Dartington campus hosts UK National Contact Jam

University College Falmouth's (UCF's) Dartington Campus in Devon will host the UK National Contact Jam this weekend with improvisation classes, performances and open jams bringing together students from BA(Hons) Dance: Choreography, Music and Theatre courses as well as national and international practitioners to share knowledge and working practices.

Contact Improvisation - a performance practice where two or more improvisers use the point of contact with another dancer to explore movement through weight sharing, counterbalance and momentum - has a historic home at Dartington; the place it first landed in Europe. Now contact improvisation is an art form with world-wide influence.

The Jam will be in the spirit of the Dartington Dance Festivals once organised by Steve Paxton and Mary Fulkerson; festivals that provided the seeds and soil for the stream of work that has grown into the vibrant independent dance scene in the UK. Steve Paxton's teaching of contact improvisation and dance at Dartington in the 1980s inspired many of the UK's most prolific and creative performing artists including Kevin Finnan, Laurie Booth, Yolande Snaith, Rosemary Butcher, Kirstie Simson, Caroline Waters, Mary Prestige, Lone Twin, Marie Dewit, Kathy Crick and Charlie Morrissey.

The weekend-long event from Friday 30 April to Monday 3 May 2010 will feature workshops by Dartington graduate Charlie Morrissey, as well as Gesine Daniels, Kayla Dougan Bowtell, and Richard and Malaika Sarco-Thomas, as well as jams with live musicians and performances.

Charlie Morrissey has been researching, directing, performing and teaching nationally and internationally for fifteen years. He creates large and small-scale site specific and theatre and gallery based performance works with diverse groups in different contexts. He initiates research and performance projects on a regular basis.

Gesine Daniels is a dance performer and teacher who has worked and practiced Contact Improvisation internationally since 1984. Her involvement covers an expansive range from opera to street performance, solo and group works. As a teacher she has worked in social ghettos, theatre schools and primary schools as well teaching educated dancers. In 2000, together with Riccardo Morrison and two others, Gesine founded the SomeBodyElse DanceCompany, which works with Improvisation and Contact Improvisation in mostly site-specific dance pieces.

Kayla Dougan Bowtell is a teacher, choreographer, facilitator, educator and the director of Inside Out dance company. She is passionate about high quality process and technical work, and continues her growth as an artist through the programming of Inside Out's professional development and creative engagement across wide sectors of the community.

Malaika Sarco-Thomas, Lecturer in Choreography at UCF, is a dance artist whose research spans dance improvisation, ecological philosophy, site-based performance, tree-climbing, guerilla tree-planting and community practice. Malaika has studied dance, theatre, biology and improvisation all over the world and was awarded a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellowship in support of her postgraduate research.

Richard Sarco-Thomas, Part-Time Lecturer in Choreography at UCF, is a martial artist and improviser working with principles of Ki in movement, bodywork and performance. Richard's practice of Ki-Aikido and Shiatsu informs his teaching of movement and contact improvisation.

Commenting on The Jam, Malaika Sarco-Thomas, said: "It is an exciting event for leading artists and UCF's performance students and an example of how they have every opportunity to develop creatively, share with leading experts and explore a range of practices within their courses."

If you require any special assistance to help you attend any of our events or have questions about event accessibility, please get in touch by emailing events@falmouth.ac.uk or telephoning 01326 213756.

For further information about Performance courses at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/performance, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 213730.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2013/2014 that will be unique to the South West.

The University College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby Dip CIPR MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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