Posting by Jamie Antonick

I found the Contact Improvisation class with Julia Rae Antonick at Columbia College extremely beneficial and inspiring. I feel that this class has helped me to solidify my future aspirations in dance. It has guided me in finding a community that I feel a close connection to at Columbia College and within the dance world at large. Due to this course, developing my own artistry has been a natural process of enjoyment, instead of a struggle. I am fully confident that contact improvisation is and will always be a very important aspect of my dancing and I am left feeling inspired to continue my studies in this form.

I feel that contact improvisation is useful to dancers of all forms. It introduces new processes to creating movement, gives options for partnering, and creates a greater self-awareness. I am grateful that contact improvisation is a required class and that Columbia College recognizes its significance. I am, however, disappointed that contact improvisation in the classroom has to come to an end because the course was completed. This is the main form that I am interested in and would like to focus on, and I would like to pursue this practice further at Columbia College. Along with many other students, I wish that there were an opportunity to be in an advanced contact improvisation class at Columbia College. Having completed essentially an introduction to contact improvisation, many of us feel eager for the opportunity to develop further and to proceed to more advanced work and concepts.

In the last couple weeks of the semester I have recognized my own improvements, as well as the growth the class has experienced together. We are now able to have fruitful dances and jams. Whether we were exploring a new idea of touch or a different aspect of the body, working out kinks in how to fall or jump, we were leaving each contact class or practice feeling successful. The explorations were endless and the discoveries always rich. I believe that having an advanced contact improvisation course would allow for our progress in this form to flourish. I would be one of many students to sign up for an advanced contact improvisation course if Columbia College offered it. This would create a community that would be beneficial to the students and would offer the Chicago dance community a flow of Columbia graduates well-versed in this important form.