Video room
What it looks like when it is working.
Contact Improvisation is difficult to describe and immediately recognisable on film. These are the performances, jams and documentary records worth watching before your first session.
Contact Improvisation on video falls into three useful categories: performance work, where trained dancers push the form to its physical limits; jam footage, which shows what an ordinary session actually looks like; and documentary and teaching material, which explains the principles behind what you are seeing.
Start here
If you have never seen this dance, watch these three first.
The plainest demonstration in the set. Two dancers working through the underlying weight exchange, useful the week before your first session.
Archive material from the founding year, uploaded decades later. Watch it for how little it resembles a performance and how much it resembles standing around until something happens.
Part of a documentary series, and it answers the question in its own title directly.
Duets
Sustained two-person work, from near-stillness to fully airborne.
A single continuous duet, shot as film rather than documentation. No interview, no title cards, no talking. The cleanest picture on YouTube of what sustained contact feels like from the inside.
Irene Sposetti and Johan Nilsson, cinema-verite, natural light, long takes. Slow, unshowy, structurally clear.
Low camera, rolling bodies, almost no event. Still one of the most quoted records of the form as a physical conversation rather than a display.
Sasha Dodo and Dolores Dewhurst Marks. Colour-graded, tightly framed, strong lifts and counterbalance, no spoken content.
Filmed at Earthdance, the long-running CI centre in Massachusetts. Handheld, unhurried, clearly a good session rather than a performance.
Close technical footage of lift mechanics and counterweighting. Watch this one if you have been told you are too heavy or too light to fly.
Body Research performance work. Movement-led and experimental rather than instructional.
Full duet documentation by a well-known Berlin pair. Clean framing, music-led, no narration. Embedding is open on Vimeo, which is not always the case for dance film.
A shot dance film rather than documentation. Painterly, made for a screen, worth watching for what contact work looks like when it is composed for camera.
Festivals and jams
What a gathering of CI dancers looks like when the room fills up.
A festival jam filmed as it fills up. Multiple duets, ambient music, no narration. This is the shape a busy room takes.
Thirty-one minutes of beach and studio footage from a large tropical festival. The closest thing here to what a South Florida outdoor session could look like, at scale.
A complete opening: the warm-up that a first-timer should watch before attending a jam, followed by the jam itself.
Senior teachers performing for a festival audience. Shows the performative end of what the practice can produce when experienced dancers push it.
One minute, outdoors, no context needed. The best short clip here to send someone who has never seen the form and only has a moment.
Performance documentation, one of the few higher-production CI performance uploads still public and openly embeddable on Vimeo.
Documentary and the originators
The people who made the form, in their own words.
A documentary on Stark Smith and on touch as the medium. Contains interview material as well as dancing, so it is an editorial watch rather than a background loop.
Vintage footage of two of the earliest practitioners, uploaded in 2020. Silent, archival, and the best evidence of how the form looked before it had a name people recognised.
Archive clip of the form's originator from the contactimprovdoc channel. Low-resolution and quiet, and the primary source for why any of this exists.
Gregory Catellier and Kristin O'Neal on what the practice teaches off the floor. The best single answer to a sceptical relative asking what this is for.
Credits
Every film here belongs to the channel that made it and plays through that channel's own player on the platform that hosts it. Nothing is downloaded, re-cut or re-hosted by this site. If you own one of these and would rather it were not embedded, say so and it comes down the same day.
- Blake Nellis and Brando at Earthdance
- CIPD
- Contact Improvisation 1972
- Contact Improvisation at Summer Dance
- Contact Improvisation, Goa Contact Festival, India
- Contact Improvisation: a couple of basic exercises
- Contact Improvisation: moments of practice
- Contact Improvisation: the art of jamming
- Elske Seidel and Joerg Hassmann: Contact Improvisation duet
- Embraced
- Life lessons learned through Contact Improvisation
- Lifting: contact and improvisation
- Nancy Stark Smith and Karen Nelson (1990)
- Opening jam and guided warm-up with Steve Batts
- Poland Contact Improvisation Festival: Warsaw Flow 2012, jam
- Shaken
- Silkies
- Steve Paxton
- Teachers' performance, Kyiv Contact Improvisation Festival
- The poetics of touch: Nancy Stark Smith, a pathway into contact improvisation
- What happens in a Contact Improvisation jam?
- the play of weight
Watched enough
Nothing on this page will teach you what two minutes on a floor with another person will.
Miami Contact Improv (2026). Contact Improvisation video room. miamicontactimprov.com. https://miamicontactimprov.com/videos