Hello! A beginning to our beginning. Over the course of this year (2024), I’ll interview Carolyn Stuart once a month. We’ll dive into her experience, philosophy, and teachings of Contact Improvisation. Look for a new episode the last day of each month.

A devotee of Contact Improvisation since 1984, Carolyn’s research and development of the dance form spans 17 countries, hundreds of projects, and diverse populations. Her primary teachers have been commitment to the process of exploration and the use of the blindfold. Her mission is to make contact improvising accessible by distilling the vastness of possibility into the simplest of terms. The current edge of her investigation is applying the principles of the C.I. paradigm to life at large. If mutual well-being is possible on the dance floor, then what about off the dance floor too—for the generations to come!

Writings by Carolyn Stuart can be found at: www.contactgames.wordpress.com

Your host, Eric Nordstrom is a dance performer, filmmaker, and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He teaches in the Dance Program at Lewis and Clark College and has taught at contact festival Freiburg in Germany, the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, and Conduit Dance. He has performed with Karen Nelson, Keith V. Goodman, and was a core company member of Oslund + Company.

To help preserve Portland dance history, Eric created a documentary film Moving History: Portland Contemporary Dance Past and Present. To centralize and preserve dance history source material, Eric has partnered with Portland State University to create the Portland Dance Archives. He studied with filmmaker Mitchell Rose and choreographer Bebe Miller at The Ohio State University, where he earned his MFA in Dance.

For more information about Eric Nordstrom: www.eric-nordstrom.com

Photo by Gregory Bartning