Contact Improvisation: An Intuitive, Non-Verbal and Intimate Dialogue: Itay Yatuv at TEDxBGU 

It is said that two months of contact improvisation is equivalent to five years of therapy. ;) I really agree with you, we have so many feelings and memories locked up in our bodies and while recieving touch and movement the emotion or the memory is set free. I have cried on the dance floor more than once!

Itay, other than speaking very well is an amazing conact teacher. if you have an opportunity to study with him consider yourself lucky.

very interesting, and I'm sure it has some very important therapeutic uses as well. I can imagine how it can be revealing of inner feelings and opening new windows to our self, for instance.

I'd like to see a progression as the child grows and the parent ages

Sublime, magical and mind-blowing.

so fluid, like water. I love how they embody communication.

Thanks for posting the video and I enjoyed the comments, below, too. Those comments rise some important cultural issues.

wonderful, thanks!

I like how much it's free like jazz, but freer still.

that was magic

Of course there's a TED for this? :)

waw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mungojelly, I get where you're coming from however, as a dance professor who teaches in the bible belt south of the US, I also sense an intellectual resistance to this type of work. I only say that because I hear it all the time in my classroom and among the administration who don't see the point of learning this type of work. Not criticizing you, just....I've had these conversations about dance and "touch" many times over and let me say, one has to be open to the experience. Its like eating gourmet food, or drinking a great wine or even being in love only in that one has to be open to the enjoyment of the experience and not in a cerebral way, otherwise it can be very confusing, invasive and uncomfortable for the participant. Not judging you but my metaphor basically points out that contact improv is a sensual (sense oriented) experience. Dance, very visual is 90% of the time oriented to be pleasing to an audience. Jazz, ballet, hip hop...all are to be watched instead of experienced. Contact improv although interesting to watch to a point, is really more for those who do it, and those who do it aren't often in the entertainment dance genre. Modern dance contemporary dance was formed TO BREAK BOUNDARIES, so contact improv fits within this ideology. However, if one is not into having their personal spatial boundaries broken, then I totally see how this lecture could be seen as "a bit much".

Interesting. I guess the debate in the comments is about trust in another human being. I can't do aerial yoga because I don't really trust the hook. But I have to admit that once you do trust a thing or another person, you'll get amazing feelings...

Subtitulos en español 😔

🤩😁😍🙏🏽❤️😯😲

I'm more and more disagreeing with this sense that you can just "intuit" people's boundaries or the ways they want to be touched. Contact improv seems to me to be just another habitual pattern of certain touches that are just assumed to be OK because of the context. Just as there are certain places and ways that are OK to touch in a "hug," there's a fixed set of touches that make up the normal "contact improv" repetoire. No one's actually intuiting anything about how to shape that space, they're just doing the standard thing. Rather than communicating non-verbally or in any way about which touches will be OK, the practice seems to be to just quickly touch people in any of the ways standard enough that it seems like they must be OK. That carelessness (combined with people actually respecting boundaries enough that they intuit they can't actually explore freely in that format) crimps it into a formulaic pattern of touches concentrated in one safe-enough zone of standardness, with no mechanism to expand or contract the space based on your actual felt needs.