Blog: Too much body

„Too much body“ is a compositional input Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser offered during their fabulous workshop in Vienna in January of 2026.  They offered us a list of seemingly contradictory or puzzling impulses to dance with. Everyone of them could have been a prompt for an in-depth exploration and even a performance score.

I love this prompt „Too much body“, it seems like such a contradictory statement when all we do is focus on reconnecting with the body, deepening our embodiment, and getting out of our heads and letting our body wisdom guide us. Yet when it comes to compositional qualities in improvisation, many dancers often get stuck by focusing on it too much. It’s almost as if we are afraid of loosing what we so desperately have been looking for (the body) that we forget that there is direction, phrasing, distance/closeness, healthy tensions, an outside view, arcs of attention, and on and on and on.

Many dancers, who practice Contact Improvisation have not had formal dance training. I really appreciate the availability of the form for so many people to become CI practitioners and the phenomena of the worldwidespread of the CI community is largely due to that. Yet the bigger the community gets unfortunately the more watered down the original intentions becomes, especially when there is not one „school“ or a „method“ with a trademark and an organizational committee that controls the teaching of the method. I find it very healthy that CI never became a trademarked method and yet I see that so many dancers in the community don’t know where the form comes from, what the underlying principles are and have had no training in any adjacent practices, such as aikido/ martial arts, modern dance, authentic movement/ dancetherapy and or instant composition.

What I see is that many dancers practice CI as a way of training for CI.  There are actually a lot of skills that are being trained in contemporary dance, which good CI teachers will include in their classes. These skills can help us make the CI experience less weird, symbiotic and co-dependent, and more versatile, three dimensional, viewable, sustainable and simply put, creative. These qualities are related to the compositional elements of dance, they require a willingness to acquire skills beyond the „feel good qualities“ of CI training. Contact Improvisation has always been an exploratory and performative practice and on the edge of comfort, those are its origins.

So „Too much Body“ doesn’t mean overthinking, stepping out of your body and not practicing tuning in, on the contrary it means, staying in the body, letting our BodyMind steer your experience and expand it with spacial awareness, working with different time qualities, focus beyond the touch sensation, perception of eyes (audience) outside of the dance partners. This is engagement of pre-frontal cortex decision-making in alignment with sensation, multilayered communication, internal and external referencing and a sense of flow that is not only provided by the directed 1 on 1 relationship with your partner(s). Sounds like a lot? It is!

I love dancing, in my kitchen, with my friends, on stage and during teaching. I love that many more people have access to dance events, that give space for movement and expression. Anytime there is a dance in the world, joy most likely will be present. People feel better when they dance. And yet, I think we need to differentiate between the different fields, clarify CI as a professional dance form and make an effort to not only become a superficial, washing-over-with-sensations-and-feel-good tendencies in our dancing, because honestly it becomes dull, boring and one dimensional.

I feel that some of the watered -down-versions of Contact Improvisation have partially come to be through the overlap of dancers at community dance events such as Ecstatic Dance and Five Rhythms (although I think the way that Gabrielle Roth initially conceptualized Five Rhythms involved more differentiated dancing skills than what is now mostly being offered). I am all for more people dancing in this world, really, but unfortunately many people confuse the „touch dances“ which happen during an Ecstatic Dance event with Contact Improvisation. Of course it is possible that skilled CI dancers engage in CI during  an Ecstatic Dance session and perform CI in spite of the music and the atmosphere. Yet, often times the skills are not the grounded, foundational skills that are actually needed for creating a safe, sensitive, multi layered, compositional, spacially aware Contact Improvisation dance.

The shadow aspects of the Contact Improvisation community and practice are plenty. I want to name particularly one here that to me is also related to „too much body“. Not to blame or accuse anybody, but to bring light and awareness into a practice that I deeply value. I find that many times the cause for confusion around intimate boundaries, sexual intentions and initiating relationships (finding a lover or partner) on the dance floor stem from an overemphasize of „what is happening in the body between us“ and a a lack of "this-is-an-abstract-contemporary-art-form“.

Overstepping boundaries, overt sexualizing of the form, symbiotic and codependent tendencies in the dance and more, are partly due to the initial unclarity of dealing with sexuality in the form (remember it was the 70’s!). But, and I think this is the underlying cause, the deep seated fear of the body due to the religious and societal condemnation, fears of sexuality and sensuality, depriving so many of us of existential needs for touch and a healthy relationship to our animal body that has been our underlying conditioning for thousands of years.

To be transparent: I have at times engaged in intimate relationships with people that I met during CI events (never with a participant) and I still find myself attracted to people who I have great dances with. I do not want to condemn myself or anybody else for their need for closeness and or the confusion that naturally arises in such an intimate and complex dance form. I don't moralize this topic. „Too much Body“ is not a criticism but an invitation to go deeper into our self-exploration through the means of seeing it as an art form. It is an invitation to make the practice lighter with ease and expanse, to grow, integrate and mature as practitioners and as a community. Stepping out of the bubbles of sensations and including layers of perception and information into our being and dancing.

P.S. If you would like to learn more about my approach to intimacy in Holistic Dance, the next “Authentically Intimate” intensive will take place in April 2026.

(c) Regina Stupuraiter at InContact Residency India