Contact and improvisation workshop with choreographer and social practice artist Eryn Rosenthal
JUNE 5-7, 2026 at the Rumpus Room; 15 Brodhead St. Mazomanie, WI
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- FRIDAY JUNE 5, 5-9 pm: DINNER AND JAM! Get your drive over with on Friday so you’re rested and on time for Saturday morning’s workshop start! Local housing is available for both Friday and Saturday nights.
- SATURDAY JUNE 6, 10 am-6 pm (lunch from 12:30-2, dinner at 6:30, evening plan is TBD.
- SUNDAY JUNE 7, 10 am-4 pm (lunch from 12:30-2)
What does it cost?
- WORKSHOP FEES are sliding scale ($200-300), with an early bird discount until May 1st ($225-325 thereafter). Additional scholarship support may be available. If needed, please request it when you register.
- MEALS are available: $17.50 each for Friday dinner, Saturday lunch, Saturday dinner, Sunday lunch. Pre-order when you register.
- LOCAL HOUSING is available but space is limited! Camping $5/night; shared bed, or single (bunk) bed in shared room $15/night. Please request when you register and include helpful notes about who you are traveling with, who you’d like to share a sleeping space with, etc.
Register here
Freedom From, Freedom To, Freedom With: Practices of Freedom in Contact and Improvisation.
Digging into questions and practices of freedom, in this movement-based workshop we’ll examine angles of agency within limitation: physical, interpersonal, political. Adapting strategies from permaculture, Glitch feminism, Black consciousness, architecture and the visual arts, we’ll play with spatial navigation and shapes embedded into our study of change, at varying degrees of proximity and weight-sharing. How can movement help us build our vibrational awareness, and grow our relational understanding of the brick and the whole? Employing techniques of contact improvisation and real-time composition, we’ll examine questions of scale and texture, breath and breadth at intersections between the political and creative. Through task-based movement improvisation steeped in prepositional energetics (from, to, with; in, out, alongside), as well as embodied writing, drawing and poetic analysis, we’ll call and respond in close collaboration with our interior / exterior landscapes.
Building comfortability and full-self presence in both seeing and being seen, we’ll double, build on, shake and land through implications to the poetic, the personal and political. What are tools that facilitate participation, agency, collaboration and decision? Applying this in smaller groups and in larger assembly, we’ll play with edges between welcoming and recognizing influence, and resisting assimilation. Deepening our exploration of varying degrees of proximity across space and time, where can gesture and touch coincide and rhyme, shrink and expand?
Throughout our work, we’ll examine sticky places where our choice-making can get stuck, and sandbox structural, relational, and compositional tools for unsticking. We’ll fold outwards and in toward assemblages and structures, both architectural and interpersonal. What are tools for sharing and inspiring structures of care, attention and mutual support to become visible and visceral? What are practices for making that stick? What are relationships between freedom, restraint and structure that populate our dancing, poetics and politics? Together / in solo solodancingdoesn’texist, we’ll dialogue and question with the necessary-ness of You, Me, and Us. In sum, how can contact and improvisation help us get better at freedom—freedom from, freedom to, freedom with?
All bodies, abilities and backgrounds are actively welcome. Wear comfortable clothes that allow for moving, bending and stretching. Bring clothing or fabric to play with, + paper and pen/pencil for writing/drawing.
Eryn Rosenthal is a choreographer, director and social practice artist. Her classes investigate listening and empowerment, play and joy as forces that shift what’s possible when we come together. Eryn’s body-based work examines questions of liberation and social fabric, dreams and meaning-making within local and international contexts, grounded in ongoing collaborations with artists and activists in Chile, South Africa, Spain, and the US. She is proud to be an active member of international contact improvisation (CI) teacher exchange networks, teaching and facilitating at the Freiburg Festival (DE), ECITE, the Market Theatre Lab (SA), La Universidad Complutense (SP), UMass-Amherst and elsewhere since 2003. As an artist, Eryn’s trauma-informed practice combines contact improvisation, oral history, poetry and experimental performance to examine intimate and historical aspects of socio-political change. Her ongoing series The Doors Project investigates transitions–political, social, personal– through site-based performance in different doorways around the world. She is also a founding co-director of the Sedimento Collaborative in Chile/NYC, co-developing Sediment: Studies in Movement and Memory (Sedimento: Ensayos de cuerpo y memoria).
Eryn collaborates with dance artists Tommy DeFrantz, MariCruz Planchuelo López, Nica Portavia and Oswaldo Marchiundo. She has also worked with choreographers Sello Pesa, Jennifer Monson and Sol Picó; poet Elizabeth Alexander; and documentary theater pioneer Anna Deavere Smith. Eryn’s research and performance have been recognized with awards from the Center for Artistic Activism for work on US voting rights, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain and an Open Society Institute President’s Grant to South Africa, among elsewhere. Eryn previously served as a King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor and inaugural Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building and Inclusion Initiatives at the University of Michigan. She currently teaches at Yale University, with the original arts/humanities seminars Dance and Democracy: Movement Improvisation and Liberation Pedagogies, and Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions. www.erynrosenthal.com
Pictured above: David Legue, Paula Aguirre, Cristóbal Racordon, Diego Clark Rojas, Josefa Torres Cifuentes, and Eryn Rosenthal in Sediment: Studies in Movement and Memory (Sedimento: Ensayos de cuerpo y memoria). Photo by Felipe Diaz Galarce.
Below: photo of Eryn Rosenthal by Gabriel Tollliver
Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/05/2026 - 06/07/2026
All Day
Location
The Rumpus Room
Categories