Contact Improvisation Has No Certification. What to Check Before You Pay a Teacher

In 1975 the dancers who made the form drafted papers to control who could teach it, then declined to sign. A newcomer can still check the things a licence would have stood for.

*Image: Contact Improvisation Trio Dojo Florence by Koyaanisqatsi12, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.*

Contact improvisation has no licensing body, because the dancers who developed it chose in 1975 not to create one. What stands in place of a certificate is behaviour in the room: whether a teacher states consent rules at the start, corrects unsafe technique, and lets you decline a partner.

In 1975 a small company of dancers touring the west coast of the United States wrote up papers to copyright the work, came close to signing them, and decided not to. Every jam and class you can walk into today, Miami's included, grew out of that refusal.

Nancy Stark Smith danced in the first performances in 1972 and edited the newsletter that became the form's journal. Her 2005 talk on the form's history gives a detailed first-hand account of how the dance began and why its makers left it unowned.

A gymnasium in Ohio, January 1972

The Grand Union, an improvisation collective, spent January 1972 in residency at Oberlin College in Ohio. Steve Paxton taught a 7 a.m. class he called the Soft Class: standing still in what he called the small dance, noticing the small adjustments the body makes to stay upright, and doing some yoga-like breathing. In the afternoons he worked with a group of men on a large canvas tumbling mat in the gym, practising standing still, big falls and rolls.

At the end of the month that work became Magnesium, eleven men throwing, catching and colliding for about ten minutes and then standing still, with the audience watching from a running track above the floor. Paxton came to it with competitive gymnastics behind him, years of aikido and tai chi, and three years in the Merce Cunningham company. He had also helped found Judson Dance Theater.

One week in a New York gallery

That spring he taught at Bennington College and gathered a group for New York: students from Oberlin, Rochester and Bennington, plus a few colleagues from the city. They practised for a week in a loft with a small wrestling mat, drilling the small dance, rolling in every direction, and a catching exercise in which one person stood at the back of the mat while everyone else ran at them in turn. In June they moved the mat into the John Weber Gallery and performed for five hours a day for a week. Visitors walked in, watched for five minutes, or came back the next day.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts gave Paxton a $500 grant in support of the gallery performances, and his note on that grant records seventeen performers and an audience invited for any time in the afternoons. Other money came from Change, Inc. and a small travel grant. Paxton's note gives the event's title as Contact Improvisations, and the name stayed with the dance.

The papers nobody signed

By 1975 Paxton, Stark Smith, Nita Little and Curt Siddall were touring as ReUnion, meeting once a year to give performances and classes. On the first tour they heard about people who had seen them perform and were now practising contact, and about some injuries, a few of them pretty serious. Their own group had suffered nothing worse than bruises. Their theory was that the quiet parts of the training, the small dance and the subtle sensing work, kept the bigger and more dangerous interactions balanced and safe, and that people who had only seen a performance were trying the bigger, flashier moves without that other training.

So they thought about copyrighting the work, so that anyone who wanted to do it would have to train with them first. They stopped for two reasons. A licence would have made them what Stark Smith called the contact cops of the world, checking whether they knew whoever was teaching somewhere and telling strangers they could not do it. The work was also exciting enough that people would do it anyway under another name, and the coherence of the developing form would be lost. Instead of copyrighting, they started a newsletter.

That newsletter, edited and produced by Stark Smith, with Lisa Nelson joining as co-editor in 1976, became Contact Quarterly. It produced its final print issue in January 2020, moved to publishing online, and is now becoming a resource and archive site.

What replaced the licence

In its place came a newsletter, the jams, and the listings that connected them. ReUnion started the newsletter to foster communication among the geographically dispersed teachers, performers and practitioners of the form, and Stark Smith described it as a place where anyone involved could write about what they were teaching and learning, a way to "invite people in instead of pushing them out." The group hoped that people would stay away from anyone working dangerously, and accepted that the worst outcome would be a bad reputation for the form itself.

Because there was never an organisation, the thing that carried the form was the jam: an informal, recurring, untaught session in a borrowed room. Contact Quarterly printed jam listings for decades in a section called DanceMap.

The history is less tidy than the single-founder version. Keith Hennessy, writing about the Bay Area's part in the form, notes that early practitioners resisted a suggestion to codify it and certify teachers. He also notes that some early participants tell divergent stories about how it developed, and that most histories shrink to a single male hero and minimise the contributions of women and collectives. Anyone choosing a class is dealing with a form whose quality control was left informal on purpose, and whose early participants still tell its history differently.

Courses for people who teach the form do exist, and none of them can certify anyone. A pedagogy course in Berkeley, whose facilitator has run pedagogy courses for movement teachers across Europe, Canada and the United States, states on its page that it is not a teacher training certification course, because contact improvisation is an open source practice with no certification. A certificate from a workshop records that someone studied with someone, and it does not license them.

What a studio shows in the first class

The checks fit on one hand, and the classes page of this site applies them to any teacher:

• The teacher states their consent framework within the first ten minutes, rather than assuming everyone shares it.
• They demonstrate as much as they talk.
• They stop unsafe technique as it happens, in the room, rather than raising it privately afterwards.
• They do not require you to partner with a particular person, and they are comfortable when you decline one.

A hosted jam adds a second thing to watch. The protocol is spoken out loud at the start:

• Consent is continuous, and anyone can decline anything without giving a reason.
• The edge is for resting and watching.
• Nobody teaches anyone uninvited, and nobody films without asking first.

The sessions worth your time say their protocol out loud at the start of every session, and if one skips it, the safety and consent page advises you to ask why.

The risks the form does name

Contact improvisation carries the ordinary risks of a partnered physical practice: falls, collisions, strained joints, the occasional bruise. Most injuries come from three things: bracing against a fall instead of rolling, taking weight you are not structurally placed to take, and dancing tired. The habits the form teaches answer each one: keep your own feet available to land on, roll out of the fall, do not begin a lift unless you can see how it resolves, and stop before you are exhausted.

The site publishes no injury rates. It describes serious injury as uncommon but not impossible, particularly in fast, experienced jams. If you have an injury or a condition that changes how you can be moved, tell your partner before the dance starts.

A first evening in Miami

One weekly option is the Friday open jam at Inner Motion Dance Studio, 216 NE 1st Ave in Hallandale Beach, on the north edge of Miami past Aventura. It has run every Friday from 7:00 to 9:00 PM since 2 October 2026, and costs $20 at the door on a sliding scale of $20 to $50. It is hosted by the person who maintains this site, and the Friday page carries that disclosure. The page describes the shape of the evening: a short circle where the host states the protocol, a guided warm-up, then open dancing, usually without music. You need no partner, no experience and no booking, and watching from the edge counts as taking part.

Fundamentals, an eight-class series taught by the same person, is listed at the same studio on the same Fridays, also 7:00 to 9:00 PM from 2 October 2026, each class priced on the same $20 to $50 sliding scale and ending with an open dance. Because the two listings share the room, the night and the hours, ask the host how a given Friday divides between class and jam. If the eight classes run on consecutive Fridays, six have taken place by 9 November and the last falls on 20 November, so a newcomer would join near the end of the series. The classes page lists it on the same terms as every other entry.

The question the history leaves you is the one to ask of whoever holds the room: what happens when someone ignores a boundary? The site's answer is that whoever runs the session states the protocol and acts when it is broken, and that an organiser who will not act has told you what you need to know about returning.

If you are still deciding, come to one Friday, say at the circle that it is your first time, and sit at the edge until you want to move. The site's directory page lists studios and organisers across Miami-Dade and Broward, each opened and checked before it went up, and a teacher listing there means only that the person publishes what they teach and where. For a question you would rather ask first, email the host from the Friday page and you will get an answer before the weekend.