The Contact Improvisation Canon

Details · Steve Paxton, The Drama Review T-55, September 1972

Contains the circle-falling trust exercise with its training list (eyes' judgment, skin's sensitivity, timing, trust), a first-person description of bodies colliding and blending into one falling mass, and the statement that these dancers orient by weight and touch rather than the eye. CI's blueprint in print before the name existed.

If this library has one cornerstone, this is it.

Source · free extract at Cambridge Core (full text paywalled)

Details · the three founding texts, 1972–1977 (French ed. "D'un pied sur l'autre," trans. Bigé, Recherches en danse 2017)

The 1975 piece is the founding technical statement: easiest pathways within mutually dependent masses, touch and balance as the base senses, the training list starting with attitude. "Solo Dancing" holds the canonical aphorisms: soloing doesn't exist, dancer plus floor is already a duet, two dancers make a quartet, weight is only yours to give.

Source · English originals in the CQ Sourcebook, $21 at Contact Editions

Details · Paxton, Contact Quarterly 18.1, 1993

The founding document of interior technique: how he used verbal images to focus dancers inside sensation, the small dance, the gaps where consciousness blacks out mid-roll, the "working model" mover he taught toward. Imagining a step already displaces weight. Ends with a dedication to John Cage.

Read it before anything modern about attention.

Source · buy the issue PDF from Contact Quarterly ($5)

Details · Paxton interviewed 1981, annotated by his 2013 self (ed. Mazzaglia, Danza e Ricerca 2013)

The deepest well of citable teaching language: gravity as the perceptual "field" with the moving point of contact as "figure"; feeling the floor through your partner's body as the principle CI rests on; the small dance introduced in 1972 so gravity could be observed working on the upright body. Plus his regret that standing has dropped out of practice, his replacement of "freedom" with "response-ability," and a sober late retraction of early utopianism.

The deepest well of teaching language on any shelf here.

Source · free full text at Danza e Ricerca (Univ. of Bologna)

Details · ed. Emma Bigé, Culturgest, Lisbon 2019

The retrospective's catalogue: Bigé's "fugitive study" introduction framing Paxton's decades as patient investigations; Cvejić's "A Study in Anarchy" arguing Paxton transferred authority from persons to gravity itself; and the Godard/Bigé "Moving-moved" conversation. Sardo's foreword lands on the idea that Paxton taught what Newton couldn't: what it is to be the apple. Free and legal in full via the editor's own deposit: Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10695529.

Source · free in the full 2019 book, the editor's own Zenodo deposit

Details · Nita Little with Peter Pleyer, 2013/2020, CQ Newsletter

Founder testimony: CI replaced modern dance's up/down hierarchy of weight with spirals where every direction has value; asking questions moment-by-moment is itself the politics; peripheral intelligence outruns centralized intelligence. Includes her eyewitness chronology: Magnesium seemed "for men only" until Paxton showed her the material; the Weber Gallery rehearsals were heavily videotaped and studied while still in body memory.

Source · free to read on Contact Quarterly's CI Newsletter

Details · Steve Paxton, edited by Karen Nelson, Contact Quarterly 40.1, Winter/Spring 2015

Paxton talked on two afternoons during the seven-day Breitenbush Jam in March 2014 in Oregon, on how the Stand relates to stage fright and to entrainment. For the second talk he played a recording of the first and interrupted himself to add to it. CQ prints both, Talk 1 down one side and Talk 2's extra layers down the other, so you read him working on his own thinking.

Read this one standing up.

Source · free at Contact Quarterly's Article Gallery

Details · Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Nancy Topf, interviewed by Aat Hougée at the SNDO, Amsterdam, 1982; published 2009

A transcript of a video-recorded public interview at the School for New Dance Development in the year it opened. Hougée asks plain questions: why did you choose to dance, what does it take, what can a school actually teach. Paxton answers that the work is playing the senses, exploring them, finding out what they do and how they affect us, and that he only decided to become a dancer after several years of studying dance. Nelson and Topf answer alongside him in the same room.

Worth it for Paxton's line about playing the senses.

Source · free full text at Sarma

Details · Steve Paxton in conversation with Maura Keefe, 1998; PillowVoices episode 16, hosted by Jennifer Edwards, Jacob's Pillow, released August 2020 (27 min, audio and full transcript)

Paxton tells how the men's class he set during a Grand Union residency at Oberlin started as gymnastic "throwing your weight around" and turned on one question: how to keep people safe. His answer was to make the senses acute, keep the sphere around the body lively, and teach people to fall and roll so a topple agrees with the floor. He names the third partner, the momentum two people build, as the thing that leads. He also walks through the Aikido roll he studied through the 1960s. Edwards frames the episode by naming the form's consent problems and its debts to Lindy Hop and Aikido; that framing is hers, and it is worth hearing next to his.

Listen for "the leader is the movement."

Source · free audio and transcript at PillowVoices

Details · Steve Paxton, Bill T. Jones and Mary Overlie, December 4, 1983; published from Movement Research's archives in Critical Correspondence, April 15, 2016

A full transcript of an evening where both men had just performed and Overlie asked them what their work was dealing with. Paxton answers "Analysis," and describes working with tiny, vibrating movements inside larger ones. He argues that research in an art form will look unreadable at first, and only becomes a language once people start quoting it. He presses Jones on how a performer avoids actually feeling what they pretend to feel. Jones asks whether there are "Contact people" and "classic post-Judson people," and Paxton refuses to put it on a group.

Paxton in 1983, working at the small end of the scale and arguing it out in public.

Source · free full text at Movement Research

Details · Hubert Godard & Emma Bigé, in the 2019 Culturgest book · published under the name Romain Bigé, Emma Bigé’s earlier name

The small dance as the discovery that we stream movements that aren't ours; tonic function rooted in the infant's tonic dialogue; CI as a "parietal dance" in which grounds communicate through bodies, my body makes a parcel of Earth perceivable to you; gravity as the repressed relation with no god in any pantheon. Mutual freedom with mutual dependence.

Read first. Slowly. Twice.

Source · free PDF at HAL open archive

Details · Godard interview, 1994 (Writings on Dance 15, 1996)

The clinical side: recovered patients missing specific gestures no test detects; "founding gestures" (pushing away, pointing, going towards) each learned in an affective situation, the capacity to say no lives in the muscles that push away; gesture born from gravitational organization (raising an arm begins in the calf).

Source · free PDF at HAL open archive (Paris 8)

Details · Godard interviewed by McHose, Contact Quarterly 2006

The hamstring lengthens when you orient to ground and sky, not when you stretch it; CI named as the direct way to renegotiate the touch taboo.

Source · buy the issue PDF from Contact Quarterly ($5)

Details · Emma Bigé, CQ Unbound 2017

The aesthetics of weight: upright posture as lifelong task (Straus), the small dance opening perception beneath volition, CI training "nomadic supports", weight given spherically to any point. Where music gives tonal space, CI substitutes tonic space: coordinates defined by weight, dancers bathed in the gravitational field instead of sound.

Source · Emma Bigé's own site (texts + deposits)

Details · Emma Bigé, "Le poids vivant," 2018

The scholarly full version: postural tonus, parent-infant tonic dialogue, each partner a floor, the Earth rediscovered as a power of attraction one dialogues with, every step a modulated arc of falling. Quotes Paxton's mirror-floor workshop score, the inverted body that supports you, which is Floor as Sky stated by the founder.

Source · free PDF from the author on Academia.edu (free login to download)

Details · Emma Bigé, "L'haptique et la chute," 2015

Up and down become relative to the partner's body, his back a floor, a wall, a ramp. Welcoming a partner and grounding yourself are one act.

The closest published cousin to what I teach.

Source · Emma Bigé's own site (texts + deposits)

Details · Michael O'Connor, 2015

Source · free PDF from the author on Academia.edu (free login to download)

Details · Ixiar Rozas, "Cuerpos inclinados que imaginan," 2020

Pandemic-era essay weaving Paxton's whole trajectory with Cavarero's "inclination": leaning toward gravity as critique of vertical, masculine rectitude.

Source · free full text at Re-visiones (Complutense journal)

Details · Emma Bigé in conversation with Sharon Fridman, Contact Quarterly 41.2, Summer/Fall 2016 · published under the name Romain Bigé, Emma Bigé’s earlier name

Recorded under the pine trees at the Ibiza Contact Festival on 27 August 2014, straight after a workshop Fridman had taught. The subject is Contact Improvisation and choreography: what happens when a choreographer builds finished work out of the fall and the catch. Bigé's other pieces on this shelf are written arguments, and this one is a conversation, which makes it the easiest of them to start with.

Source · free at Contact Quarterly's Article Gallery

Details · Serena Massimo, University of Ferrara, Philosophies 10(2), article 39, March 30, 2025; open access (CC BY 4.0)

A philosopher's argument that improvised creativity depends on automatisms built by repetition. Her section on gravity is the one for this shelf: in daily life we hold ourselves upright against gravity, and in the dance, repeated falling teaches a sensitivity to weight, giving and receiving it, until falling stops being frightening. She reads that surrender as a shift from "problem solving" to "problem finding," using Erwin Straus's idea of pathicity. The link to how I teach falls is my reading, not her claim.

For anyone who has asked why we keep doing the same roll.

Source · free full text at MDPI Philosophies

Details · Lisa Nelson, Contact Quarterly 29.1, 2004

Four years behind a camera taught her the eyes compose the body; she learned to catch the split-second of organization before an action appears; her group practice has watchers replay a dance with their bodies, a collective perception, a dance of opinions. She credits Paxton's 1972 survival question as her seed.

The journal's two-perspective format has an ancestor here.

Source · free full text at the Sarma archive

Details · Nita Little, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 2014

Source · ResearchGate (author-posted)

Details · Yotam Shibolet, 2018

CI as living lab for embodied cognition (Noë's enactive perception, Massumi's proprioceptive navigation); maps the physics-vs-chemistry split in CI's self-understanding; defends practitioner writing against neutral-spectator scholarship.

Source · free full text at Junctions journal

Details · Pini & Deans, 2021

Source · free full text at University of Tasmania repository

Details · Malaika Sarco-Thomas, JDSP 2014

The question menu doubles as journal prompts.

Source · free full text on ResearchGate (uploaded by the author)

Details · Sarco-Thomas, 2015

The most compact teachable small-dance script in the set, plus Chung's fingertip "follow the one you lead" exercise with the space between fingers as third agent, and Little's attention "pop."

Source · free paper on Academia.edu, posted by the author (free login to download)

Details · Chrysa Parkinson & Emma Bigé, Contact Quarterly 2018 · published under the name Romain Bigé, Emma Bigé’s earlier name

Source · buy the issue PDF from Contact Quarterly ($5)

Details · Daniel Stern, The Drama Review 1973

Source · publisher page at Cambridge Core (full text paywalled)

Details · Ramaswamy & Deslauriers, 2014

CI's unstated spiritual register given careful language: jams as hybrid of focused-attention and open-presence meditation; joining felt as movement from a third place.

Source · free full text on ResearchGate (uploaded by the author)

Details · Lisa Nelson, interviewed by Peter Hulton, Writings on Dance no. 14, 1995–96

Nelson walks through the whole route: Juilliard's children's division every Saturday from eleven to sixteen, Bennington for a year and a half before she quit, a mime troupe, then the Open Theater, which was working on movement and sound rather than text. She ends on the two things that built the sensory work, her reading on perception and her time with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and brain-injured infants, where she could watch the link between a baby's movement and its desire.

Where "Before Your Eyes" comes from.

Source · free full text at Sarma

Details · Daniel Lepkoff, May 2008 with a January 2010 postscript; printed in Contact Quarterly 36.1, Annual 2011

Lepkoff reads Paxton's move as putting the body into disorienting and often emergency situations, pulling the rug out so habits cannot run and support has to be found on any surface of two moving bodies. The technique underneath, he says, is to pose and hold a question, and that questioning sits in bones, muscles, organs and nerves rather than in the verbal mind. Two lines to keep: "When I believe I know where down is, I am always wrong! Only gravity has that information," and "If Contact Improvisation is the physical act of posing a question about ones own present circumstance, then the work is ever expansive." The 2010 postscript explains why he stepped away from the label in the mid-1980s and what he thinks survives anyway.

Hand this to the next person who asks you what CI is.

Source · free on Lepkoff's own site · also free at Contact Quarterly

Details · Catherine Deans and Sarah Pini, Synthese 200(2), 2022; open access (CC BY 4.0)

Two researchers use ethnography with CI dancers to ask how skill develops in the form. Their answer: finer awareness of your own and your partner's kinaesthetic sense, and what they call interkinaesthetic negative capability, an embodied "not knowing yet," with an ease in being off balance and waiting for the next shift to arise. They draw a parallel with how infants and caregivers learn to move together. Expertise, in their account, is the ability to slide between having agency and handing it over.

Good language for the moment a student asks what "getting better" means here.

Source · free full text at Springer (Synthese)

Details · Brynn Williams, MA thesis, UBC

Source · free full text at UBC Library Open Collections

Details · María Paz Brozas-Polo, "Discursos de género," 2020

Source · free full text at Universidad de León repository

Details · Brozas-Polo, "Llevar o ser llevada," 2022

Tango's explicit roles vs CI's supposed equality: the jam's openness can amplify elite power and leave room for abuse; the Magnesium all-male origin story.

Source · free full text at SciELO Brazil (Movimento)

Details · Emma Bigé, "Sentir et se mouvoir ensemble," 2015 · published under the name Romain Bigé, Emma Bigé’s earlier name

The most clear-eyed insider text on CI's shadows: in-group language that discourages dissent, dress-code academicism, beginner humiliation, male-dominated teaching in female-majority communities, resolved through the small dance's community of sensing.

Required reading before writing a jam's code of conduct.

Source · free full text at HAL open archive

Details · Chrys Papaioannou, 2024/25

The strongest recent challenge to "just relax into gravity": Holland and Houston-Jones's 1983 Wrong Contact Manifesto; Paxton's uninhibited "imaginary person" read as an unmarked white subject; Nodine's observation that flow is a form of privilege. Tension reframed as socially produced.

Source · abstract at Taylor & Francis (full article USD 56)

Details · Erin Stahmer, Barnard thesis 2011

A sympathetic audit of the universal-language claim: communication is real but conditional; hierarchies re-emerge; touch can turn coercive; and a documented decline of the small dance in teaching.

Source · free full text at Columbia Academic Commons

Details · Emma Bigé, "Danser l'Anarchie," 2020 · published under the name Romain Bigé, Emma Bigé’s earlier name

Post-modern dance wasn't democratic, it was anarchist: Judson's anti-institutionalism, Grand Union's temporary autonomous zone, CI's mutualism via Kropotkin, whom Paxton cites directly. Roles must form and never congeal.

Source · free full text at SciELO Brazil (Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença)

Details · Bojana Cvejić, in the 2019 Culturgest book

Includes his pedagogical redirect (toward curiosity about momentum instead of prohibitions) and the letter arguing CI addresses sexism and racism by providing a proposition in which they are irrelevant.

Source · free in the full 2019 book on Zenodo

Details · Michelle Beaulieux, Contact Quarterly 44.1

The article that brought the reckoning into CI's own journal of record: how the form's founding "take care of yourself" rule can offload responsibility onto the least powerful person in the room, and what communities changed after #MeToo. Pairs with her response essay "Starting by Believing Maria."

The most important consent text of the last decade.

Source · free at Contact Quarterly's Article Gallery

Details · SK, Rythea Lee, and CQ, Contact Quarterly 39.1, Winter/Spring 2014

A woman the journal anonymises as SK emailed Rythea Lee, whom she had never met, asking how to handle something that had happened to her at a CI festival. Contact Quarterly published the exchange. It ran in 2014, five years before Michelle Beaulieux's #MeToo article in the same journal, which is why I would read this one first.

Reading the two together is my own pairing, not the journal's.

Source · free at Contact Quarterly's Article Gallery

Details · Brozas-Polo, "Naturaleza estética y pedagógica de las jams," 2014

The sharpest anatomy of the jam as pedagogical device: a five-type map of what organizers think jams are for, and the documented drift toward beginner-social jams that experienced dancers abandon.

Source · free full text at Cultura, Ciencia y Deporte

Details · Brozas-Polo, "Pedagogía del cuerpo sensible," 2017

A decade of CQ "Essentials" teaching scores (Chung, Nelson, Little, Keogh, Lepkoff…) read as a pedagogy of touch: deep, extended, multiple, porous, spatial, internal touch; her closing challenge that CI never worked out what vision does.

Source · free full text at Universidad de León repository

Details · Brozas-Polo, "La accesibilidad en la danza CI," 2013

Accessibility as founding principle, with the full lineage (DanceAbility, blind-dancer work, Exposed to Gravity) dated and cited, plus the honest caveat that touch remains a social barrier.

Source · free full text at Arte y Movimiento (Universidad de Jaén)

Details · Brozas & García, "Los comienzos de la danza CI en España," 2014

Source · free full text at the journal's site (RIMCAFD)

Details · Sarco-Thomas & Zammit

Source · buy the book from Cambridge Scholars (from £64.99)

Details · the Buenos Aires school: Menacho 2008 · Tampini & Farina ~2011 · Singer 2021

The Buenos Aires school, three philosophical readings: Marcuse (CI as lived non-manipulative relation), Foucault (CI destabilizing the discipline that produces docile bodies), Deleuze/Spinoza (the "third entity" as composition of relations that increases each body's power).

Source · Menacho 2008: free full text at Memoria Académica (UNLP) · Tampini & Farina: free full text at SEDICI (UNLP repository) · Singer 2021: free full text at Dialnet

Details · Emma Bigé, "Gestes du CI," Musée de la danse 2018

Source · the exhibition on Emma Bigé's own site

Details · Nancy Stark Smith's long-form jam score

Her own page explains the practice; the famous one-page glyph sheet maps its phases in her hand-drawn symbols.

The map for designing a long session.

Source · her official Underscore page · the glyph sheet (PDF)

Details · Lisa Nelson, Contact Quarterly 2.3, Spring 1977

Balance a peacock feather upright on your open palm, let its falling lead you, and move only to keep the two of you in balance. Then pass it to someone else, tossing it straight up or spilling it into their waiting palm. Nelson closes with a group structure Nita Little brought to a Berkeley CI class in February 1977: A moves, B joins weight, C enters to join A, B lets go and becomes a spectator, and one continuous duet travels through any number of people. The mover who stays is the feather.

Twenty minutes of class, in half a page.

Source · free full text at Sarma

Details · Nancy Stark Smith, Embodied Activity #1 for Meta-academy at the Bates Dance Festival, 2013 (18 min video)

Stark Smith leads an exercise you can do at home with a pen and paper. She describes it as "writing from the body." The Underscore on Shelf 5 is also drawn as glyphs, one per phase; reading this exercise as part of the same habit of drawing the dance is my own connection, not hers.

Run it with a class after a jam, before anyone talks.

Source · free on YouTube (Meta-academy Lab)

Details · Archias, 2010

Source · free full text in WRECK journal (UBC)

Details · Ramírez Tur & López del Rincón, 2023

Companion · Hennessy & Houston-Jones in conversation on dancing through the AIDS years (SFMOMA Open Space)

Source · free full text at Archivo Español de Arte (CSIC)

Details · Rufo, 2022

Source · free full essay at Venti Journal

Details · Georgelou, 2010

Source · free PDF uploaded by the author on Academia.edu (free sign-in may be needed)

Details · Brozas & Vicente-Pedraz, "La diversidad corporal," 2017

Source · free full text at Arte, Individuo y Sociedad

Details · FoundSF, the open San Francisco history archive

Source · read at FoundSF

Details · the Five Ways In documentary project, University of Kent

The research platform behind the anthropological CI documentary Five Ways In (Poltorak, Lynes, Brühlmann): video research, themes from community to political change, and a blog running to 2020.

Source · researchingcontactimprovisation.com

Details · Lisa Nelson and Nancy Stark Smith, Contact Quarterly 5.3/4, Spring/Summer 1980, page 43

Magnesium at Oberlin in January 1972, eleven men throwing, catching, colliding and falling for ten minutes, then standing. Paxton meeting Leon Felder and Nita Little at Bennington that spring. June 1972, funded by Change, Inc., about fifteen of the best athletes he had met in a year or two of teaching, one week rehearsing and one week showing five hours a day at the Weber Gallery in New York, in an event called Contact Improvisation. Every participant is named. Then the 1973 West Coast tour under the name "You Come, We'll Show You What We Do," Rome that June, ReUnion in 1975, and the Contact Newsletter that same year.

The origin story with the roster attached.

Source · free full text at Sarma

Source · Stay Standing (Lochhead on stillness): free PDF uploaded by the author on Academia.edu (free sign-in may be needed)

Details · Steve Paxton lecture, 62 min, Contredanse

On Contredanse's own Vimeo: vimeo.com/403600420.

Details · Steve Paxton, filmed by Walter Verdin, early 1990s

Paxton improvising to Glenn Gould, published free on the filmmaker's own YouTube channel: Variations 1–15 · Paxton's own introduction. Variations 16–30 (same channel) is currently blocked on YouTube by a music-rights claim on the Gould recording; checked September 2026.

Details · Videoda, 1987; excerpts via Martin Keogh

The official free excerpts live on Martin Keogh's YouTube: watch the excerpts. The full 22-minute film is in the Videoda archive below.

Details · the six founding films, 1972–1983

Magnesium (1972), Soft Pallet, Peripheral Vision, Chute, Contact at 10th & 2nd, and the full Fall After Newton, the complete founding film record, distributed by Contact Quarterly: rent for $8 per film (48h), $25 for three years, $50 to own.

Where all of this began, for the price of a coffee.

Details · Paxton's own technique, as an interactive web app

Four-plus hours of exercises, lectures and performance documents, Paxton teaching his own system, adapted from the 2008 DVD-ROM: materialforthespine.com, €25 once, via Contredanse.

Details · documentary on Kirstie Simson, 75 min, dir. Katrina McPherson

Source · rent or buy on Vimeo On Demand (from $9)

Details · Steve Paxton solo, 1991

Paxton improvising solo to Bach in 1991, the same body of work as the Goldberg Variations, caught live in a hall instead of a studio. Third-party upload, so the link may not live forever.

Source · watch on YouTube (unofficial upload)

Details · Paxton dancing with a blind partner

Paxton in a contact duet with Gerry Overington, who is completely blind: the form's claim that dancers orient by weight and touch rather than the eye, shown instead of argued. Third-party upload, so the link may not live forever; the idea it documents pairs with the accessibility shelf.

Source · watch on YouTube (unofficial upload)

Details · 2004–2025

Source · free video archive on the Contactfestival Freiburg site

Details · A film by Sara Pozzoli and Germana Siciliani, shot at Casina Settarte, Italy; published on YouTube April 2013 (24 min)

The filmmakers describe it as a portrait of Nancy Stark Smith and of Contact Improvisation as a form. Most of the films on this shelf centre Paxton; this one centres her.

Show it to a student who has only seen Paxton.

Source · free on YouTube

Details · Nancy Stark Smith, interviewed by Marlon Barrios Solano, London, July 10, 2012; embodied techne series on dance-tech.tv (46 min video)

Stark Smith defines the Underscore as a framework for research in improvisation, then walks through its phases one by one and talks about the Global Underscore. It is the spoken companion to the Underscore page on Shelf 5: same structure, in her voice, with time to go into detail.

Watch before you hold your first long jam.

Source · free on YouTube (Marlon Barrios Solano)

Details · Cynthia J. Novack, 1990, University of Wisconsin Press

Also in Italian (Dino Audino, 2018) and Japanese (Film Art-sha, 2000).

Where · UW Press · Contact Editions · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · Cheryl Pallant, 2006, McFarland

Where · McFarland · Amazon · borrowable at archive.org

Details · David Koteen & Nancy Stark Smith, 2008, Contact Editions

The most-cited CI book of the last twenty years.

Where · Contact Editions

Details · Thomas Kaltenbrunner, English ed. 1998/2004, Meyer & Meyer

Out of print in English; used copies are common. German original 1998.

Where · Amazon (used) · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · Martin Keogh, 2018, Intimately Rooted Books

Where · martinkeogh.com · Contact Editions

Details · Martin Keogh, 2000s, self-published

Where · via the author

Details · Keith Hennessy, 2018, Circo Zero

Where · Contact Editions · circozero.org

Details · Annie Brook, 2000

Where · Contact Editions

Details · ed. Ann Cooper Albright et al., 2010, Oberlin College

Where · Contact Editions

Details · eds. Stark Smith & Nelson, Contact Editions

Where · Contact Editions

Details · eds. Stark Smith & Nelson, Contact Editions

Where · Contact Editions

Details · eds. Stark Smith & Nelson, Contact Editions

Where · Contact Editions

Details · ed. Malaika Sarco-Thomas, 2020, Cambridge Scholars

Where · publisher · Amazon

Details · Steve Paxton, 2018, Contredanse

Also as audiobook, collector vinyl, and in French (La gravité). His book Drafting Interior Techniques lives on the Paxton shelf above.

Where · Contredanse

Details · Melinda Buckwalter, 2010, University of Wisconsin Press

Where · UW Press · Contact Editions

Details · Danielle Goldman, 2010, University of Michigan Press

Where · free to borrow at archive.org · Fulcrum (institutional login) · University of Michigan Press

Details · eds. Albright & Gere, 2003, Wesleyan

Where · Wesleyan · Contact Editions

Details · Ann Cooper Albright, 1997, Wesleyan

Where · Wesleyan

Details · Ann Cooper Albright, 2013, Wesleyan

Where · Wesleyan

Details · Ann Cooper Albright, 2018, Oxford

Where · Oxford UP

Details · Kent De Spain, 2014, Oxford

Where · Oxford UP · Contact Editions

Details · Sally Banes, 1980/1987, Wesleyan

Where · Wesleyan

Details · ed. Vida L. Midgelow, 2019, Oxford

A library copy is the sane route.

Where · Oxford UP

Details · Tufnell & Crickmay, 1990, reissued by Dance Books

Where · free to borrow at archive.org · used copies (the Dance Books site is gone)

Details · eds. Hunter, Krimmer, Lichtenfels, 2016, Lexington

As of 2026 she has no monograph of her own; this is where her book-length thinking lives.

Where · Rowman

Details · Simone Forti, 1974

Out of print; used copies.

Where · used via AbeBooks · Contact Editions

Details · eds. Bigé, Godfroy, Falcone, Sini, 2022, Les presses du réel

Where · publisher · Amazon.fr

Details · Emma Bigé, 2023, La Découverte

Where · La Découverte

Details · ed. Agnès Benoit, 1997, Contredanse

Where · Contredanse · Contact Editions

Details · ed. Patricia Kuypers, 1999, Contredanse

Out of print; archive hunt.

Where · Contredanse archive

Details · Claire Vionnet, 2022

Where · via booksellers

Source · free open-access book PDF from Georg Éditeur (print copies sold at georg.ch/l-ombre-du-geste)

Details · Thomas Kaltenbrunner, 1998, Meyer & Meyer

Where · Amazon.de

Details · Heike Pourian, 2016, contact bewegen e.V.

Free preview on the author's site.

Where · direct from the author

Details · Novack, eds. Falcone & Veroli, 2018, Dino Audino

Where · Dino Audino

Details · Marina Tampini, 2009/2012, IUNA Buenos Aires

Where · via IUNA/UNA Buenos Aires or the author

Details · Hugo Leonardo da Silva, 2014, Selo A Editora

Where · Google Books ebook · Brazilian CI network

Details · Novack, trans. Tachiki & Kikuchi, 2000, Film Art-sha

Out of print, used copies common.

Where · Amazon.co.jp

Details · empty as of 2026

Community translations circulate online. The gap is itself a finding, and an invitation.

Where · know one? use the suggestion box below

Details · John Cage, 1961, Wesleyan University Press

The text Robert Dunn carried into his Cunningham-studio composition class, the one that seeded Judson.

Where · Wesleyan University Press

Details · John Cage, 1967, Wesleyan University Press

Where · Wesleyan University Press · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · Anna Halprin, ed. Rachel Kaplan, 1995, Wesleyan University Press

Where · Wesleyan University Press

Details · Anna Halprin with Rachel Kaplan, 2019, Wesleyan University Press

Where · Wesleyan University Press

Details · Anna Halprin, 2000, LifeRhythm

Where · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · Lawrence Halprin, 1969, George Braziller

Written with Anna Halprin. Arguably the single most direct textual ancestor of CI's own idea of a score as a container for improvisation.

Where · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · Simone Forti, 1974, reprinted 2021 by Contact Editions

A direct precursor to CI's floor-and-weight work, now published by Nancy Stark Smith's own press.

Where · HFS Books / Johns Hopkins University Press

Details · Yvonne Rainer, 1974, Press of NSCAD / NYU Press

Tracks her shift from dance-object minimalism toward the anti-spectacle position. Out of stock at the reprint house; used copies via AbeBooks.

Where · Primary Information

Details · Yvonne Rainer, 2006, MIT Press

Thirteen refusals, "no to spectacle, no to virtuosity", the sharpest single statement of Judson's rejection of theatrical dance conventions.

Where · free to borrow at archive.org

Details · ed. Hendel Teicher, 2002, MIT Press / Addison Gallery

Alongside contributions from Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. Out of print; used copies via AbeBooks.

Where · used copies via AbeBooks

Source · used copies on AbeBooks (from about $26)

Details · Deborah Hay, 1994, Duke University Press

A direct precedent for CI's own democratized-body ethos and for jam culture generally.

Where · Duke University Press

Details · Deborah Hay, 2000, Wesleyan University Press

Close in spirit to CI's own somatic listening practice.

Where · Wesleyan University Press

Details · Deborah Hay, 2016, Routledge; Wesleyan ed. 2019

Hay's mature articulation of choreography-as-instruction-set, a close cousin of CI's own scored structures.

Where · Routledge

Details · Merce Cunningham, 1968, reissued 2019 by The Song Cave

Steve Paxton danced in Cunningham's company 1961–64, overlapping with his Judson work, putting Cage's chance methods directly inside CI's founder's own training.

Where · Artbook / D.A.P.

Details · Robert Ellis Dunn, 1980 journal excerpt, via Movement Research

Dunn never published a book. His 1960–62 classes at the Cunningham studio are the direct seedbed of Judson, and so of Contact Improvisation itself.

Where · free at Movement Research

Details · Sally Banes, 1980, Wesleyan ed. 1987

The standard first history to hand a CI student who wants the scene's before-and-after context.

Where · Wesleyan University Press

Details · Sally Banes, 1983, Duke ed. 1993

Documents how Robert Dunn's class, held at the Cunningham studio, became the actual seedbed of the collective.

Where · Duke University Press

Details · Derek Bailey, 1980, revised 1992, Da Capo Press

Not connected to CI by personnel, but the reference point any CI teacher reaching for a parallel discipline's theory of improvisation itself will land on.

Where · Da Capo Press · earlier edition free to borrow at archive.org