Nita Little is the one of the last practicing members of the founding cohort of Contact Improvisation. Her research and teaching goes beyond CI to somatics, compositional improvisation, emergence, relational intelligence, performance studies, and more. I have studied with her as much as I can since first encountering her work in 2020 as her work has improved my work as a dancer and a person. I brought her to Philly a few years ago to lead a CI focused workshop that was amazing.

Now, I want to bring her to Philadelphia (Philly) to lead her Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC) workshop to start this active research in Philly. This weekend-long training workshop in the Somatic Research methodology of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication. The workshop format will involve theoretical and practical work, including training that involves listening, moving, reading, and practicing research interview techniques with one another.

If this campaign is funded, Nita will lead ISSC Friday- Sunday, June 12-14, 2026 10am-6pm (with a 1.5 hour lunch break) at the beautiful Cardell Dance Studio, located at 1713 Melon St. in the centrally located Fairmount neighborhood. 

Since I am self producing this workshop without organizational or grant support, I need at least 14 people to commit and pay their tuition in advance (by May 7), so we have the funds to bring Nita to Philly to lead this amazing work. This is an all or nothing campaign, meaning that if we don't meet our goal of $3500 by 5/7/26, you will get your tuition refunded.

Not only does your early commitment ensure that this workshop will happen, but you can also think of it as an early bird discount! After May 7, a few more slots will open up for this incredible opportunity, but at a higher price.

More about ISSC:

Somatic Research Training Workshop for Ensemble Practice
This Training Workshop in Somatic Research provides specific research skills for participants intending to
study the physicality of Somatic Communication through Improvisational Solo, Duet, and Ensemble
Practices by means of methodologies established by Nita Little* for the Institute for the Study of Somatic
Communication (ISSC).

The ISSC offers embodied practices of Relational Intelligence and other transferable skills of Somatic
Communication to further the work of dancers, affiliate researchers, and anyone whose ultimate goals are
to enhance the lives of any and all peoples. This Training Workshop is meant for dancers to extend their
research beyond choreographic choice-making to find that Somatic Communication offers emergent
relations of immediate coordination, synchronicity, and play. Outcomes will include a deeper
understanding of the potentials for Co-Creative Practices where new knowledge and data might emerge,
as well as access to establishing CoLab research groups under the resource umbrella of the ISSC.

Learning research skills requires studies of language, theoretical concepts, and the conceptual grounding
that influence embodied states: their application and analysis within movement events. While movement
will be a part of this workshop it is not the sole concern. In other words, this is not a dance movement
workshop lead by Nita Little. This is a training to develop particular capacities and skills for artist-based
inquiry and research into what dancers do when they engage in acts of communication.

The workshop format will involve theoretical and practical work, including training that involves listening,
moving, reading, and practicing research interview techniques with one another. We will investigate the
language of embodied states that support somatic communication within contact improvisation and
ensemble practices, offering dancers a shared language base from which to anchor their research inquiry.

Movement practices 35%, Training and Discussion 45% Specific skill building 20%

Learning Outcomes will include:
+ a deeper understanding of the potentials for Co-Creative Practices where new knowledge and data
might emerge.
+ shared language from which to begin research inquiry.
+ research practices and tools that are specific to dancing, improvising, and inquiry.
+ materials that outline our work together.
+ access to establishing CoLab research groups under the resource umbrella of the ISSC.
+ access to a worldwide network of dancer/researchers collectively investigating new ways that dancers
bring dance values and potentials into the broader world.
+ access to establishing CoLab research groups under the resource umbrella of the ISSC.

More about teacher/leader/facilitator, Nita Little:

Nita Little investigates embodied attention within improvisational and technical movement practices with a concentration on the technicities of both creative and relational practices. Through ensemble dance improvisation practice and performance she works toward a future that recognizes our environmental entanglements and values many forms of embodied communication, recognizing that the quality of an embodied state determines the potentials of its relational capacities. A dance researcher, theorist/artist, and one of the founding developers of Contact Improvisation (CI) she teaches around the globe, guiding one of its forward leading edges. She began over 50 years ago, working alongside her teacher at Bennington College, Steve Paxton, on materials that became CI (1972) and was a participant in the earliest performances and teaching that helped it to become significant within dance and dance communities. Within CI’s first year she developed a curiosity about the relationship of the (physical) mind and relational events. Now, she investigates ecological actions of embodied attention, particularly with respect to somatic communication between humans and beyond.

Nita received her PhD in Performance Studies with a focus on the articulation of presence and creative actions of attention (2014). Her life work is inclusive of mindbody training, performing, choreographing, researching and writing about the ethics, politics and entanglement of somatic relations. With a world-wide audience for her teaching, dance making, and lecturing, she is an activist for relational intelligence and an advocate for dancers as embodied researchers, marking and exposing a field of human relational potentials. She is executive director of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC, 2016), a network of laboratories populated by dancer researchers and associate research experts from diverse fields. She lives near Seattle, in the USA. Currently she tours throughout the year and may be found on 6 continents. You can learn more about her and sign up for her monthly newsletter at: www.nitalitte.com

Accessibility notes:

Venue is up a flight of stairs and is mask optional.

Participants do not need to be dancers, but workshop participants will benefit from some prior somatic experience.

While much of Nita Little's work is connected to Contact Improvisation, this workshop does not require weight bearing or even touch.