Contact Improvisation Jam

Our monthly Contact Improvisation Jam consists of a half hour warm-up and skills practice, followed by open improvisation. All experience levels are welcome! This month we have guest musicians Sarah Blacker and Aaron Katz.

$10-20 suggested donation SIGN UP ONLINE or at the door

Musician bios:

Singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, board-certified music therapist and licensed mental health counselor Sarah Blacker, together with her husband Aaron Zev Katz (both from Salem, MA) —a spiritual song leader, singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music teacher & producer —bring their award-winning original music and interactive healing experiences to sacred spaces throughout New England. Both seasoned international touring and recording artists, they understand the nuances of a shared live music experience. As healers and empaths, they understand the deeper needs of humanity and have cultivated a path that allows them a marriage, both literally and figuratively, of their performing and healing worlds.

“Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton. The improvised dance form is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to open to these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.”

“Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one’s basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.”

—early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s,
from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979