Contact Improvisation Dance

Monday Night Fairfax Contact Class and Jam is now at ROCO Dance Studio across the street from The Common Well in downtown Fairfax.

Roco has a fabulous dance floor that is larger than the Well studio, so you can fly, run and jump bigger than before.  We hope you'll join Rana at Roco and wish her success at the new venue.  Thank you Rana and Jeremy for the last 3 years of your energy, talent and offering to our community, here at the Well. We will miss you.

See postcard below for contact details.  Rana is happy to keep you updated through the CI email list. Just send her an email and she'll include you. 

Contact improvisation dance has been described as "moving massage," "body surfing," "gymnastics," "post-modern folk dancing."

Rana "Satori" Stewart, who leads a class in contact improvisation dance every Monday night in Fairfax, likes to think of it as "wrestling meets tai chi meets swimming."

Whatever you want to call it, "You're moving in contact with one another," Stewart said. "You can be in contact with two or three people or large groups.

"There's a rolling point of contact, a center of gravity," she continued. "As you roll, the point of contact moves. Then lots of possibilities can happen. You can roll together on the floor. You can work together standing. You can do what's called 'flying,' when one person lifts the other person. There are major acrobatic things that can just happen naturally."

One thing she emphasizes: "There are no rules. It's ever evolving."

It all sounds quite intimate, an observation Stewart doesn't deny.

"But it's typically not sexually intimate," she quickly clarified, "although it could be. But the dance floor is not designed with that in mind."

Cory Vangelder, a 47-year-old middle school teacher from Woodacre, was first exposed to contact improvisation when she saw an all-male dance group do it in the late '80s.

"It really caught my attention, having that kind of physical strength and connection," she recalled.

Now a regular at Stewart's weekly classes and jams, she finds contact improvisation returns her to the joyful freedoms of childhood.

"As children we enjoy using each other's bodies to play off of, to balance and roll and get lifted," Vangelder said. "Contact improvisation is all of those fun things we can do physically with each other in the context of dance, and with an element of play and of connection with each other. It feels really human."

The 34-year-old Stewart grew up in New Mexico taking modern dance classes and jazz. She came to Marin to study with expressive arts pioneer and choreographer Anna Halprin and discovered the emotional release of "ecstatic freestyle dance."

"That was so moving for me," she recalled. "I went through challenging times after both my parents died and dance really helped me."

Stewart, who lives in Fairfax, has been teaching contact improvisation for two years, working the Monday night sessions at the Common Well with fellow teacher Jeremy Weichsel.

Their hour-long class is followed by a two-hour freestyle "jam," a session open to all comers that is accompanied by down-tempo chill music.

"There isn't anybody leading," Stewart said. "You follow your own instincts and your own desires. How you move is how you are."