Contact Improvisation Exercises
Scores you can try alone or with a partner, each with its author and its source.
Contact improvisation exercises are usually called scores: short instructions that set up a situation to explore.12
Scores you can do alone
- The small dance. Paxton's standing instruction starts with the skeleton and moves to weight and compression through the bones while the muscles stay soft. You can hear him guide it in 5 minutes 50 seconds.39
- Hieroglyphs. Nancy Stark Smith teaches a pen-and-paper exercise she calls writing from the body. The video runs 18 minutes and you can do it at home.4
- Momentum, gravity and sensational facts. The library calls Sarco-Thomas's script the most compact teachable small-dance script in its set.6
Scores for two or more
- Riding a Peacock Feather. Lisa Nelson's half-page score from 1977: balance a feather upright on your open palm, move only to keep it up, then pass it on. It closes with a group structure Nita Little brought to a Berkeley class: A moves, B joins weight, C enters, B lets go and watches, and one continuous duet travels through any number of people.5
- The fingertip exercise. Ray Chung's "follow the one you lead" exercise uses the space between fingers as a third agent.6
- Touch + talk. Dancers answer a projected question by moving, touching and talking at once. The question menu doubles as journal prompts.1
- The circle-falling exercise. Paxton's 1972 text describes it with a training list of the eyes' judgment, the skin's sensitivity, timing and trust.7
- The mirror-floor score. Paxton's workshop score of the inverted body that supports you, quoted in Emma Bigé's Living Weight.10
A score for a whole jam
Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore maps the phases of a long session in one page of hand-drawn glyphs.8
Books and papers full of exercises
Thomas Kaltenbrunner's manual is the library's most manual-like CI book, with exercises and class structures.11 Annie Brook's teaching manual crosses developmental work from Body-Mind Centering with contact skills.12 Brozas-Polo reads a decade of Contact Quarterly teaching scores as a pedagogy of touch.13
Before you try them with someone
Agree before starting that either of you can stop: Earthdance's guidelines say you can leave or end a dance at any time for any reason.14 The consent page collects what communities write down.
Frequently asked questions
What are good contact improvisation exercises for beginners?
One place to start is standing: Paxton's small dance, which he guides in 5 minutes 50 seconds.9 Lisa Nelson's peacock feather is a short score that begins alone.5
What is a score in contact improvisation?
A short instruction that sets up a situation to explore. Keith Hennessy's class descriptions from 2010 are each a score, and Malaika Sarco-Thomas turned a question into a performable one.21
Can I practise contact improvisation alone?
Some scores work alone, such as the small dance and the pen-and-paper Hieroglyphs exercise.34
| Guides in this wiki |
|---|
| What is Contact Improvisation? · The small dance · The Underscore · Jams · Steve Paxton · Nancy Stark Smith · Falling and gravity · Consent · Exercises · Glossary · How it is written · Contribute |
Sources in the library
1touch + talk Malaika Sarco-Thomas, JDSP 2014. In the library: Attention & perception.
2Post/Contact Keith Hennessy, Contact Quarterly Winter/Spring 2012. In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
3The Small Dance, 1977 Steve Paxton, class notes from the ReUnion West Coast tour, February 1977; annotated by Paxton April 2008; hosted by Ken Manheimer at myriadicity.net. In the library: Paxton in his own words.
4Hieroglyphs Nancy Stark Smith, Embodied Activity #1 for Meta-academy at the Bates Dance Festival, 2013 (18 min video). In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
5Riding a Peacock Feather Lisa Nelson, Contact Quarterly 2.3, Spring 1977. In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
6Momentum, gravity and "sensational facts" Sarco-Thomas, 2015. In the library: Attention & perception.
7The Grand Union Steve Paxton, The Drama Review T-55, September 1972. In the library: Paxton in his own words.
8The Underscore Nancy Stark Smith's long-form jam score. In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
9The Small Dance, read by Steve Paxton Steve Paxton, English, audio (2020), excerpt from the audiobook of Gravity (Contredanse, 2019); collected by Emma Bigé. In the library: The Small Dance.
10Living Weight Emma Bigé, "Le poids vivant," 2018. In the library: The gravity school.
11Contact Improvisation: Moving, Dancing, Interaction Thomas Kaltenbrunner, English ed. 1998/2004, Meyer & Meyer. In the library: Books: the complete shelf.
12Contact Improvisation & Body-Mind Centering Annie Brook, 2000. In the library: Books: the complete shelf.
13Pedagogy of the Sensitive Body Brozas-Polo, "Pedagogía del cuerpo sensible," 2017. In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
14Earthdance CI Jam Guidelines Earthdance, Plainfield, Massachusetts, updated November 2022. In the library: Jams, scores, pedagogy.
Cite this page
Alessi, Eric (curator). “Contact Improvisation Exercises.” The Wiki of Contact Improvisation. Published 30 October 2026, updated 31 October 2026. https://ci-wiki.com/concepts/contact-improvisation-exercises/. Accessed .