CILXJAM English Version
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CONTACTO IMPROVISAÇÃO LX JAM
(Lisbon’s Contact Improvisation Jam)
When: Sundays 5.30 – 8 pm
Where: Forum Dança
Rua dos Caetanos 26, 1 dto 1200-246
Lisboa (Bairro Alto)
Donations: 3 Euros or whatever you can offer.
(No one will be turned away for lack of funds) 
Contacto Improvisação LX Jam (CILXJam) is a meeting place, a space for mutual learning amongst performers with or without experience in this form and in osmosis with other forms of performative, musical, theatrical, audio-visual, and technological improvisation; a space to strengthen the local Portuguese and international performance communities; an experimental site for the emergence of collaborative creative synergies.
We are extremely thankful to Forum Dança for housing this initiative. Initiated in October 2006 at the Amália Rodrigues Garden, in the occasion of Michael Dobbie’s visit from Seattle, the CILXJam was interrupted due to the cold and was looking for a home.
Emerging out of a revolutionary social, artistic and cultural environment of protest and reclamation of rights, “The Human Rights Movement”, this improvisation practice has been growing and rooting itself since the 1970’s, initiated by Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, and other performers/choreographers of the NY’s new dance movement (or postmodern dance, Banes, 1980), around the Judson Dance Theatre, and the Grand Union.
In continuing expansion throughout the USA, Brazil, Europe, Asia, and all over the world, in cities such as, Paris, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, São Paulo, the CIJam constitutes a community of communities, an environment where we feel at home any where it happens. http://www.contactimprov.com/worldjammap.html
CI's hybrid and catalyzing power is the fact of refusing to constitute a school, and instead, developing in osmosis with other forms of improvisation and movement. However, the form is legitimated in the passing of experience between practitioners and beginners. Departing from principles of T’ai Chi Chuan, Aikido, and Gymnastics, and taken improvisation as group performance, CI has been assimilated by classic, modern and contemporary dance movements, and more recently, mixing with partnering dances, like Tango. Nonetheless, it maintains its democratic principles of equality and respect for subjects' genders, sexualities, and ethnic differences.
The character we value in the Jam it’s the openness to the here and now of the experience build by the participants, instead of a directed / guided or facilitated practice. This openness does not mean that, when needed, we will introduce beginners to the basic principles in suggested experiences.
To the value attributed to physical touch amongst subjects, we add the idea of experimenting with interactive audio-visual and other media systems. Based on spatial and wearable sensors, touch will function also as media modulator influencing the interactions.
In our informatized and sedentary urbis, human relationships tend to be restrict to verbal logical-rational verbal communication, or to movement and dance practices extremely coded and connoted, and where body interactions between subjects tend to be limited to sexual practice or bound. The CILXJam opens others possibilities for experiencing / thinking / communicating bodies’ physicality and perceptive sensuality.
PLEASE, JOIN US IN YOUR VISIT TO PORTUGAL!!!!!
Looking forward to dance with you,
Isabel Valverde and Sofia Fitas
