2025 Teaching Team
McKay House lives and works in Nashville as a freelance dance and performance artist focusing most of her work on dance film and improvisation. She is a co-founder of Garage Collective, a dance collective centering emergent performance in unconventional spaces and collaboration with musicians. McKay also teaches and organizes for Nashville Contact Improvisation and has been a guest teacher of improvisation at several universities including The University of Alabama and Purdue University.
Kellyn Jackson is a white, neuro-spicy, dancin & dreamin girlie from the shores of Michigama (aka Lake Michigan). 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 teaches a weekly contact improvisation class in Chicago, and this is her second year on the GLACIER organizing team. Kellyn is as passionate about cultivating the CI community, especially building bridges between the old and new generations, as she is about 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.
Holly Jaycox. I arrive at the Christine Center from my home in Indiana near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. Having grown up in the Midwest I know the wide horizons, the powerful thunderstorms and the singing frogs of this ecosystem, and resonate strongly with the rivers and the forests. My current interests in CI include navigating my own body as it changes day to day and year to year, deepening my trust in the dance as it emerges, and finding the presence and articulation of the cells and fibers of my flesh and joints.
As one of the folks who taught at the first GLACIER in 2002, I realize that I am becoming an elder in the community, and have come to recognize this community as family. While I had been dancing CI since the ‘90s, it is in the extended midwestern gatherings of GLACIER, from Minnesota to Ohio, that I had the privilege of going deeply into my experiences, and recognized the power of this somatic mind-body work we do together. I share this form with my students at Purdue University.
An American mutt, I seem to have primarily Northern European genes, my mom's half coming from the Netherlands. I wonder if I look at this point like someone’s grandmother, but midwestern friends who know me refer to my spicier side as my New Yorker, my home for seven years.
Utam Moses is a somatic explorer and loves sharing dance as a space for all parts of the self to show up. She currently teaches at IU Bloomington and Windfall Dancers. Her work investigates movement as a catalyst for transformation, shifting states, and emergent community. She loves integrating play, embodied wonder, experimental theater and contemplation into her dance explorations. She wonders about how imagination helps open access to new ways of being human together. Utam received her B.A. in Contemporary Dance (IU) and her M.A. in Performance Studies from Tisch (NYU).
In 1992 Dennis Yelkin saw a contact improvisation performance by Chris Akins and Andrew Harwood. The beauty of that duet changed Dennis' dance interests. He began studying contact improvisation in Minneapolis with Chris Akins, Cynthia Stevens, Hyjack taught by Arwen Wilder and Kristin Van Loon, and Patrick Scully, who introduced contact improvisation to the Twin Cities. What Dennis appreciated most from a workshop at Luther College from Nancy Stark Smith was the joy of connection. Dennis says: I have been attending GLACIER off and on for decades and often, at some point, can feel lonely and disconnected from everyone. But the awesome community of contact improvisation always folds me back into the joy of realizing I am where I need to be.
Lindsay Forsythe is a dancing mom of two ever-evolving teenagers who keep her heart full. She’s especially passionate about the healing and meditative power of movement and creative expression. For over three decades, Lindsay has been on a professional dance adventure, living across the country and primarily immersed in modern dance. Twelve years ago, she made her home in the Twin Cities, where she eventually took Hijack’s inspiring CI class (where she met Dennis, her co-facilitator at GLACIER). Since then, she’s been immersed in the Twin Cities Contact Improvisation community, and has studied with influential artists including Nancy Stark Smith, Nita Little, Karen Nelson, Chris Aiken, Angie Hauser, and Nora Hajos. Lindsay loves holding welcoming, playful spaces for CI dance classes and regularly facilitates both Contemplative Dance Practice and the Underscore in Minneapolis. She also teaches older adults Tai Ji Quan: Moving for Better Balance and improvisational fitness classes — gratefully soaking up elder wisdom along the way. Her favorite language is Dance, and she remains endlessly curious about the discoveries that unfold with each new dance partner or group.
Dennis and Lindsay have been exploring improvisation together through movement, drawing and performance for several years.
2025 Organizing Team
Andrew Brightman (he/him) - As a long-time member (since 2006) of the GLACIER community, and someone who discovered CI through this community, I am happy to be able to give back through helping to organize the event this year. I have benefitted incredibly from this CI community, especially during those first few formative years when so many people were there for all my questions as I was navigating the intersections of my spirituality and sexuality with the new ways of physically interacting with others in dance. Supporting diverse and inclusive local communities of CI dance is also important to me. I help host and teach our CI community as well as the annual academic CI Gathering (CIG) in West Lafayette, Indiana. Although I’ve lived for many years in Indiana on the lands originally inhabited by many first nation people, including Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Miami, Sauk, and Wea, my cultural roots are from the south coast of New England, and my biological roots are from the immigrant Portuguese and Italian communities that sailed there in the early 1900’s. I love being in the water and the woods where ever and whenever I can, and dancing outside is a particular delight. I look forward to welcoming you, and hopefully dancing with you, at GLACIER!
Kellyn Jackson - teaching team coordinator, see above
Ilana Bloom (she/her) - I first studied Contact Improvisation at UW-Madison in 1996. Contact Improv is my happy place. I love the flow state I can reach when I’m fully present and focused on my movement impulses, leaning into another body and what’s happening in the space around me. I am currently one of the jam leaders in Madison and am fortunate to live near The Rumpus Room in Mazomanie where I have participated in many gatherings and workshops. I have two teenagers, two dogs and a cat. I'm a Jewish HSP, born in Montreal, grew up in Boston and lived in Jerusalem. I love that this form is practiced all around the world! I am a Trager Approach practitioner, a type of bodywork that centers on somatic re-education, finding softness, fluidity and ease in the body. I am also an aerial dancer specializing in low flying trapeze, lyra and cube.
2025 Welcome Team
The Welcome Team is a small group of volunteers from our GLACIER community who aim to foster a culture of accessibility, consent* and inclusion at the retreat, especially for participants of marginalized identities. If you are interested in volunteering, please reach out to Kellyn at glacier.registrar@gmail.com to see if it's a good fit.
Margaret Sunghe Paek (she/her) is a mixed-race, quinquagenarian, collaborative dance artist, maker, sister, middle-child, former gymnast, and mother practicing curiosity, compassion, and rigorous play as choreographic methodologies of inclusion and community-building. Current research involves Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening training, creating a documentary with Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas archiving their almost 15 years of practice~play~work~dances with their children, and developing Ensemble Thinking teacher certification with Lower Left Legacy Project. Margaret loves finding connection in the space between and has been irreparably influenced by her relationships with contact improvisation, Ensemble Thinking, Alexander Technique, and the collectives Lower Left, the Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas, projectLIMB, Uh Oh Trio, and Dr. Shamell Bell’s Street Dance Activism. In the late 1990s, she began practicing Contact Improvisation with Nina Martin, and over the years, the practice has brought her many things, including joy, possibility, sweat, so many friend~teachers, and an improvising cellist husband (in an indirect way). In 2015, Margaret moved from New York City to ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people (Appleton, Wisconsin) to teach dance at Lawrence University where she now co-directs the minor in “Dance: Embodied Collaborative Practice.” Even when things are hard, she loves a lot of things in her life (including singing, poetry, and hearing people’s life stories). www.margaretpaek.com
Rachel Aster Grace (She/her or They/them)~
Writer. Dancer. Teacher. Pagan/Buddhist Witch. Community Builder ~ Black/Mixed/Transracial Adoptee. Neurodivergent. Queer. Minnesotan.
I am in love with the practice of CI–as play, meditation, art, and medicine–as well as its community. In my few years of experience, I am grateful to have danced with and learned from many teachers in and outside of the great lakes region, most specially the folks of my home jam in the Twin Cities. As a board member of Contact Improv Twin Cities and co-organizer of its offshoot, Tiny Jam, I have had the opportunity to host weekly jams, facilitate warm-ups, and collaboratively engage in the on-going work of creating safe and inclusive spaces for the practice of CI. It will be my third year attending GLACIER, first year on the volunteer team. I aspire to approach this new role with the same present awareness, beginner’s mind, courage, trust and groundedness that have brought me the most mutually fun, affirming, and pleasurable CI dances. I look forward to listening, learning and mindfully tending our glittering web of community together. Peace and Blessed Be.
Sasha Lasdon
Sasha (they/them) lives and dances in Madison, WI (TeeJope, Ho-Chunk land). They have been a part of the GLACIER community for 20 years and shared organizing and teaching in many of those. They’ve been lucky to travel with dance in many countries and learned (and keep learning) in many contexts, with many teachers. Their current dance obsessions include embodying the 5 forms of freedom as shared in Tim Snyder’s work (approach me to nerd out together), co-creating aerial, stilt and wall running works (I can fly!), and synthesizing the overlap with CI and the Wheel of Consent (as faculty with the School of Consent with Betty Martin). Being in an intergenerational community with queer leadership woven in from the start keeps them rooted. Shared values of nourishing curiosity, rigorous play, and welcoming new people keep them coming back to GLACIER and this form again and again. Also, hot sauce and parlor games. They are a white Ashkenazi jew, trans and queer, conditionally able-bodied and not a natal midwesterner.
Tim Wang
Hi! My name as label is Tim Wang, he/him. Other labels include CI dancer and sometimes CI teacher, curious person, Chicago resident, life-long learner, practitioner of Tai Chi and various martial arts, architect, practitioner and avid sharer of various meditation and mindfulness practices, former bodyworker for 20 years, Taiwanese-American… (Phew! Ok. Time for a breath) …someone who’s variously playful, serious, heart based, nerdy, intellectual, someone who loves to connect deeply with others, someone self-described as a gregarious loner (which may be something like an outgoing introvert), someone who’s taking singing classes, someone who thinks and hopes he’s emotionally available (but you get to decide for yourself). Beyond all the labels, I’m me and you’re you. Let’s dance or discuss life’s important questions or share labels and stories or sit quietly or whatever feels right in the moment. I’m here to be discovered as are you. As part of the Welcome Team, share with me what you want or need or would enjoy in the moment.
*consent: a multi-directional process of attunement to our own and others’ needs; creating an environment in which we feel as supported as possible in hearing, asserting, and responding to our own and others needs.