CONTACT FESTIVAL
SOUTH
AFRICA

 

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THE APPLE RETURNS TO THE TREE

 

The title nods to Steve Paxton’s early reflections on the Newtonian apple falling from the tree. It also gestures to the decades of questions, experiments, and evolutions that have followed—Contact Improvisation as an ever-branching practice, both rooted and dispersed, both form and transformation.

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In this workshop, I want to return to some of those original propositions: how we notice weight and mass, how we respond to gravity, how we fall, rise, slide, or tumble with others and with the ground. But I also want to revisit these experiences through the lens of perception—how we shift our viewpoint, how attention alters what we experience, and how those shifts reshape the nature of our moving selves.

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I’ll draw on material I first encountered in the studio with Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, and on the developments those encounters have seeded in my own research: explorations of the spine, of vision, of mapping touch and imagination through movement. For me, imagination is not an add-on but a basic, complex faculty of being human—a way of reaching into the world through our moving, sensing lives. In this work, the apple doesn’t just fall; it carries the whole cycle of its journey, returning to the tree, only to fall again.

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Together we’ll work with simple scores that open space for each person’s complexity to be present. These will include anatomical maps, perceptual pathways, and imaginative experiments explored through solos, duets, trios, and larger group scores.

This is an invitation to widen attention, to include the seemingly impossible, and to dive once more into the ongoing adventure of Contact Improvisation.​