wcciJAM
2025 Theme
LONGEVITY OF PRACTICE
This year, wcciJAM is centering long term commitments to practice. We are hosting many teachers and pracitioners who have a lot of time under their belts dancing CI. We wonder:
What does longevity of practice do?
What kinds of habits does this practice build?
What kinds of bodies, what kinds of attention?
How are bodies, minds, and spirits shaped by weight and touch practices?
Nancy Stark Smith called CI an open frame. The center is an unknown, but the container can be felt: on the outside things keeps forming, growing, reframing. How does framing our dance as a long arc change our perspective and patterns? Can we replace ambition with curiosity over time?
How do we hold the space for not knowing and inquiry, year after year, decade after decade? Over the past 50+ years, how has CI as a practice changed? What has remained the same?
Jam Guidelines
Please read the Jam Guidelines.
By jamming with us, you are agreeing to abide by these.
Following years of discussion in CI circles regarding the frequent failure of jam culture to create safer/braver spaces for women, people of the global majority, and LGBTQIA+ folks, we continue to reflect and learn, engage each other and our teachers, and welcome caring and generative disruptions of business as usual.
We are grateful for the community that challenges us to do better.
We are also curious about what makes CI possible as a practice.
How is CI sustained?
What allows the practice to happen at all?
What makes it accessible? —sustainable?
What are our resources for resilience? — Our guiding priciples and values?
We look forward to touching brief moments of the long arc of each participant's practice.
A note on care, politics, boundaries:
The West Coast Contact Improvisation JAM makes space for a community of practice dedicated to the meeting of moving bodies navigating gravity in the present moment. This requires dedication to sensing into moments of unknown, practicing being uncomfortable, and negotiating difference.
This year’s festival takes place in the midst of multiple global emergencies: the rise of totalitarian right wing governments, especially here in the U.S., a deepening climate crisis, and worsening violence and injustice in many places across the world. The festival offers a number of special events that make space for underrepresented identities and/or sensitive sociopolitical issues. We ask that as you explore and exchange about structural injustice, political crises, and oppression, you remember the sensitivity and openness with which we know how to listen to each other while dancing.
Just as we do at the jams, we also invite you to hold your personal boundaries with care during conversations. Holding a boundary is not being unkind or rude, it is a way to structure safe exchange. If you feel you need help with this at any point during the festival, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. That said, please note that attending this festival requires some self-resourcing: we do not have trained therapists or conflict mediators on staff. As festival organizers, we will not tolerate violence, harassment, racism, hatefulness, homophobia, transphobia, or misogyny. We firmly reserve the right to deny anyone participation should any of these arise during the festival, or should conflicts escalate beyond our capacity to find solutions that work for all parties. Please read the guidelines to better understand our expectations.
The festival holds a diverse group of individual humans, each with our own beliefs, motivations, and opinions. As organizers, we believe caring disagreement, frank reflection, and clear, kind boundary setting are good for our community’s development. We invite everyone to engage each other with honesty, inclusivity, and curiosity.
No matter what, we are all in one big dance together.