Just a few hours ago, I was sitting on the periphery of the morning jam on the closing day of the Freiburg Contact Festival 2016. The huge gym hall was completely open, full of colored lines and even more colorful clothing, a moving, changing mass of bodies running walking lying rolling touching flying. It felt like a giant swimming pool full of possibilities. I pushed off the edge and dove in, not knowing what I would find. After 12 days of dancing, I noticed the excitement, apprehension, what attracted my eyes, my body. And then I took the plunge…

Romain Bigé, one of the two researchers at the festival this year (“Touch & Talk - Thinking in CI”), planted philosophical seeds for dancing on each day of the five-day Teachers Meeting (TM) right before the Festival. Throughout the entire 12 days of the TM and Festival I found myself coming back to the first seed he offered:

Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
—Jacques Lacan

Romain went on to comment that the giver doesn’t possess it because ‘it’ is potential, the potential of becoming. And the receiver doesn’t want it because it is unimaginable. The gift is created through relation. It comes into being in the moment of being given and received. This description seemed an apt one for the encounter with other and unknown that is the spark of every contact improvisation. Not knowing what will happen, but being willing to engage it. As Romain said, “so, contact improvisation is love.”

Mandoline Whittlesey, this year’s other researcher (“Seen beings, or the art of framing a dance space”), was engaged with the act of watching, and its power over both the watcher and the one being watched. In her lab proposal during the TM we worked with a trio of doer, seer and an active watcher who paid attention especially to the space moving between the first two. I perceived echoes of Romain’s and Mandoline’s research reverberating throughout the entire 12 days: each one’s research affecting the other’s, the performance, the labs and classes, jams and even my walks to the lake.

Jurij Konjar, who was invited to curate the performance evening, worked with 24 participants and teachers on a score called The Gravity of Watching. In this score we worked with roles of doer and watcher, where the doer provided the field for the (active) watcher to work in. Again, this active watching was echoed, encouraged and supported from many different directions during the many focused, open, and musical jams throughout the Festival.

Dan Farberoff was working with video documentation this year, with a similar research interest in the relationship between witnessing and doing, and Ka Rustler and Susanne Martin co-facilitated the Teachers Meeting, squeezing deftly into the space between witnessing and doing.

Both the TM and the Festival were supported by a large team of helpers who provided clean studios, dressing rooms and bathrooms, technical/logistical support, and delicious and abundant food (and probably a million other things I didn’t notice). I saw this team of helpers work very hard, all the while chatting in many languages, singing, laughing, chopping, cleaning and, of course, dancing.

Teaching intensives this year were Eva Karczag, Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood, Christine Mauch, Tim O’Donnell and João Fiadeiro. I was fortunate to offer a class alongside fellow teachers Alyssa Lynes, Iván Baucia, Mario Ghezzi, Miriam Wolodarski, Tal Avni, Abhilash Ningappa, Alex Guex, Alice Godfroy, Kees Lemmens, Lea Kieffer, Mary Pearson, Defne Erdur, Ville Johansson, and Nina Wehnert, whose proposals ranged from CI principles to Somatics into CI and more.

As a first time proposal, Laura Hicks and Otto Akkanen introduced and facilitated an optional feedback structure for teachers, based on a process they learned while studying their Master of Arts in Contemporary Dance Education at MA CoDE Frankfurt. This system, based heavily on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, created a formal space for participants to provide supportive feedback to teachers directly after the class, and for the teachers to receive it in a structured, facilitated context. Many teachers, myself included, took advantage of this offering, and I hope they will offer it again in the future, as I found it both informative and supportive.

Eva Karczag, Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood and João Fiadeiro gave a talk entitled “Suspending Contact”, facilitated by Romain Bigé & Alice Godfroy. Themes that emerged included suspending time as well as the speakers’ evolving and varied, yet overlapping, ways of researching not knowing.

Musicians (and dancers!) David Leahy and Jan Lee were in constant collaboration, both with one another and the studios full of dancing. They did all this with great sensitivity, creating episodic moments of music, sound atmosphere and silence. Sounds of double bass, flute, keyboards, clarinet and voice moved in and out of being throughout the festival.

During the 12 days I witnessed several times the vocal delight of new and seasoned dancers surprising themselves, or being surprised by a dance partner. In addition to the many hours of dancing, I also actively observed (and took part in) many conversations on dance, the body and performance, as well as swimming and sunning by the lake, an outdoor milonga (which formed spontaneously when Gabriel from Buenos Aires took out his bandoneón), full court international 5 on 5 barefoot basketball, Pappu’s discolight filled circus, flower tour walks through the neighborhood to the far studio, the many children running, laughing and playing through all the hidden spaces, excursions to seek out gelato and espresso, late night post-jam talks and walks and songs and moonlight dips in the lake. As I moved through several small tweaks in my ankles and neck and the nervous uncertainties of new encounters, I also experienced the (literal) healing powers of sharing this moving, opening, touching, and unfolding of the unknown with others.

This is the first year in a long time that the organizers are a trio, with founding organizer Benno Enderlein having transitioned out of the team. Happily, he was present for the TM and Festival. Barbara Stahlberger, Dani Schwartz and Ecki Müller continue to organize and grow a festival that takes care of 310 people (!), open the facilitation and share it with a dedicated group of former teachers, keep things fresh by inviting almost all new teachers every year, create a container for research & renewal, empower participants to experience many angles into CI and above all endeavor to open and hold a space for difference. Even with all of this, I saw them relaxed with themselves and each other, dancing and participating fully the whole time. For me, it was a joy to be there, and seeing this joyful trio move with ease through the Festival was a big part of that.

So, these are some of my observations. Undoubtedly other people had different experiences, and I’ve probably left out some important details and names of people integral to the Festival, for which I apologize. In any case, I can’t wait to return to Freiburg for more research and dancing next year. Maybe we’ll see each other there!

—Bryce Kasson Cologne, Germany