Back in July of 1998 Barbara Stahlberger and I sat on an ocean facing deck in Point Richmond, California with an expansive, three-bridge view. We had both just been part of the Berkeley Contact Improvisation Festival and were basking in the days of dancing and learning.

Barbara turned to me and said, “We need a festival like this in Germany. Who can I find to help me create it?” Barbara returned home and with the assistance of Eckhard Mueller and Benno Enderlein (and now, Daniela Schwartz) created the Contact Festival Freiburg in 2000. It soon became the model festival in Europe, spawning contact improvisation festivals throughout Europe that now run annually from May through September.

I first taught at the Freiburg Festival in 2001 when there were 150 attendees. During my most recent visit this past August there were 301 attendees gathered from 26 countries and five continents.

My experience over 35+ years of festival-going is that these big group events have a life cycle, and that after a few years they can become a bit routine, even stale.

I am happy to report that after 16 summers the Freiburg Contact Festival is as alive and vibrant as ever. Separately, I asked each of the four organizers, “how is it that this festival has not gone stale after all this time?” They all independently gave the same answer: “We give the festival over into the hands of the teachers. They keep it fresh because they keep filling it with their curiosity and inquiry.”

During its first decade the festival never repeated a teacher so the roster of offerings always felt fresh and timely. They also invited all the previous teachers to attend the festival for a token sum. This way, with many of the festival participants being teachers, the quality of investigation within the classes and at the jams was profound.

Each year the organizers invite a teacher to lead the pre-festival workshop, a five-day intensive investigation of the form. I was honored to receive that invitation this year. This particular offering allows the organizers focused time for their own dancing and inquiry. All four were very present for those five days, even with the next two big events coming up.

Between the pre-workshop and the festival is the ‘Teacher’s Meeting,’ a gathering of all those who will be leading classes and workshops in the current year, along with past teachers and potential future teachers who have also been invited. Ecki expressed that the use of two facilitators at the Teacher’s Meeting (TM) works because, “... we find that one becomes the open-hearted hospitable host and the other one directs the group and makes sure they keep things moving.” This year Peter Pleyer from Berlin and Eszter Gal from Budapest facilitated the TM with a very light and generous hand.

This year’s TM allowed over 60 teachers to meet and dance and lab their questions while preparing to be the constellation that would hold the festival group once it grows to over 300 people. Most of the time is spent jamming and labbing, with some sessions reserved for the nuts and bolts of preparing for the festival.

The TM included many structures into which the teachers could pour, exchange, and blend, with extraordinary generosity. The 10X5 structure gave ten teachers five minutes each to talk about what excites them most right now. This structure was repeated several times.

There was also ample lab time with topics ranging from ‘Scores for ‘Not Knowing’ , to ‘Anatomical Imagery’, ‘Paying Attention: CI in Performance’, ‘Spiritual Experience in CI’, ‘Subterranean (Shamanic) Aspects of Teaching CI’, and ‘CI as a Political Action’.

The festival proper begins with everyone gathered into a huge circle in the gym hall and each person stands in turn, saying their name and where they live. I was surprised at how emotional an experience it was to hear how far and wide these people come from to dance together.

Smaller groups were then created, grouped by six different languages, in order to transmit all the pertinent festival information. The largest language group~ after German~ was Spanish, then. English, Russian, French and Finnish. These groups then went into slow motion dancing that eventually connected all the groups and opened up into the evening’s jam.

Each evening the massive gym hall was split in two: the regular jam space and the focused jam space. The focused space had different scores each night and including a box filled with secret scores and a night that began with no duets–only solo and group dancing. One evening, an “ideo-kinetic jam”, initiated by Peter Pleyer had archival copies of CQ and other contact books around the space. When someone found a passage that moved them they could approach a microphone and read it to the dancing bodies. This jam was packed and had rather ‘informed’ dancing.

For the yearly “History Talk”, I led a score titled, ‘Who Dances CI? Who Are We: An Interactive Talk.’ I had participants begin with the Universe Score, where people take a stand for their histories, their beliefs, and their desires. With such a diverse, worldwide group of dancers, it was interesting to see our demographics on many levels. It got interesting when people began to make statements about identity and race: “I’m queer,” “I’ve been discriminated against because of my color,” and “I’m a political activist.”

The only statement that created a consensus was when we found out that not one of this group owns a yacht.

On the fourth afternoon the students initiated several labs events. Some titles included: Buddhism Practice and CI. C.I. with Props. Contact and Climbing and Bouldering. Contact and Basketball. Singing in CI. Non-violent Communication and CI. Dream Work and Movement. Breaking Away From the Form.

Festival Intensives were taught by Eszter Gál and Peter Pleyer, Gretchen Spiro, Ruslan Baranov and Didier Silhol, and myself, Martin Keogh. Individual classes were taught by, Noam Carmeli, Enikö Szilagyi, Rajendra Serber, Ady Elzam, Inna Falkova, Heike Kuhlmann, Laura Barcelo, Steve Homsher, Diana Bonilla Lafuente, Vera de Propris, Panu Erästö, Rachel Dean, Laura Hicks, and Mathilde Monfreux.

This year, two experiments were tried. One was a welcoming in of participants’ children and integrating them into some of the jams and performances. Another was the presence of a resident philosopher, Romain Bigé, who matched philosophical treatises with Steve Paxton’s writing, and led ‘“Eat and Think’” meetings during the lunch breaks.

Dieter Heitkamp created the performance segment this year with 10 dancers: "Going Into Contact Performance", used historical Contact performances and texts to create a narrative for a compelling hour of dance. Another performance was a humorous fundraiser for CQ magazine.

Several aspects of this festival touched me especially the murmuring heard throughout the room as people translated to their non-English speaking friends.

Over 50 helpers made this summer’s event run smoothly. A large share were from Spanish speaking countries. Just before the festival began several helpers were washing all the recently unpacked dishes, readying them for the mountains of meals that are at the heart of most any gathering. They sang and scrubbed, breaking into peals of laughter as they worked, creating a warmhearted feeling-tone for the festival.