SUMMER CONTACT IMPROVISATION FESTIVAL
setGO | AUGUST 18 - 24
Announcing our annual Summer Contact Improvisation Festival featuring 6 days of intensives, classes and jams exploring and training in Contact Improvisation.
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Surviving Change Together: A Contact Improvisation Workshop with setGO
This workshop is built on composition, connection, and touch— where each of these elements takes center stage at different moments, supported by the others.
We intentionally complicate our teaching, allowing five voices to speak as one, mirroring the fluid and unpredictable nature of a jam setting. Here, everyone is responsible, everyone is accountable, everyone is awake. The process is thorny, tangled, and sometimes disorienting—but within that complexity lies the deepest satisfaction.
What to Expect
Each session unfolds through discussion, discovery, and dancing. Different members of SetGO will take turns facilitating, shifting perspectives and approaches to challenge how we learn and move together.
We build and dismantle physical architectures with our bodies, inviting a wide range of physical textures to do so: crumbling, colliding, unfurling, gazing, pausing, extending, retracting, pushing, pulling, and yielding. Through these actions, we refine our instincts in real time, training how we meet a moment, and make choices that serve both ourselves and the dance.
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Current Inquiries
Body as Landscape – Moving beyond anatomical function into terrain and topography.
Depth of Eye Contact Beyond the Eyes – Seeing with the full body, receiving from beyond sight.
Shared Engine & Re-ignition – Finding momentum together, losing it, sparking it again.
Being at the Center of the Thing – Staying inside the storm rather than watching from the edges.
Listening into Knowability – Tuning in before knowing, trusting before naming.
Choice-Making into Ride-Taking – Decision as propulsion, surrender as navigation.
Playing the Music of Time, Space, Touch, and Weight – Tuning the dance like an instrument.
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Why We Do This
Our curiosity is collective—we embolden one another to take risks, in dance and in life. Our practices are informed by the diverse communities we engage with, learning from dancers of manyall backgrounds and movement histories.
We recognize that Contact Improvisation is, at its core, political. It requires us to meet resistance with deep listening, test edges together, and trust our instincts to move through uncertainty. In a time of rapid change, these skills are more necessary than ever.
This is the work. Let’s move.
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Registration options include taking the Intensive Only, Weekend Pass only, or a FULL FESTIVAL PASS with camping options available. This event is limited to 40 participants including campers.
Arrival for the Weekend Pass is Thursday at 4pm.
SCHOLARSHIP | WORK TRADE | PAYMENT PLAN
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We offer 3 full scholarships for Black, Indigenous and People of Color [BIPOC] folks in each session. As well as 3 Work Trade spots in each session. If interested please select 'BIPOC Scholarship' ticket OR 'Work Trade' ticket when registering via the link below. For more information about the work trade exchange, please see Work Exchange.
CLICK HERE to register with a Payment Plan.
REFUND POLICY: Full refunds available up to 10 days prior to the event. Please inform us if you cannot attend an event up to 10 days prior [including Scholars and Work Traders]! Refunds within the 10 days prior to the event may be available on a case-by case basis, please reach out to communications@thefieldcenter.com
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
setGO is a collective of movers connected by a shared devotion to Contact Improvisation as both a practice and performance research. Founded in 2016 by Shura Baryshnikov, Aaron Brando, Paul Singh, Bradley Teal Ellis, and Sarah Konner, the ensemble thrives at the intersection of dance research, teaching, and embodied experimentation.
With over 60 years of combined experience, setGO’s members are leading educators and innovators in the field, teaching and performing across the U.S. and internationally. Their work is grounded in deep listening, spontaneous composition, and the ever-evolving dialogue between bodies in motion.
The setGO ensemble shares a love for whimsical, whole-hearted, virtuosic improvisation; they have been dance-making together since 2009. The group has performed at the Moving Arts Lab (Earthdance, MA), the RISD Museum Open Rehearsals, for the Institute for the Study of Environment and the Society at Brown University, Providence Fringe Festival, Lawrence University, and the Everybody Moves Festival at the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA.
In addition to directing their own companies, setGO artists have danced with other choreographers and companies including Jeanine Durning, Sara Shelton Mann, Amy Chavasse, Heidi Henderson, Chris Aiken, Faye Driscoll, Douglas Dunn, Gabriel Forestieri, and are currently on faculty, as well as artist-residents at universities across the United States. Members of the ensemble teach at acclaimed dance festivals nationally and internationally and offer regular classes in their local areas. They have unique training in somatic modalities including Laban Movement Analysis, Viewpoints Technique, Structural Integration, Safety Release Technique, Countertechnique, Yoga, Pilates, and Body-Mind Centering®.
Bradley Teal Ellis (He/Him) is a dance improviser based in New York City. He has practiced Contact Improvisation for 27 years, and frequently collaborates in process and performance with other artists. Bradley has taught as adjunct faculty at NYU’s Tisch - Experimental Theatre Wing and the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College since 2014. In addition he teaches for Movement Research, one of the world’s leading laboratories for experimental movement, and travels solo and with setGO ensemble to offer classes and workshops in Contact Improvisation.
Paul Singh holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois, USA. He has performed with a diverse range of choreographers and companies, including Gerald Casel, Risa Jaroslow, Phantom Limb Company, Stephanie Batten Bland, Douglas Dunn, Christopher Williams, Kathy Westwater, and Faye Driscoll. Notably, he was part of the inaugural cast of Punchdrunk’s American debut of Sleep No More.
Internationally, Paul has performed in Peter Sellars’ opera The Indian Queen (Madrid) and Peter Pleyer’s large-scale improvisation work Visible Undercurrent (Berlin). His choreographic works have been presented in venues across NYC and Berlin, with a highlight being the presentation of his solo piece Stutter at the Kennedy Center in 2004. Most recently, he premiered two new works for A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in 2024.
An experienced educator in contact improvisation (CI), Paul teaches intensives and workshops globally, focusing on both teacher training and beginner studies. He is currently a faculty member at The Juilliard School, where he teaches various technique classes, including CI, floor work, contemporary, and partnering. From 2021 to 2023, he served as Program Manager at Baryshnikov Arts Center.
Sarah Konner is a dance artist, improviser and somatic movement educator researching dance as a process of evolution and collective storytelling. Sarah creates dance-theater with Austin Selden and others that has been shown at performance venues, universities, and museums across the country. She has had the pleasure of working with Jeanine Durning, ChavasseDance&Performance, Sarah Shelton Mann, Jenna Reigel, Gabrielle Revlock, Shura Baryshnikov, Megan Kendzior, Alex Springer and Xan Burley, Headlong Dance Theater, and setGO Performance. Sarah is currently an Associate Professor at the Boston Conservatory. She holds an MFA in Dance from Smith College and certification in Body-Mind Centering®. www.SarahKonner.com
Shura Baryshnikov is a New England-based artist who works broadly across dance, theater, and opera. Shura co-founded the contemporary dance project Doppelgänger Dance Collective and the Contact Improvisation research and performance ensemble SetGO. Choreographic and performance credits include projects at Boston Lyric Opera, Hartford Stage Company, Trinity Repertory Company, FirstWorks, Motion State Arts, Emmanuel Music, Urbanity Dance, The Gamm Theatre, Odyssey Opera, and the Contemporary American Theater Festival, among others. Baryshnikov directed Svadba, a cinematic opera for Boston Lyric Opera, which received the award for Artistic Creation at the 2nd Annual OPERA America Awards for Digital Excellence in Opera in 2023. Baryshnikov is an Associate Professor of the Practice at Brown University in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies where she has been on faculty since 2011. Both a performer and a designer, Baryshnikov is a member of Actors' Equity Association, the American Guild of Musical Artists, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Aaron Brandes (Brando), LICSW, M.Ed, is a movement educator, psychotherapist, and bodyworker committed to fostering healing and resilience through somatic practices. With over 20 years of experience in dance, yoga, and body-based therapies, he has taught and performed internationally, sharing his passion for movement as a pathway to physical and emotional well-being.
He is honored to have shared the stage with the members of setGO, Nancy Stark Smith, Chris Aiken, and Angie Hauser among others. Since 2007, Brando has been hosting VIDAM a bi-monthly event in Northampton which explores the relationship between improvised music and dance. In 2009, Brando established CI Ground Research, an annual conference for the pedagogical and embodied research of Contact Improvisation.
Brando was a curator for CI’s 36th & 50th anniversary events and co-authored a chapter on the therapeutic applications of touch in Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50 (Oxford Press). His career in dance continues to inspire his exploration of movement as a therapeutic practice for navigating the complexities of modern life. Through his innovative work, Brando encourages others to use movement as a powerful tool for self-discovery and resilience.
For more information and links to his videos, visit: BodyandBeing.net.