Valerie Sabbah

✨What if you could find ROOM TO FALL & SPACE TO FLY? Moment Collectives has invited Lilianna Kane as guest faculty in Montreal for a 3-day Contact Improvisation Masterclass. @liliannakane An invitation to enter the space between us — a living field we can fall into and fly out of. A space of attention, listening, and shared presence. Through subtle attunement and dynamic exploration, we will follow the movement of weight, centers, and relationship in motion. Deepening perception Expanding range Opening new pathways in the dance For movers with a foundation in Contact Improvisation ready to go further. We will dance a lot. ✨ May 22-23-24 📍 Moment Collectives @proto_studio_ Sliding scale registration : $168-$308 full 3-days $28-$51 Friday only drop-in 🧡About Lilianna — Improviser, teacher, and curator of Contact Improvisation. Her work weaves rigor and play, rest and discipline, holding improvisation as a practice of attention, patience, and inquiry. She teaches and shares her work internationally, and is currently the head chef and a CI curator at The Field Center (Vermont), where she continues to practice, research, and live the form. @_thefieldcenter → Full schedule + rates also on Linktree in bio @valeriesabbah

You do not get your Contact Improvisation practice to the deepest level by going to one jam per week. You do it by completely immersing yourself in studies for many days in a row. This is where ARCS CI Festival comes in. Moment Collectives is dedicated to supporting dedicated movement practitioners in their studies and for the third year we are proud to present the Contact Improvisation Pre-Summer Festival. This festival is not actually a festival. It is an urban immersion where you can deepen your practice on a daily basis through a wide range of educational workshops, masterclasses and community events. No matter what level you are at, there is an array of offerings for you. We are honoured to have both local and international teachers visiting to share their movement research and to support the dancers and movers in this community. EARLY BIRD full festival passes are now live!  Don’t wait, because they are only available until May 21st. Visit the Link Tree in Bio for more information about the festival or shoot us a DM and we will send it to you. We look forward to seeing you there. Get your knee pads ready!

If you’re trying to lift your partner, you’re missing the point of Contact Improvisation There’s an illusion happening in Contact Improvisation. From the outside it looks like people are lifting each other and most dancers will try to copy the positions they see by trying to muscle their partners up onto their bodies. If you do this, you can end up feeling fatigued, you lose connection with your partner and in some cases you can cause injury. The game of Contact Improvisation is in the conversation of physics between two bodies. Can you let the body rise up onto the shoulder instead of forcing the person up? Can you be in such deep listening that the body rises up naturally? Can you be in such deep relationship with your anatomy and your partner’s anatomy that you when you connect, the shapes fit so well that everything feels effortless? Knowing where your partner’s weight centres are and being really clear with how you are using them is what will get you up onto the shoulder, not grabbing and lifting your partner. Want to learn more? Sign up for classes happening now during the Montreal Contact Improvisation School. Link in bio to class schedule or send us a DM and we will send it to you.

TUNING SCORES IN NATURE A Contact Improvisation Masterclass with Valerie Sabbah On May 9th we went out into the forest on Mount Royal and shared in exploring tuning scores with a group of curious movers. We tuned our attention, our listening and our movement with the forest to expand our nervous system’s ability to work with more and more unique situations. From Valerie Sabbah on her Masterclass “ At the heart of this practice is a simple yet profound question: How does the dance arise through what we notice? Lisa Nelson describes this as the movement of attention— an “attentionography” of the body— tracking how perception shifts, selects, and organizes experience in real time. Tuning is the act of bringing one thing into relationship with another—body to space, sensation to action, self to environment. This outdoor masterclass explores Tuning Scores as a practice of synchrony— how we sense, adapt, and compose together in real time. We work with the body as a tuning instrument, listening, adjusting, responding, in relationship to each other and to the living environment of the forest. The forest becomes the score. The environment becomes the partner. “ Join us for the next masterclass with guest teacher Lilianna Kane - Link in Bio for more details. Moment Collectives helps dedicated Contact Improvisation and Movement practitioners expand their practice and gain valuable tools to improver their dance and physical body. Find out more about the classes happening right now during the Montreal Contact Improvisation School by sending us a DM. Thank you Marguerite for your authentic share at the end of the day

Can you commit to what’s actually happening and trust the process? In the Tuning Scores yesterday in Montreal, we explored how to deeply listen to the moment. How can we deeply listen to the environment, our own internal space, to the partner we are dancing with? This is a skill that takes time to develop and is readily available if we choose to open to what’s happening in the moment without judgement or agenda. Learning to trust yourself when you enter a situation of dance or otherwise is a really beautiful skill that translates into your daily life. From Valerie Sabbah on her Masterclass yesterday “ At the heart of this practice is a simple yet profound question: How does the dance arise through what we notice? Lisa Nelson describes this as the movement of attention— an “attentionography” of the body— tracking how perception shifts, selects, and organizes experience in real time. Tuning is the act of bringing one thing into relationship with another—body to space, sensation to action, self to environment. This outdoor masterclass explores Tuning Scores as a practice of synchrony— how we sense, adapt, and compose together in real time. We work with the body as a tuning instrument, listening, adjusting, responding, in relationship to each other and to the living environment of the forest. The forest becomes the score. The environment becomes the partner. “ Join us for the next masterclass with guest teacher Lilianna Kane - Link in Bio for more details. Moment Collectives helps dedicated Contact Improvisation and Movement practitioners expand their practice and gain valuable tools to improver their dance and physical body. Find out more about the classes happening right now during the Montreal Contact Improvisation School by sending us a DM.

Do you want to be flowy and perfect or do you want to do Contact Improvisation ? Doing all your practiced drills and patterns over and over again in a jam is not the same as allowing the convergence of bodies guide the movement. When you set up the moves you’re about to do, when you have an agenda with the movements you’re doing, this is not Contact Improvisation. This can be difficult to do if you don’t have the right kind of conditioning in your nervous system but if you lean in to the intelligence of your reflexes while in an adrenalized state, you discover that you don’t actually need to plan the moves for them to happen. The moves are great to practice but if you get tangled in just doing “the move” , you lose the opportunity to deeply listen and find new and creative ways to solve complex moments of bodies converging. So what to do? This is what the Montreal Contact Improvisation School aims to offer ; a complete and comprehensive guide to training your nervous system, your tissues and your movement skills so that you can dive deeply into the Contact Improvisation practice . Of course you will practice “moves” when you train with us, but you will also be given guidance and opportunities to express those moves in high velocity, unpredictable situations in jams with other dedicated dance practitioners. Link in bio for more info on the school, classes are happening now.

It’s not about “DOING THE MOVE” it’s about knowing how to play with physics More times than not, contact improvisation and dance moves are taught as steps Do this things, put this hand there, move foot here, twist here. This is a great place to start sometimes but it doesn’t lead to movement that is effortless. In contact Improvisation, if you focus on falling, looking where you’re going , bringing your limbs with you and sending your weight, you will find yourself in a completely different territory of experience. Positions that feel sticky and clunky suddenly feel open and fluid. “Moves” that feel hard to understand suddenly lose their complexity. This benefits us a lot in a jam context when so many things are happening all at once, we don’t want to be thinking about how we move, we want to be in a embodied conversation with physics, falling and gravity. You want to release all ideas of “the move” and just move. Every move is the move, not just the techniques you learned in class. Send your weight and see what happens. Want to learn more about Contact Improvisation and become a movement ninja? Check the link in bio for more information about the Montreal Contact Improvisation School, upcoming masterclasses and jams.

Precision creates more play in Contact improvisation Jamming is the space where the physical intelligence of each body reveals itself. If we want to play more when jamming, we need to become experts at our own anatomy. If we know every curve of our muscles, every bend of our joint, every inch of our skin, every length of our bone, the weight of our head, then we can play. This is where the magic happens.

🌲 TUNING SCORES IN NATURE A Contact Improvisation Masterclass with Valerie Sabbah @valeriesabbah Saturday, May 9 : 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM Step out of the studio. Step into the forest. Where the ground shifts, the wind speaks, and the dance is no longer only between bodies— but between everything. This is a day of tuning: attention · perception · relation A practice of sensing together, moving together, composing in real time with each other and with the living world. 🌀 Eyes open. Eyes closed. 🌀 Listening. Responding. Playing. 🌀 Becoming a body that adapts, pivots, and composes — 📍 Mount Royal Park Meeting point: Monument Sir George-Étienne Cartier 🕤 Arrival: 9:30–10:00 🕙 Start: 10:00 sharp 🌿 10:00–12:45 — Morning session 🥗 12:45–2:15 — Picnic lunch 🌿 2:15–5:00 — Afternoon session 💸 Sliding scale: $40-80 👉 Register: e-transfer to [email protected] 🌧 Rain or shine Bring: water, food, layers, good shoes, bandana — 👉 For more info: Linktree in bio 🌐 — Come play. Come tune. Come disappear into the dance.

🔥 THIS WEEK AT MOMENT COLLECTIVES Don’t miss these incredible offerings — jams · drop-in classes · labs · practices ✨ And especially — don’t miss the upcoming masterclasses: 🌀 Partnering with Vincent-Nicolas Provencher - May 8 @vincent.nicolas.pro 🌀 Tuning Scores with Valerie Sabbah - May 9 @valeriesabbah A chance to deepen, refine, and enter the practice in a more committed way. 🌿 Come move. Come explore. Come train. 👉 Full schedule + details : Linktree link in bio or go to : 📩 Questions: [email protected] — 🔥 CETTE SEMAINE CHEZ MOMENT COLLECTIVES Ne manquez pas ces magnifiques propositions — jams · cours en drop-in · labs · pratiques ✨ Et surtout — ne manquez pas les masterclasses à venir : 🌀 Partnering avec Vincent-Nicolas Provencher le 8 mai @vincent.nicolas.pro 🌀 Tuning Scores avec Valerie Sabbah le 9 mai @valeriesabbah Une occasion d’approfondir, de raffiner et d’entrer dans la pratique de manière engagée. 🌿 Venez bouger. Venez explorer. Venez pratiquer. 👉 Horaire complet + infos : Lien linktree en bio ou aller : 📩 Questions : [email protected]

A lot of dancers make this very simple mistake when doing Contact Improvisation. You are moving with someone else, sharing weight, going through space and as you move , an arm or leg gets stuck in a position behind you and interrupts the continuity of what is happening … You are sharing weight and reach your arms or legs into the empty space behind you only to find yourself off balance and unable to catch your fall … These are common scenarios that can be easily be avoided. Your arms and legs are landing gear and locomotive gear. If it’s behind you, it is not useful. Not only that but the shapes you can make by having your arms and legs in front of you allows you to roll on others with more ease and can protect yourself while being rolled on. Keep it simple, keep your arms and legs within eyesight and not only will your balance and stability become more dialled-in, but you will also have more movement options available while you jam. Want to learn more about Contact Improvisation and become a movement ninja? Check the link in bio for more information about the Montreal Contact Improvisation School, upcoming masterclasses and jams.

Contact Improvisation doesn’t work if you hide from yourself Beyond all the techniques, after all the drills and moves and positions we train outside of jams; There exists moments of improvisation between bodies that reveals a unique experience of physical communication. An experience where if we are TUNED and prepared for the convergence of bodies, Something happens that is the clear communication of physics. This exists because the desire to act or to control the situation has evaporated and the body’s natural intelligence takes over. This is what we are seeking in jams and in contact dances. A level of clarity between bodies unencumbered by personality, choreography or agendas. No hiding, only bodies in motion. Curious? Join us in the research with the Montreal Contact Improvisation School, Link in Bio for more information on how to join classes that are already in session. Moment collectives is dedicated to the rigourous practice of Contact Improvisation and the support of dedicated movement practitioners.