Burlington International Contact Jam 2025

Burlington International Contact Jam

September 12th 13th and 14th

Scroll down for schedule 

🎉 Registration is Open! 🎉

Use this form to register: https://forms.gle/ZvLGMwV9oPZZUWDw8

Register by August 23rd for an early bird discount!

Read more information in our 2025 Welcome Letter:   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPsfiru2_tRhgC5W8FSTmPLM4oYG1S2RVnA_6ElW07k/edit?usp=sharing

Guest Artists:

Juliette Gomes

Juliette Gomes is a Cape Verdean and African American dancer, artist, and Earth scientist based in Montreal where they are currently obtaining a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science. Juliette is inspired by the intersection of landscapes of memory, decolonizing the body, and building generative relational practices through movement and connection to the Earth. As a Contact Improviser, their teaching comes from researching bodies in motion through the poetics of Earth systems and decay. Juliette most recently taught at the Montreal 2025 Summer Arcs Festival and hosted the Earthdance 2024 Falling Leaves Jam.

and Olive Frank 

Olive Frank lives in reverence to the gravitational pull that keeps us all on the same  Earth.  Olive studies Structural Integration, the Axis Syllabus,  Contact Improvisation and enjoys co-creating dances that helps them experience gravity in new and playful ways.  They have studied CI in numerous wonderful containers including Spiral and Root at Earthdance, Leviathan in Lasqueti and Mission Improvable in Buffalo NY.  They have been a regular attendee at most CI Jams at Earthdance for the past several years, learning from each dance that they have the opportunity to experience.  Olive is currently perusing a Doctorate in Occupational Therapy at Western New England University. 

Musicians for the Jam: Moti

Moti (Mark) Zemelman, MFA, began practicin Contact Improv 34 years ago in 1988. Over the past 26 years he has taught and performed across USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Europe and Israel. In 2008-09 he taught as Dance Professor at the Instituto Naciónal de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Moti has been both a teacher and a board member at Earthdance Retreat Center in Plainfield, MA where he also co-directed the annual Touch&Play Festival for six years.  He was an original member of Wire Monkey Dance Company (Holyoke, MA) and is a featured dancer in Sanford Lewis' documentary film about CI "An Intimate Dance." As a musician Moti plays vocal-electronic music for Contact Jams and in 2007 released his debut CD, Doorwaves.  He also designs and moderates the international Contact Improv resource website www.contactimprov.com 

and Lalaina

Lalaina was born in France into a home filled with music and adventure. He was raised by a mother who was a teacher and musician steeped in humanism. She instilled in him her love of adventure, mystery, and the transmission of knowledge, which would determine his career path: He completed a master's degree in musical improvisation with machines and then found himself teaching and performing music on the roads of France and Canada.

His artistic practice, coupled with his love of meditation and philosophy, led him to study the ancestral practices of his people of origin, consisting of deeply communal ritual ceremonies blending music and dance. These led him to learn the arts of movement, in a search for unison between body and mind. Through art and its transmission, he seeks to observe the daily application of Antoine Lavoisier's law: "nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

Facilitators for the Urban Dance Walk

Amanda is a politicized somatics educator, embodiment activist and changemaker working at the intersections of somatics, the trauma informed movement, social justice, environmental justice and cultural co-creation.   They/She is a certified Somatic Body Practitioner and is an  ISMETA certified Somatic Movement Educator, as well as a certified Level II Collab trainer and facilitator.   She/They collaboratively run  The Everything Space, a somatic education studio weaving together personal growth and dynamic social change, co-creates/facilitates curriculum on Growing Resilience through being Trauma Informed, and organizes a collective community Garden Project that reimagines community through tending the non-human Alive and growing food and medicine together.

Amanda is committed to learning and unlearning the lived and woven places of privilege and oppression, embodied and enacted in each of the sites they hold influence.  Guided by their positionality and through trauma informed/resilience oriented, anti-racist and decolonial practices, Amanda is invested in re-culturing whiteness, redistributing power, and re-centering relationship to address the past and present harms they have perpetuated.  Her work weaves together many revolutionary forms as threads of a deep listening to the self as body in service of the Great Turning.  She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Oberlin College and forever holds the big skies of Missouri (lands of the Osage, Kickapoo, Peoria and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples), the place of her birth, dear to her.

                            

 Ksanti Chohan is a counsellor, somatic experiencing® practitioner and naturotherapist based out of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Canada. They utilize mindfulness & dharmic principles with authentic relating, play, imagination, parts work, movement, and dance to create a hybrid space for collective liberation and embodiment to emerge. 

 

Facilitators for the Underscore

         Michelle         &   Moti