The title references Steve Paxton’s early musings about the experience of the Newtonian apple as it falls from the tree. It acknowledges the time that’s passed since then, and the incredible journey and evolution of Contact Improvisation as a series of questions and experiments; as a diaspora of bodies; a form; and a complex web of extrapolations and transformations.

I will return to some of the basic propositions and questions of CI; to how we notice ourselves as bodies/masses in relation to physical forces in a physical world — to visit them anew, to roll our bodies on the body of the earth, to observe ourselves and simultaneously be ourselves as we fall and rise again, as we slide and jump, and bounce and tumble along with the questions, propositions and particularities of the other bodies we negotiate as we go.

This workshop will also attend to the experience of the ensemble — to how we sense being alongside and with when we move. We’ll explore the subtle, shifting dynamics of many bodies in motion: how energy and tone pass between us, how we jam, surf, and ride the waves of momentum, stillness, and change. We’ll work with multi-directional listening — a physical peripheral awareness that allows us to receive information from the space and others as we simultaneously transmit it through our own actions and attention. This is an exploration of how movement communicates and reverberates across a shared field, how perception extends beyond the self into the collective attention.

I will be calling on my own versions and developments of materials I met and explored in the studio with Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson to inform our explorations, and those materials (for the spine, and for the senses, among others) will be woven into my own questions about movement, experience and imagination — how we include, in our image of the experience of the apple falling, the other parts of its journey and its return to the tree to fall again.

This is an invitation to widen attention, to include perceived impossibilities, and to dive into the adventure of Contact Improvisation all over again.

The work will be explored via simple scores which allow for each person’s own layers of complexity to be noticed and included; there will be physical maps and pathways to research and play with, as well as perceptual and imaginative explorations in solo, duet, trio, and ensemble constellations.

This workshop invites us to see movement as both individual and collective attention — a continual conversation between gravity, imagination, and one another