Round Robin Into an Open Improvisation

To close the exhibition Touch and Tumble, EDAM (Experimental Dance and Music) company members, Anne Cooper and Arash Khakpour with Brandon Schwinn, will perform a demonstration of Contact Improvisation by leading a “round robin” into an “open improvisation”. Audience members are welcome to attend for the full duration or to come and go as they please.

The “round robin” is one of the foundational formats to practice and perform Contact Improvisation. It involves the formation of a circle by participants, in the middle of which one person begins a solo then is joined by another to form a duet. After some time a person from the circle enters the space and a transitional trio emerges until one person leaves the dance and goes back to the circle.

In an “open improvisation”, the dancers’ familiarity or unfamiliarity with each other, their own physical and dancing histories, and the commitment to exploring what emerges from the openness as it arises, becomes the score for the movement. Together they compose a dance with the space by using chance, choice, intuition, sensation, and resonance.

About the Artists

Anne Cooper has danced with EDAM since 1994. She has performed in the work of many choreographers in Vancouver, with companies in Manitoba and Quebec, and in improvisations directed by several well-known dance makers including in Nancy Stark Smith’s Glimpse Performance Installations. She began teaching Contact Improvisation at EDAM by invitation of Peter Bingham in 2000, and has taught there and elsewhere ever since. She also facilitates Nancy Stark Smith’s The Underscore. Anne creates her own performance work, often a hybrid of movement, vocalization and words, which has been presented throughout Vancouver.

Arash Khakpour is a dance artist originally from Tehran, Iran, and based in Vancouver, who is privileged to have immigrated to the ancestral and unceded Coast Salish territory including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. He is interested in dance as a way to research human nature and human conditions through historical, social, political and existential interpretations. Arash is the co-founder of the dance-theatre company The Biting School (alongside his brother Aryo Khakpour), the performance group Pressed Paradise, and the founder and co-host of “How About A Time Machine”, a podcast on the history of Canadian performance. He was the 2016/17 recipient of Dance Victoria’s Chrystal Dance Prize.

Britt Angus is a dance artist and performer originally from Vancouver, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples. She splits her time between Berlin and Vancouver creating choreography, interdisciplinary performances, and films. In 2017, Britt received a scholarship from Simon Fraser University to complete her bachelor of fine art in Berlin. After graduating she continued living there until 2020, later taking her practice to Latin America and returning recently to Canada in April 2022. Since 2020, Britt has been artistic director of her Berlin and Vancouver-based art collective ‘Chaos Emblematic’.

Brandon Schwinn is a carpenter and an artist working across painting, photography, video, and dance. His capacity for expressive movement as a dancer has been informed by sports such as ice hockey and wrestling. He played Junior “AA” Hockey as a youth and went to Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His job as a carpenter, allows him to work sessionally and study dance and meditation in the gaps. He sees Contact Improvisation as a way to integrate all of these interests.

Acknowledgement

Presented with the support of the Government of Canada.