S. and in fourteen countries. She continues to experiment with movement as an activator of meaning and form, investigating boundaries and intersections of dance, theater, poetry, and performance. She is based in Auburn, WA. 

DEY SUMMER lives in Boston, MA, where she spends a lot of time doing things she loves, including being a bodyworker, playing flute, dancing, and creating more opportunities to dance.

NINA WISE is a performance artist, writer, and founder of the Motion Theater technique. She is known for her provocative and original performance works, which have been produced in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Nina is the author of Big New Free Happy Unusual Life, and her many articles and stories have been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She currently teaches at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in CA. www.ninawise.com, www.motioninstitute.com.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Amanda Abrams, Peter Aerni, Bill Arnold, Donald K. Atwood, John Barrett, Patrick Beelaert, Penny Brogden, Melinda Buckwalter, Ling-Fen Chien, Neige Christenson, Jim Coleman, Lucy May Constantini, Cunningham Dance Foundation, Luis Delgado, Vanessa DeWolf, Aaron Freedman, Karl Frost, Tímea Györke, Renee Hardman, Alexandra Hartmann, "Oasis" Darryl Hasten, Melody Heath, Tinu Hettich, Anja Hitzenberger, Martin Hülsen, Ibiza Contact Festival team, Alexey Karyagin, Miles Kesler, James Klosty, Nóra Kollárovics, Emmanuelle Latour, Bronja Novak Lindblad, Andrea Locke, Katherine Marx, Klea McKenna, Yaniv Mintzer, Norbert Moerchen, Karen Nelson, Minori Nagai, Sveta Pashko, Carme Renalias, Ru-Hong, Richard Rutledge, Ruslan Santah, Andrey Samarcev, Kirstie Simson, David Vaughan, Frances Ward, Paula Zacharias

ALITO ALESSI directs Joint Forces Dance Company (JFDC). Two of JFDC's major programs are DanceAbility and the spring Jam at Breitenbush Hotsprings in Oregon—now in its twenty-eighth year. Alito began dancing contact improvisation in the mid-1970s and began mixed-abilities work in 1988. He teaches, choreographs, and performs both mixed-abilities work and CI internationally. www.jointforcesdance.com.

GABRIELLE BARNETT is currently assistant professor of humanities at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, as well as a dancer, writer, and grassroots organizer/activist. She can often be found exploring the mountains, river valleys, and coastline near her home in Girdwood, Alaska.

THE BOULDER CONTACT LAB, in Boulder, Colorado, is a place for ongoing personal exploration and deepening through the form of Contact Improvisation. The Contact Lab is organized and facilitated by seven Core members—Jeffrey Dann, John Caron, Morgan Stanfield, Lindsay Sworski, Lucien Renjilian-Burgy, Susan Coates, and Victor Warring—who collaborate and donate their time for the love of the dance.

BONNIE BAINBRIDGE COHEN, founder and developer of Body-Mind Centering®, has been an innovator and leader in working with movement, touch, and the body-mind relationship for over forty years. She has an extensive background in movement, including various dance styles, dance therapy, occupational therapy, bodywork, martial arts, voice, and yoga, and her work has been influential in those fields. She is the author of Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering.

RUTH FERRARI, dancer and architect: After being introduced to CI by Martin Keogh in Montevideo, Uruguay, I started practicing regularly and began hosting the Montevideo jam in taller casarrodante. I work both in design and movement, now exploring surprising myself as a way to expand life.

SIMONE FORTI just turned seventy-four. She's doing more and more writing. This June she will teach Writing from Movement in the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

MARGIT GALANTER has been living on the East Coast for the past few years, sharing her time between New York and Western Mass. During this time, she has been co-directing Earthdance and continuing to work on collaborative movement investigations. She intends to archive her findings at www.margitg.wordpress.com.

JULYEN HAMILTON is a dancer and poet and teacher. He has been making and performing dance work throughout the world for over thirty years. Born and raised in England, he trained in London in the 1970s, a time of radical experimentation, and has been an exponent of innovative performance since that time. His work, both dances and their accompanying texts, is mostly improvised. Since the 1980s he has performed in close collaboration with live musicians, dancers, and lighting designers from all over Europe. His teaching reflects his research into efficient ways technique can evolve and improvisational creativity might be imparted. He lives in northern Spain. www.julyenhamilton.com.

ARAWANA HAYASHI is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher trained in both Japanese and Western art forms. She is also an Acharya (a senior teacher of meditation) in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage. Her work as an artist and meditation practitioner has always been intertwined with innovations in community building and education. Since the 1970s, her focus has been on using nonverbal collaborative improvisation methods to increase personal presence and group performance. Arawana is currently on the faculty of the Naropa University Authentic Leadership Program in Boulder, Colorado, and the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She co-founded the Presencing Institute with C. Otto Scharmer.

Based in Berne, Switzerland, TINU HETTICH has worked with contact improvisation, videography, and martial arts since 1990. Together with Peter Aerni, he runs Atelier FreiForm, a space for image and movement in Berne. Part of the organizing team of the international CI jam in Berne, he teaches contact improvisation in Switzerland and abroad, and collaborates on movement research projects around the world.

K.J. HOLMES and other dancefanatics (Scott Smith, Charlie Morrissey, Henry Montes, Kate Brown, and Christoph Lechner) comprise the group Body of Truth, who meet in the UK to engage in long bouts of movement, music, and theatrical wizardry that at times resembles contact improvisation. K.J. lives in Brooklyn, teaching at New York University/Experimental Theater Wing and at Movement Research. She currently channels her physical impulses into scripts and characters through Meisner studies at the William Esper studio. She occasionally continues to travel to perform, teach, and dance with friends.

DANIEL LEPKOFF is a dancemaker who approaches movement as a finely tuned physical dialogue with the environment. He is known for his commitment as a teacher, performer, and writer and has developed a technique based on his approach. Through the '70s and '80s he played a central role in both the development of Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson and Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. A founder of Movement Research in NYC, he has taught and performed his work worldwide. His collaborators include Lisa Nelson, Channel-Z, Paul Langland, Steve Paxton, Oleg Soulimenko, Attila Dora, and Sakura Shimada.

BEBE MILLER is a choreographer and professor living in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches for part of the year at Ohio State University. She formed the Bebe Miller Company over twenty years ago to work with friends and artists who could inspire each other.

JENNIFER MONSON uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections among environmental, philosophical, and aesthetic approaches to understanding our surroundings. As artistic director of iLAND, which supports performance, research, and residencies, she creates large-scale dance projects inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. She is currently working on the Mahomet Aquifer Project in Illinois, where she is on the dance faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. www.ilandarts.org

SALLY NASH: In 1989, after forty years of making, performing, and teaching dance, I established Workspace for Choreographers, a mountain retreat in Virginia that supports movement-generated arts of all kinds. My inquiry through touch as a Feldenkrais teacher intrigues me in its subtlety, distinctions, and possibilities, unique to each student and set of circumstances, one of which has been my own visual art.

ANDREA OLSEN is author of Body and Earth (2002) and Bodystories (1996 with Caryn McHose). She is a professor of dance and the Truscott Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. She also teaches and performs internationally, including at Pen Pynfarch, in Wales. Her home places—shared with husband Steve—include Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine.

RUTH ZAPORAH is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She travels to and fro, feeding on the improvisational moment. www.actiontheater.com.

SARA ALESSI ZOLBROD authors the blog jammingonculture.blogspot.com. She is a writer, choreographer, performer, and massage therapist. She contributed to the anthology Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. Since 2000, she has worked for DanceAbility International.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Amanda Abrams, Mamen Agüera, Jun Akiyama, Hallie Aldrich, Catherine Allport, Bill Arnold, John Bainbridge, el barrendero, John Barrett, Carolina Becker, Jules Beckman, Richard Bird, Ben Brouwer, Melinda Buckwalter, Juan Antonio Cardenas, Jim Coleman, Angela Dony, Johan Elbers, Ruth Ferrari, Robert Flynt, Mónika Gallardo, Ziji Beth Goren, Kristen Greco, Daniel Halkin, Arauco Hernandez, Kieren King, Guto Macedo, Ulla Mäkinen, Sharon Mansur, Kelley Mariani, Jo McCulty, Marjean McKenna, Sharon Montes, Marilynne Morshead, Eckhard Müller, Kenta Nagai, Lisa Nelson, Jeff Noble, Eric Palmer, Susan Rethorst, Ramon Roig, Andrey Samartzev, Javiera Sanhueza, Leslie Scates, Beatriz Schiller, Daniela Schwartz, Roberta Shaw, Ilana Silverstein, Nancy Stark Smith, Tim Summers, Lindsay Sworski, Jacques van Eijden, Mike Vargas, Yun Yu Wang, Ali Woolwich, Sandra Yee

AMANDA ABRAMS is a writer and dancer based in Washington, D.C. Originally from North Carolina, she moved to D.C. to pursue foreign affairs, which she recently gave up in an effort to become a freelance journalist. When she's not scrambling to get writing jobs, she's dancing as much as possible and is always, always, trying to figure out what it means to live improvisationally.

GABRIELLE BARNETT began working with place-based research, writing, and activism in the 1990s. Her movement training includes modern, west African, and Afro-Carribean dance, as well as Contact Improvisation. She earned her doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University, and has collaborated on many performance projects, ranging from children's theater to experimental performance art. She teaches at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, for both the Liberal Studies and Theatre and Dance programs.

MELINDA BUCKWALTER is a dancer/writer living in western Massachusetts, where she co-edits Contact Quarterly and works on projects for Earthdance. She recently finished writing a book on dance improvisation, coming soon. Mavis & Bunhead are her dancing alter egos.

JORDAN FUCHS is a choreographer, dancer, and improviser who has been practicing Contact Improvisation since 1989. Based in New York City for the last ten years, and before that in San Francisco in the early 1990s, he now teaches at Texas Woman's University. In addition to his work with longtime collaborators Toby Billowitz, Storme Sundberg, and Andy Russ, he has explored duet collaborations with K.J. Holmes and Sarah Gamblin.

ESZTER GÁL is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and organizer working at the Hungarian Dance Academy. She regularly teaches and participates in international improvisation festivals in Europe, Russia, and the U.S. She has been the artistic director of Kontakt Budapest International Improvisation Festival since 2002.

SARAH GAMBLIN has been teaching at Texas Woman's University since 2002. She has been practicing Contact Improvisation since 1988 and performed with the companies of Bebe Miller and Bill Young through the 1990s. Lately she has been creating and performing improvised choreography projects with collaborators including Amii LeGendre, KT Niehoff, Ray Schwartz, and Jordan Fuchs, and happily co-establishing a tasty CI scene in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

JÖRG HASSMANN, based in Berlin. I recently realized that I am a professional contacter. Contact was my starting point to dance in 1992. Soon it led me to creating dance and theater pieces, while studying biology and religion, which supported my analytic thinking and questioning for meaning/depth. In 2000 I committed full-time to dance, and CI became—in jamming, labbing, teaching, and performing— the heart of it.

KEITH HENNESSY has been dancing, teaching, performing, praising, and complaining about Contact Improvisation since 1979. He directs Circo Zero Performance and teaches internationally. Improvisation is his home base for experiments in activism, ritual, art, and criticism. Currently working on a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis, Hennessy wants any and all stories about CI in the Bay Area before 1985. www.circozero.org.

MARTIN HUGHES is based in Melbourne, Australia, where he has worked since the early 1990s developing the Contact Improvisation community with the invaluable help of others. He has taught and performed Contact in Australia, New Zealand, Korea, and most recently in the U.S. at CI36 and Earthdance.

For 28 years, MARTIN KEOGH has researched Contact Improvisation through dancing, teaching, and writing. Keogh has taught in 22 countries and has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist for his contribution to CI. He is currently working on the Living Now Project, an anthology about mending the place of humankind in the natural world. He lives with his family in southeastern Massachusetts. www.martinkeogh.com.

PAUL LANGLAND is a dancer and choreographer, and has been a contact improviser since 1972. He has performed with many artists and companies since then, including Channel Z, and was an original member of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble. He is currently an Associate Arts Professor at NYU's Experimental Theater Wing.

SUE LAUTHER has an MFA from the University of Illinois and teaches and practices Contact Improvisation in Troy, New York, where she teaches dance at the Emma Willard School. Sue has taught internationally as well and enjoys the metaphors Contact inspires: support, self-sufficiency, interconnectedness, riding through the unexpected, and much more!

ULLA MÄKINEN is a Finnish dancer and dance teacher currently living in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, studying for an MA in Contemporary Dance Pedagogy. She focuses on CI and improvisation in her work and loves to travel, perform, and teach in different countries and communities, as well as organize events such as the Finnish CI festival, www.contacfestival.fi, and Barcelona International Dance Exchange, www.bide.be.

MARJEAN MCKENNA is a teacher of the Alexander Technique, whose work has been influenced by graduate studies in embryology, traditional Chinese medicine, and the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. She has been studying aikido, Contact Improvisation, tai chi, and the Alexander Technique since 1976. Other movement investigations include skiing, aerial dance, tango, and walking. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

ECKHARD MÜLLER, based in Strasbourg, France, has been deeply involved in sharing and exploring Contact Improvisation since 1988, as a practitioner, performer, and teacher, touring all over Europe and South America. He is co-founder and organizer of the annual Contactfestival Freiburg in Germany, which will celebrate its tenth birthday in 2009, and he is a supporter of worldwide development and networking for the form.

JEFFREY S. PARKER works as a psychiatric rehabilitation counselor for Threshold Services in Silver Spring, Maryland. He recently earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University.

STEVE PAXTON is an inveterate contactor who is interested in improvisation.

DANIELA SCHWARTZ is an Argentine artist, dancer, and teacher based in France, and is a tireless traveler. When she is at home, she collaborates with Cie Dégadezo, and when not, she tours with Eckhard Müller around Europe and South America. Years of jewelry making; object, textile, and fashion studies; and video and installation creation inform her physical practice, investigation, and teaching.

ROBERT TURNER lives, for the moment, in Toronto, where he dances, deejays, choreographs, and, in general, continues to research and experiment in the concerns of his recently completed PhD thesis in political science: the relationship between political power, habit, and risk in human movement and contact.

SARA ALESSI ZOLBROD authors the blog jammingonculture.blogspot.com. She is a choreographer, performer, and massage therapist. She contributed to the anthology Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. She has worked for DanceAbility International since 2000.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Peter Aerni, Claudio Al Jahara, Anton Argirov, Robert Anderson, Maria Antonova, Susan Arnsten-Russell, Gaston Bayle, Joshua Bisset, Jeff Bliss, Hilary Bryan, Melinda Buckwalter, Polina Bykhovskaya, Steve Christiansen, Naomi Claire, Contredanse, Diana Cordeiro, Jocasta Crofts, Jess Curtis, Jym Daly, Earthdance, Jenny Epstein, Amber Espar, Ben Featherpeach, Maaya Fukumoto, Ava Su Ganwei, Sven Hagolani, K'lo Harris, Lila Hurwitz, Edgar Jansen, Carey Jeffries, Gabriela Jüttner, Aune Kallinen, Alexei Kapterev, Oksana Kashkovskaya, Erica Kaufman, KNI, Marina Konovalova, Katja Kulenkampff, Emmanuelle Latour, Ken Manheimer, Diane McCorkle, James Moore, Fernando Neder, Christopher Neville, Ilya Noé, Uldis Ohaks, Cheryl Pallant, Sabine Parzer, Cathy Pollock, Daniela Ponieman, Michal Ratajski, Jan Ratecki, Lucien Renjilian-Burgy, Róbert Révész, Phillip Ringel, Save-the-Redwoods League, Steven Schreiber, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Stahlberger, Carol Swann, Hiroko Takahashi, Tamin Totzke, Cristina Turdo, Isabelle Uski, Valparaiso Chile CI36 Group, Ronja Verkasalo, Konstantin Voschanov, Nathan Wagoner, Andrew Wass, Mandoline Whittlesey, Jamus Wood, Ali Woolwich, Sarah Young, Paula Zacharias, Hernán Zelaya, Mark Moti Zemelman, Vladimir Zhulanov, Alexey Zyryanovff

 

CHRIS AIKEN is an international teacher and performer of dance improvisation and contact improvisation. His work has evolved over 25 years through ongoing investigations of performance, composition, movement technique, and design, significantly influenced by his research into aesthetics, somatics, and perception. He has received numerous awards, including commissions from the National Performers Network and the Walker Art Center, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. He teaches at Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania.

OLIVE BIERINGAcodirects the BodyCartography Project with Otto Ramstad, which, for the past ten years, has been investigating the physical resonance of space through dance, film, and installation work internationally. Current projects include a new site work at the Crewe Train Station for Cheshire Dance, UK; the SEEDS Festival at Earthdance; and Half Life, a new performance work from the heart of the nuclear Pacific. Olive is a certified practitioner of Body-Mind Centering®. www.bodycartography.org.

THOMAS HÄNTZSCHEL is a freelance photographer for newspapers and magazines. He lives and works with Russian performer Marina Konovalova in north Germany. Inspired by contacters Benno Voorham and Eszter Gál, he started a photo project in 1997 about CI in Western and Eastern Europe. He hopes his photographs show the special qualities of improvised dance. An exhibition in Tallinn, Estonia, during ECITE 2005 was the initial point for a collaboration of text and photo with Martin Keogh.

DELPHINE HESTERS studied sociology and cultural management, researching contemporary dancers in Brussels for her master's thesis. As a research fellow of FWO (Research Foundation) Flanders, she is currently preparing a Ph.D. on the second generation of Moroccan immigrants in Brussels. She was part of Sarma's B-Chronicles think tank, creating the game PROJECT with Dimitry Masyn and assisting with interview research.

itch
AMY "CATFOX" CAMPION is dedicated to breaking through cultural and artistic boundaries by sharing ideas and experiences through multimedia hip hop dance/theater with her company, Antics Performance. www.AnticsPerformance.com.
SIMONE FORTI has had a seminal influence on the dance field. Her books include Handbook in Motion (1974); Oh, Tongue (2003); and Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006). She currently lives in Los Angeles.
SARAH LEDDY (CLMA) is a dancer, choreographer, writer, actor, and educator based in Los Angeles. She recently cowrote and performed in the dance theater piece Fear of Drowning / Fear of Flying, directed by Liz Hoefner. Her work has been performed in L.A., San Francisco, New York, and Greece.
TAISHA PAGGETT is a Los Angeles-based dance artist and co-instigator of the dance journal project itch. Her work and collaborations have been presented by venues in California, NYC, and Utrecht, the Netherlands. www.taishapaggett.net.
Independent agitator MEG WOLFE is co-editor of itch journal, founder and curator of the Anatomy Riot performance series, and organizer of the L.A. DANCEbank classes. As a choreographer/performer, her work has been presented in NYC and on the West Coast. www.myspace.com/dancemegwolfe.

NAOMI JACKSON is an associate professor in the Herberger College Department of Dance at Arizona State University. Publications include Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) and the edited anthology Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights (Banff Centre Press, 2004).

For nearly thirty years, MARTIN KEOGH has researched contact improvisation through dancing, teaching, and writing. Keogh has taught in 22 countries and has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist for his contribution to CI. He is currently working on the Living Now Project, an anthology about mending the place of humankind in the natural world. He lives with his family in southeastern Massachusetts. www.martinkeogh.com.

CLARINDA MAC LOW'S solo work and collaborative group extravaganzas have appeared in NYC at P.S. 122, St. Mark's Church, Movement Research, the Kitchen, and elsewhere in the world. Current work includes TRYST, with Alejandra Martorell and Paul Benney; DAGGER, a solo video and performance project based on Macbeth; and Salvage/Salvation, an ongoing collaborative project that explores the implications of reuse, discard, decay, and abundance.

MAVIS & BUNHEAD are dancers and roommates who enjoy colliding and combining their experience from the diverse worlds of postmodern dance and ballet in unusual works of activist dance-making. myspace.com/mavisandbunhead.

ERIKK MCKENZIE is a Norwegian musician and performance artist who is graduating from the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam. The films he created with Li Ning can be seen during Julidans in Amsterdam, 2008. www.myspace.com/erikkmckenzie.

ANDREA OLSEN directs the dance program at Middlebury College; she is author of Bodystories and Body and Earth-books rooted in the Northampton, MA, community.

MARY OVERLIE, performer, choreographer, teacher, and theater collaborator, has been developing her Six Viewpoints since 1978. A founding member of New York City's Danspace at St. Mark's Church, Movement Research, and the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU, as well as the Pro Series for the TanzWochen festival in Vienna, Overlie has written about her work in the book Training the American Actor (2006), edited by Arthur Bartow.

STEVE PAXTON is an inveterate contactor who is interested in improvisation.

Tanzfabrik Panel
JESS CURTIS is a choreographer, director, and performer, and was a member of Sara Shelton Mann's Contraband. His company, Gravity, is based in San Francisco and Berlin. He teaches CI, composition, and release-based technique, currently at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz in Berlin and at UC Berkeley.
STEPHANIE MAHER is a choreographer, improviser, and teacher who trained in multidisciplinary forms for ten years in San Francisco, CA, living for the last ten years in Berlin. She started the 848 Contact jam in San Francisco, and the K77 jam and K77 studios in Berlin, and continues with the Ponderosa Tanz/Land Festival in Stolzenhagen, Germany.
SARA SHELTON MANN trained in NYC and then moved to Canada, where she was introduced to CI by Andrew Harwood and Peter Bingham. Sara formed Contraband in 1979, an interdisciplinary performance company in which Contact was the driving force. She lives in San Francisco, where she creates projects with collaborators, writes, and has a healing practice.
FRIEDERIKE PLAFKI now in Berlin, started as a freelance dancer in Leipzig, Germany, with choreographer Heike Hennig, and has been doing CI for sixteen years.
PETER PLEYERhas been a practitioner of CI since 1990. He is a graduate of EDDC in Arnhem, the Netherlands; a mover and shaker in Berlin; a member of "Veronika Blumstein" (Poland); and, since 2007, artistic director of TanzTage, Berlin.
KAREN SCHAFFMAN graduated from EDDC in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and University of California Riverside's Doctoral Program, her dissertation based on CI and performance. She is a professor at Cal State, San Marcos, and collaborates with San Diego locals, Downstream Media (San Diego), and Veronika Blumstein (Poland).
MEG STUART dancer/choreographer, took her first CI class at fifteen in Boston and studied further in NYC in the late 1980s with Randy Warshaw, Nina Martin, and Steve Paxton, among others. Along with her Brussels-based company, Damaged Goods, she collaborates with artists such as Bruce Mau, Ann Hamilton, Benoît Lachambre, and Hahn Rowe. Her latest improvisation project, Auf den Tisch! (2005), invites actors, dancers, and thinkers to improvise together while talking about improvisation.

PAUL FREUNDLICH is the founder and president emeritus of Co-op America, was editor of Communities magazine, and has been active in the movement toward corporate accountability and environmental responsibility. Publications include a novel, Deus ex Machina; essays and anecdotes, Secrets of the Universe Revealed; and 25+ documentary films and videos. He started Dance New England almost thirty years ago and is still dancing.

GORDON THORNE is a visual artist living and working in Northampton, MA. He is the founder and director of A.P.E.; the Open Field Foundation; and Window, LLC.

NALA WALLA is a transdisciplinary artist, teacher, and activist living at the BCollective: an off-grid arts and ecology project on a tiny island near Port Townsend, WA. Her work as a homesteader overlaps with her activities facilitating Bodyversity workshops and performing dance, theater, and music everywhere from organic farms to preschools.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Peter Aerni, Marjorie Agosin, Keeth Apgar, Bill Arnold, John Barrett, Stacy Barton, Heidi Beier, The Brad Blog, David Brown, Karmit Burian, Julieta Cervantes, Christopher Chu, Ray Chung, Naomi Claire, Albert Cook, Ann Cooper Albright, Anne-Marie Culhane, Adrienne Dailey, Pen Dale, Dance New England, Dance Theater Workshop, Tine Declerck, Ilse Den Hond/Rosas, Green Deng, Katherine Dohan, Andrés Duque, Katy Dymoke, Mika Ebbesen, EINCE Festival, Laura Einsel, Johan Elbers, Liz Erber, Noa Eshkol/EWMN, Karim Ezzat, Benjamin Featherpeach, Hillary Anna Flecha, Eszter Gál, Alicia Grayson, Thomas Greil, Andreas Hechler, Dieter Heitkamp, Tinu Hettich, Amos Hetz, Gai Hetzroni, Michael Higgins, itch, Karen and Allen Kaeja, Tanya Kane-Parry, Miriam Keye, Marina Konovalova, Anouk Llaurens, Alejandro Martorell, Marjean McKenna, Mary-Clare McKenna, Thomas Moese, Ester Momblant Ribas, Mikki del Monico, Ann & Angus Monk, Fernando Neder, Amy Oelsner, Claire O'Neil, Anita Ostreich, Norbert Pape, Jeroen Pede, Diana Raspoet/Damaged Goods, Róbert Révész, Otto Ramstad, David Ray, Saliq Savage, Melissa Rolnick, Karen Schaffman, Christian Schneider, John Seyfried, Joel Smith, Lindsey Rosen, Sean Smuda, Herman Sorgeloos, Gretchen Spiro, Jillian Sweeney/DTW, Robert Turner, Natalie Uhlmann, Charlotte Vandevyver, Chris Van der Burght, Myriam Van Imschoot/SARMA, Anne Love Woodhull, Benjy Young, Coleman Zeigen.

PELE BAUCH is a choreographer and arts manager. She joined The Field staff in 2004 after working in development at the Joyce Theater and Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. All of her choreography has been developed via Fieldwork and subsequently selected for presentation at New York City theaters. Pele recently received a BAX10 Passing It On Award.

MELISSA BORGMANN, cofounder of the Juno Collective with Dudley Voigt, is a writer, teacher, and facilitator who has taught learners of all ages. Her work has taken her around the United States and South Africa. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

JOHN BORSTEL is Humanities Director for Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. He has conducted facilitation and training in Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process throughout the U.S. His writing has appeared in Generations, Dialogue in Artistic Practice: Case Studies from Animating Democracy, and Parterre Box, the Queer Opera Zine.

RICK BROSTOFF has been a part of the contact improvisation community in New England for many years and has performed with Helix Rising and Playing Field. A chapbook of his poems inspired by CI and authentic movement, Momentum, is due out in November from La Vita Poetica Press (Atlanta, GA).

NEIGE CHRISTENSON has been an avid Contact Improviser since 1981, when her theater professor, John Hellweg, introduced her to the form. She has a BA in Theater from Smith College, an MA in Expressive Arts Therapy from Lesley University, and is a grateful graduate of the School for The Work of Byron Katie. Now she's an improvisational mother, dancer, performer, teacher, therapist, and inquirer. She lives with her family in Boston, MA.

BARBARA DILLEY danced with Merce Cunningham, studied new thoughts with John Cage, and entered new dimensions with the Grand Union. She continues to investigate bodymind through meditation and improvisation, and teaches at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Currently she is working on a project called deSOlAte/deLIGhT to create a culture that makes performance art.

ROBERT ELLIS DUNN (1928-1996), musician and protégé of John Cage, was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater and mentor and coach of several generations of choreographers, dancers, and teachers. He finished the Laban training at the Dance Notation Bureau in 1972, which informed his subsequent teaching of movement observation, choreography, and improvisation.

CANDACE FECK is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at the Ohio State University, where she teaches courses in dance history, criticism, and theory. A lifelong lover of both dance and writing, Candace is interested in the many ways these two practices intersect.

Since arriving from Bennington College in 1961, MERYL GREEN has been dancing, teaching, and choreographing in the greater New York metropolitan area. She has taught at studios, schools, and community centers, including Marymount School in Manhattan and Greenwich Academy in Connecticut. She is presently artistic director of MAC, a multigenerational dance improvisation group in Greenwich, CT, which has been in existence for twenty years.

STEVE GROSS has been involved with The Field since its inception as a service organization in 1987, often as director, and was dance curator at The Kitchen from 1990 to 1992. He has taught fundraising and arts administration courses at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and The Juilliard School. A choreographer, performance artist, writer, and video maker, Steve is also a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice; he works with artists individually and in groups.

DANIEL LEPKOFF is a dance maker who approaches movement as a finely tuned physical dialogue with the environment. His work explores the form and composition of this interaction. Daniel writes: "In a friendly e-mail exchange, considering our expansive view of movement, I asked Steve Paxton what could possibly be an example of something that is 'not physical.' He e-mailed back: 'writing e-mail.' Reading over my contribution in this CQ, I see I am pushing for a way out of this supposed dilemma. If you would like to join me in 'not being physical,' send your e-mail to: dnlep@earthlink.net."

LIZ LERMAN is a choreographer, performer, speaker, educator, consultant, and Founding Artistic Director of the Maryland-based Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, which just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Her numerous awards include a 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Current Dance Exchange performance projects include Ferocious Beauty: Genome, Small Dances About Big Ideas, and 613 Radical Acts of Prayer.

TERE O'CONNOR has been making dances since 1982. He's created over thirty works for his company, which performs throughout the U.S., Europe, South America, and Canada. O'Connor is a professor in the dance department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches one semester and devotes the rest of his time to research with his company, based in NYC.

PATRICIA REEDY is the director of Teaching & Learning at Luna Kids Dance in Berkeley, California. She teaches inquiry-based classes and seminars for teachers, artists, children, and families through the California Institute of Dance Learning. www.lunakidsdance.org

DANA REITZ is a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist who has developed and produced projects since 1973. Her projects include Necessary Weather, with lighting designer Jennifer Tipton and dancer Sara Rudner; Unspoken Territory, a solo for Mikhail Baryshnikov; and her latest work, Sea Walk. Reitz has toured extensively as a performer and teacher worldwide. The recipient of two "Bessie" awards, she is currently on the faculty of Bennington College.

CHRISTINA SVANE has been tracking a flock of migrating questions since she started dancing with Ann Woodhead in San Francisco in the 1960s: "Where does the dancing take us?" "How do we know what we've invoked if we don't tell each other?" While helping create Movement Research, teaching at SNDO in Amsterdam, creating IDEA and the moving-sounding-writing ritual, The Crystal, she keeps asking.

DIANE VIVONA has worked professionally as a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and arts administrator in New York, Los Angeles, and London. She is currently studying visual arts and the contemporary art market through the master's program at Christies' Education, London.

LAILYE WEIDMAN is a dance artist, teacher, and writer in Los Angeles, where she collaborates with the traffic, wind, and the moving ground. Currently she is working on her BA in the World Arts and Cultures program at UCLA.

In addition to curating Dance Conversations @ The Flea for the past three seasons, NINA WINTHROP choreographed Violet Fire-an opera by composer Jon Gibson and directed by Terry O'Reilly-which was presented at BAM's Next Wave Festival in October 2006. She formed Nina Winthrop and Dancers in 1991 and has presented her work throughout New York City and Los Angeles. She is on the Board of Directors of New Dance Alliance.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, YASUKO YOKOSHI arrived in the United States in 1981 with a background in the martial art kendo and classical ballet. Yokoshi's works, which reflect her interests in combining disciplines and mediums, have been presented at festivals and theaters nationally and internationally. Yokoshi has received two New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards, one for her solo, Shuffle, in 2003, and the other for what we when we in 2006. Yokoshi serves as a curatorial adviser at The Kitchen.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS:
Kent Alexander, Susan Arnsten-Russell, John Barrett, Rob Bettmann, Nicole Bindler, Sondra Blanchard, Brando Brandes, Diane Butler, Nancy Campbell, Selene Carter, Ubaldo Cella, Nora Chipaumire, Michelle Coe, Jim Coleman, David Corbet, Paula Court, Fred Covarrubias, Barbara Cox, Critical Correspondence, Pen Dale, Ben Dallas, Dance Exchange, D. James Dee, Brittany Pettit Delany, Angela Delichatsios, Gretchen Dunn, Måns Erlandson, Anneliese Euler, Beth Fairservis, Molissa Fenley, Arthur Fink, Force Fong, Jordan Fuchs, Maaya Fukumoto, Ilana Gerjuoy, Ray Green, Matt Haber, Rosemary Hannon, Elazar Harel, Sue Huggins, In Dance, Mimi Johnson, Vika Kleiman, Magda Kleparska, Mark Kornblouth, John Kubat, Tina Kukovic, Katja Kulenkampff, Rythea Lee, Jacob Lepkoff, Alejandra Martorell, Mazie Marx, Michael Mazzola, Ryutaro Mishima, Marcin Mroz, Colleen Mylott, Johan Nilsson, Andrea Olsen, Judi Petkau, Mary Ramsay, Chris Randle, Alston, Melinda Ring, Rachel Roberts, Shakti Carolyn Sadeh, Paula Sager, Bala Sarasvati, Sarah Sass, Steven Schreiber, SheShooters, Howard Silver, Urs Stauffer, Pat Stone, Taimi Strehlow, Tim Summers, Hiroko Takahashi, Dudley Voigt, Charlotte von Glasersfeld, Johanna Walker, Jerry Weisberg, Kathy Wildberger, Mark Moti Zemelman