Long Beach Contact Improvisation Festival
Join us for a 4-day celebration of Contact Improvisation in sunny Long Beach!
Enjoy classes & jams with world class teachers from California and across the world.
The 5th Annual Long Beach Contact Improvisation Festival is coming January 15-18, 2027 on the beautiful California State University Long Beach campus. Make it a weeklong immersion by joining the Agile Beast "Already Animals" January Training with Sebastian Grubb, January 13-15.
Brenton Cheng (Oakland, CA)
One:Many and Impulse/Control
Brenton teaches contact improvisation, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies, and somatically-based performance skills in classes, workshops, and festivals around the world. As a teacher, he empowers students to become sophisticated movers through a cultivation of somatic and poetic awarenesses, and an engaged relationship to the unknown.
Karen Palafox (Mexico)
Crystalline Intelligence
Karen Palafox is a dancer, producer, and movement researcher whose work bridges Somatic Education, Contact Improvisation, and Evolutionary Aquatic Movement. She is a certified Body-Mind Movement® Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (Mexico & Brazil), and a certified Janzu® Aquatic Therapy facilitator.
taisha paggett (Riverside, CA)
One Class
taisha paggett is an interdisciplinary dance artist whose individual and collaborative works re-articulate and collide specific western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life so to contemplate and interrupt fixed histories of Black and queer embodiment, desire, placemaking, possibility and survival.
Sebastian Grubb (Denmark/US)
Contact Improvisation as Evolutionary Movement
Sebastian is a movement coach, dance artist, and founder of Agile Beast. He teaches integrated movement practices that help people become stronger, more capable, and more connected.
Jessica Humphrey (San Diego, CA)
Goldilocks Frequency
Jessica’s movement research began in childhood with gymnastics and continues with dancemaking from various, shifting perspectives, and states of body~mind. Her dances are expressions of her engagement with paradox, somatics, Integral Theory, Practice-as-Research, and reverence for the works of those within whose lineages she moves.
Nuria Bowart (Boston, MA)
Toning Up, Tuning In, and Winding Down
Nuria Latifa Bowart is a professional dancer and movement artist; a student, practitioner, and teacher of Capoeira with the rank of Mestra and a movement educator authorized as a Teacher and Certifier within the Axis Syllabus© international research community.
Kevin O'Connor (Los Angeles, CA)
Wake Up Your Gooey Body
Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary dance artist, somatic researcher, improviser and community engaged artist working between Los Angeles and London, Ontario, where he cofounded the Sweet Labour Art Collective. His practice braids movement research, improvisation, ritual, circus arts, and performance.
Jen Hong (Venice, CA)
One Class
Jen Hong (洪慧珍) is a dancer, choreographer, movement teacher and healer based in Los Angeles, CA. She is well-versed in numerous dance forms and completed her MFA in experimental choreography at UC Riverside. She is interested in the intersection of art, dance, anatomy/physiology, and individual/collective healing.
Sharna Fabiano (Long Beach, CA)
Jam Warmup
Sharna is an internationally recognized tango social dance artist with over 25 years of teaching experience in both academic and community settings. She has trained in multiple forms of conditioning including contact improvisation, physical theater, modern and postmodern dance, somatic conditioning, yoga, and mindfulness.
Maja Ejrnaes (Denmark)
Jam Warmup
Maja Ejrnæs is an experienced facilitator with a background in anthropology, movement practice, and performance art. As a practitioner of Contact Improvisation, she explores the phenomenology of touch and engages in developing scores for group improvisation.
Land Acknowledgement
CSULB is located on the sacred site of Puvungna. We acknowledge that we are on the land of the Tongva/Gabrieleño and the Acjachemen/Juaneño Nations who have lived and continue to live here. We recognize the Tongva and Acjachemen Nations and their spiritual connection as the first stewards and the traditional caretakers of this land. We thank them for their strength, perseverance and resistance.
