Janine Taylor is a curious little primate who has worked as a massage therapist since 2011, with a wide variety of clients including college level football players for 8 of those years. She loves moving her body in a weekly Authentic Movement group and attends bimonthly Contact Improvisation jams. She follows her curiosity as much in her work life as in her personal life so each new growth edge informs both. As a bodyworker, her style is born from this integration and means that she comes from a place of combined intellectual study, lived experience, and joyful practice.

 

Kellyn Jackson is a dancer and a dreamer in a body on this planet. She’s incredibly grateful that she attended Nancy Stark Smith’s (last) January workshop in 2020, thanks to some strong nudges from the GLACIER community. She’s been committed to continuing the research and practice of contact improvisation in Chicago since. Kellyn believes that cultivating the CI community, especially building bridges between the old and new generations, is equally as important as the physical practice of CI. She is curious about the dualities that emerge within the CI context, such as inclusivity/exclusivity, safety/risk-taking, process/performance, and personal responsibility/collective care. Some of her other influential teachers include Guru Suraj, Erica Kaufman, K.J. Holmes, Kathleen Rea, Kirstie Simson, Adrianna Michalska, and Margaret Paek. When not dancing CI, Kellyn works as a dance/movement therapist, integrating a similar creative process to psycho-emotional-spiritual healing. 

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Margaret Sunghe Paek is a collaborative dance artist whose research engages in inclusionary methods and ensemble enterprises. As a mixed-race maker, educator, performer, and community builder, she finds connection in liminality. Margaret is continually influenced by her durational relationships with contact improvisation, Ensemble Thinking, Alexander Technique, and as part of the collectives: Lower Left, the Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas, Uh Oh Trio, Dr. Shamell Bell’s Street Dance Activism, and her family trio with Loren Kiyoshi Dempster and their daughter. Currently, her research includes developing the Ensemble Thinking teacher training program with Lower Left, exploring intersections of disability culture and Ensemble Thinking with Shireen Hamza and Alison Kopit, and deepening new work with Uh Oh Trio. The practice of teaching is integral to her creative process, and Margaret has taught CI since 1998. She has been on faculty at Movement Research and Marymount Manhattan College in NYC and taught at festivals in Sweden, Hungary, and Germany.  In 2015, Margaret moved from NYC to ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people (Appleton, Wisconsin) to teach at Lawrence University, where she codirects, with Mauriah Donegan Kraker, the “Dance: Embodied Collaborative Practice” minor and Interdisciplinary Area. www.margaretpaek.com

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Mo Hayden lives and works in chicago.  They came to CI in 2019 and they've been captured by it ever since. Mo is deeply invested in play, performance, and good queer fun. They've been taught by the entire Chicago CI community, and more specifically influenced by Ray Chung, Faye Driscoll, Raul Saldarriaga, Margaret Paek and the members of SetGo. Deepest gratitude to all who've shared this practice. 

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Scott Franke Hello! My name is Scott Franke and I have been doing contact improv for about 6 years now. I was introduced to it in Minneapolis, where I used to live. I then spent a year traveling and I was lucky enough to attend jams/retreats in many places, and ended up moving to Chicago where I have been getting to dance a lot with some great people. I am a mechanical engineer for my day job, and I also like to explore nature and different arts. Contact improv has been my favorite art form for so many reasons, but to name a few: I find human bodies so fascinating and its endlessly interesting to explore them, I like the group attuning and mindset, I like how sharing weight and moving together can put me in my body and into a creative state, I like being able to explore non-verbally and without a goal, and I really like the people I find in the CI community. Excited to dance with you all!

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Utam Moses is a dance theatre artist, teacher, and embodied theorist. She currently teaches at Indiana University Bloomington. Utam is passionate about dance as a tool for transforming states, as a mode of research and as an emergent community. Her teaching draws from contact improvisation, paratheater and Qigong, centering a play as a pathway to creativity. She has performed with the Doors Project, BodyResearch of San Francisco, California and WindshipDance among others. She has presented collaborative performance works at festivals such as Going Dutch Festival and Tennessee Women's Theater Project. Her dance film, OVERANDOVER has been shown at multiple film festivals in the U.S. and Europe. She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. 

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