114 works on 9 shelves · free and paid · updated September 2026
A directory I keep growing: the texts and films that shape my practice and my teaching, on nine shelves. Each entry says what the work argues and when to reach for it. Where a work has a free, legal home, the entry links to it; sources are being added shelf by shelf. Where a work is for sale, buy it.
The undertaking is deliberately big: to gather every interesting piece of work on Contact Improvisation and share it here, for the benefit of the global CI community. If something essential is missing, write to me.
One clarification on the paid entries: today I earn nothing from anything listed here. No commissions, and no association with any of the authors cited. I am sharing what I find interesting. If that ever changes, for example if book links become affiliate links, I will say so here first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Details · Hubert Godard & Emma Bigé, in the 2019 Culturgest book
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Details · Michael O'Connor, 2015
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.
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.
Details · Pini & Deans, 2021
Details · Malaika Sarco-Thomas, JDSP 2014
The question menu doubles as journal prompts.
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."
Details · Chrysa Parkinson & Emma Bigé, Contact Quarterly 2018
Details · Daniel Stern, The Drama Review 1973
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.
Details · Brynn Williams, MA thesis, UBC
Details · María Paz Brozas-Polo, "Discursos de género," 2020
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.
Details · Emma Bigé, "Sentir et se mouvoir ensemble," 2015
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.
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.
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.
Details · Emma Bigé, "Danser l'Anarchie," 2020
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.
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 PDF at Contact Quarterly
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.
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.
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.
Details · Brozas & García, "Los comienzos de la danza CI en España," 2014
Details · Sarco-Thomas & Zammit
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).
Details · Emma Bigé, "Gestes du CI," Musée de la danse 2019
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 · Archias, 2010
Details · Ramírez Tur & López del Rincón, 2023
Companion · Hennessy & Houston-Jones in conversation on dancing through the AIDS years (SFMOMA Open Space)
Details · Rufo, 2022
Details · Georgelou, 2009
Details · Papaioannou, 2024
Details · Brozas & Vicente-Pedraz, "La diversidad corporal," 2017
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 · 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 · Variations 16–30 · Paxton's own introduction.
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
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
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 · 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
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 full book on Fulcrum
Details · eds. Albright & Gere, 2003, Wesleyan
Where · Wesleyan · Contact Editions
Details · Ann Cooper Albright, 2018, Oxford
Where · Oxford UP
Details · ed. Vida L. Midgelow, 2019, Oxford
A library copy is the sane route.
Where · Oxford UP
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
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
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.
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
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
If you know a work on Contact Improvisation that belongs here, in any language, tell me and I will chase it down.
One short email a week. One minute to read and be inspired.
A taste from a recent edition:
A statement I can't stop returning to:
We treat stability like a virtue. Emma Bigé maintains: equilibrium is where the dance ends, and your partner's real job is to help you lose your vertical. Every time I stop protecting my balance, the dance gets more honest.