Our Instructors
Our Instructors
Delia Brett
Anne Cooper
Olivia Schaffer
Manuel Rochette
Selena La Brooy
Helen Walkley
Marie Osterman
Joni Cooke
Stuart Phillips
Andrew Harwood
Farley Johansson
Jennifer McLeish-Lewis
Michael Bean
Nayana Fielkov
Francesca Frewer
Kat Single-Dain
Delia Brett Anne Cooper Olivia Schaffer Manuel Rochette Selena La Brooy Helen Walkley Marie Osterman Joni Cooke Stuart Phillips Andrew Harwood Farley Johansson Jennifer McLeish-Lewis Michael Bean Nayana Fielkov Francesca Frewer Kat Single-Dain
Olivia Shaffer (she/her)
Photo: Hilary Maxwell
Olivia Shaffer is a professional dance artist based in Vancouver, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded Coast Salish lands and waters of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people.
Olivia is the Associate Artistic Director of the EDAM Dance Company, where she has practiced Contact Improvisation with pioneering teacher Peter Bingham since 2011 and performed with his company since 2014. In addition to teaching dance and CI, Olivia is a certified Feldenkrais® Method practitioner. She teaches regularly at EDAM and in the Department of Theatre & Film at the University of BC. She has taught internationally at Freiburg Contact Festival, CI@50, SFDI, and the University of the Philippines.// oliviashaffer.ca
Selena La Brooy (she/her)
Selena discovered Contact Improvisation in 2014 and has been fascinated with it ever since. She has studied and played with various yoga lineages, developmental movement patterning, BMC, Feldenkrais, breathwork, vipassana, clowning, the Axis Syllabus and circus arts which colour the lens of her inquiry of the form. She is an anatomy nerd, certified rolfer and somatic movement integration practionner which inform her approach to teaching. Some of her most influential teachers have been Martin Keogh, Kira Kirsch, Frey Faust, Andrew Harwood, Anjelika Doniy, Karl Frost, Alicia Grayson, Nita Little, Ida Rolf and Monica Caspari. She is most passionate about ways to make contact improvisation playful and accessible to all bodies by empowering choice, inviting deep listening and inspiring perpetual curiosity into what else is possible. She is a core member of the Salt Spring Island Contact Improvisation community, Salt Spring Island Contact Improvisation Festival (www.contactimprovisationsaltspring.com) and the founder of Rhizome Springs (www.rhizomesprings.com), a community project hosting multi-day Contact Improvisation festivals and intensives on the unceded terrtories of the Hul’Q’Umi’Num and Sencoten speaking people where she is grateful to work, live, teach and play.
Helen Walkley (she/her)
Helen Walkley is a contemporary dance artist, certified Laban Movement Analyst and somatic movement educator who has taught, created and performed for over 40 years in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. She completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in 1996 and has since been based in Vancouver. Most recently Helen was the recipient of The Dance Centre’s Isadora Award which recognizes an artist’s outstanding contribution to dance in British Columbia and in 2022 she received the Lola Award.
Manuel Rochette (he/him)
Manuel Rochette is a dancer, facilitator, and host of Salt Spring Island Contact Improvisation Festival in Canada. With 2 decades of experience with the form of Contact Improvisation, his personal studies got him closer to teachers such as Martin Keogh, Angelika Doniy, Alicia Grayson, Ray Chung, Scott Wells, Vega Luukkonen, Kira Kirsch, Paul Singh, Andrew Harwood and more. His facilitation approach is at the nexus point where skills, states, play and spontaneous composition merge. His dancing style aims at creating ever-changing pathways, opening to novelty, modulating patterns, and the use of momentum and release to ease into authentic movements.
Curiosities of the moment: Deep focus on connection, accessing poly-centricity, how to increase availability & generosity with the body, opening the backspace, falling together, and continuity of attention and movement. He has explored and facilitated CI on many continents and communities, harvesting gems from them all. Manuel is an avid jammer while he continues to deepen the practice in classes and workshops. Manuel is also a DJ and a gardener from which he sources inspirations and metaphors.
Delia Brett (she/they)
Delia is an established Vancouver performing artist, teacher and choreographer. She took her 1st CI class from master teacher Peter Bingham when she was 14yrs old and began training, almost daily, in CI when she was 18 yrs old, 33 years ago (Eek!). Delia teaches people of diverse, ages, abilities and genders locally And has toured as a CI teacher and dancer to Austria, France, Greece, Finland and across Canada and in the US. Locally, Delia has been a contributing teacher to Dance and theatre programs: Modus Operandi, The BPA, SFU, Studio 58 and of course, last but not least…EDAM Dance (Canada’s premier contact company) in which she was a primary contributing dancer with for 24 years! Pre-covid, Delia and her company partner Daelik, offered regular CI classes and workshops at their studio, Left of Main as well.
Delia’s perspective as a CI teacher, facilitator and dance artist has been informed by numerous practices, including her extensive background in acting, theatre, martial arts, voice, breath, Yoga and Myofascial structure and function. But one of the single most enlightening of all her experiences as a teacher/ facilitator, was the 8 years her company, MACHiNENOiSY dedicated to working with LGBTQ2+ youth (ages 13-25) producing 11 different shows called, PROX:IMITY RE:MIX, during which they trained the youth in the skills of CI. Because it was through these years that Delia began to understand how this dance/awareness practice we call, Contact Improvisation can be used not just to create wickedly awesome dances, but also to develop complex inter-relational capacities such as confidence, deep listening, somatic and intuitive knowing, as well as collaborative and divergent thinking.
Delia is also a Hatha yoga teacher with 20 years experience, has an extensive knowledge of myofascial anatomy and bio-mechanics and post covid has transitioned from running a dance company to running her own business in transformational coaching and wellness for artists, activist and creative beings.
https://www.deliamoves.com/about-delia
Joni Cooke (she/they)
Joni encountered Peter Bingham and fell in love with Contact Improvisation in 1995 in the BFA dance program at SFU. She avidly delves into the myriad ways CI teaches us about the relational field, using the study of weight and the point of contact as a way to examine independence, co-dependence and interdependence. Despite being "neurospicy" she has been a serious student of Zen since 1992, and primarily examines the way we work with focus and presence, story and impulse, both the witnessing mind and the full absorption that we can directly experience when we're flying or in flow. Just like with meditation, contact is an excellent way to deeply examine how we generate story, how we let stories proliferate, how we can relinquish them in an instant and find silence and simple sensation. The adaptability and embodied play afforded on the dance floor can teach us skills to bring into our daily life. Joni is a yoga teacher at Green Room Yoga and teaches a class called "Yoga for the Nervous System" which develops the Jedi ;) awareness to regulate "fight or flight responses" and is working on the same material for CI. Contact has informed her yoga teaching, her shiatsu practice (RST) , and her somatic embodiment coaching (SEAC). She is a nerd about embodied philosophy, healing arts and uncovering radical presence. It is said she brings her joy and vitality to her teaching. Currently she is studying Somatic Embodiment through the Somatic Embodiment Association (SEA. Damien Kai Norman and Dr. Sam) and is dying to fold her somatic work into the field of Contact Improvisation.
Anne Cooper
Anne is a dancer/performer, improviser, choreographer & teacher based in Vancouver, BC. She has taught Contact Improvisation since 2001 at EDAM, WOW, Leviathan & in the NWT and has studied CI with many teachers including Peter Bingham as well as Nancy Stark Smith, one of CI's originators & the deviser of the Underscore. Anne has performed with Nancy Stark Smith & other improvisers in Nancy's 'Glimpse' projects. She's recently returned from 'Glimpse 4' in Salt Lake City, USA, researching & offering the Underscore as both Community Underscore & 'Performance Installations'. Anne has danced for a number of choreographers for over 20 years, and also creates her own hybrid dance/voice works. Upcoming she performs in EDAM's Spring Choreographic Series. She's happy to give the Underscore 'Talk-through' & do the Practice with people at the Vancouver CI Festival! Monica Strekle and Anne Cooper. Photo by Chris Randle
Stuart Phillips
Stuart Phillips dances CI as a healing process for over 40 years, teaching, performing & researching said form worldwide
Marie Osterman (They/She)
Marie Osterman is a multidisciplinary artist working to unearth community and curiosity through theatre, devised performance, improvisation, and movement. Their work centers around generosity, queer embodiment, and politics of the body. Marie’s generative art combines her classically-trained background in theatremaking and her contact improvisation practice with the mission of facilitating intimate and playful creative spaces. Marie is a facilitator, teacher and passionate member of the Contact Improvisation community, as well as a professional performer and social theatre teaching artist based in LA. They have studied CI and movement composition in UCLA, Tbilisi, Germany, and San Diego, going on to teach Contact to both professional dancers and students between ages 5-19. Marie has trained in CI with Konstantinos Mihos, Dorte Jensen, Anya Cloud, Mayfield Brooks, and Ezra LeBank. They also most recently completed the "Composing Emergence" mentorship with Nita Little. Their own teaching in Contact Improv focuses on accessibility, community-building, emergent strategy, and chaos. They are a longtime collaborator and associate managing director of Project Nongenue, a queer theatre company focused on centralizing the voices of women and marginalized identities within classical theater and mythology, and a teaching artist for Unusual Suspects and 24th STreeT Theatre. Other passions include birds, pleasure activism, and pointing out the moon.
Andrew Harwood (he/him)
Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood is renowned as a leading light in the field of dance improvisation. He is an internationally recognized pioneer of contact improvisation (CI) and a master teacher/performer in both real-time composition and CI. He has dedicated himself to the research, development, education, collaboration and dissemination of these rigorous artistic practices as sophisticated performing arts for the past 50 years. He first studied and then performed with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and Nita Little, the instigators of Contact Improvisation. He has also danced for the companies of Marie Chouinard, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Jo Lechay, Joint Forces and Fulcrum, as well as the improvisational dance collectives Discovery Bal, The Echo Case and The Improvisational Movement Fund. His journey has continued to evolve through the development of consciousness, various investigations of perceptual awareness, an in-depth interest in design/composition as well as an abundance of collaborative performances around the globe with the likes of Peter Bingham, Chris Aiken, Ray Chung, Daniel Lepkoff, Kirstie Simpson, Alito Alessi, Karen Nelson, K.J. Holmes, Lisa Nelson, Julyen Hamilton, Benno Voorham and Benoit Lachambre, to name a few. KAT SINGLE-DAIN is an award-winning filmmaker and critically acclaimed director/choreographer specializing in the intersection of contact improvisation, vintage swing dance and physical theater. Graduating with honors from the University of California Berkeley in 2006, she co-founded the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret in 2007 and has been its Artistic Director from 2013 to present. Kat Single-Dain has choreographed eight full-length, original theatre productions, choreographs and performs with festival darlings The Myrtle Family Band and Gloria's Happy Hour and is the artistic director of The Parade of Lost Souls and The Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret, named one of “Vancouver’s best kept secrets” by the CBC. She is the creator/director/choreographer of the critically acclaimed and Jesse nominated Hard Times Hit Parade and Scarlet Queen of Mercy, two immersive theatrical extravaganzas that are in post-production as feature films. Kat is dedicated to skills development and creation through improvised play, the side effect of which is often personal growth and deeper relationships. She teaches across BC, US and Europe, and in Vancouver hosts regular dance classes and improvisation jams. What makes Kat particularly unusual is her use of clown exercises for dancers, dance exercises for clowns, and for using the philosophy underlying both as a way of life.
Francesca Frewer is a contemporary dance artist who has been studying Contact Improvisation for 12 years. Her teaching is heavily influenced by training and dancing with Peter Bingham and the EDAM company, and her classes also draw on principles of the Feldenkrais Method, a somatic movement practice she teaches and of which she is an ongoing student. With a particular interest in efficiency, precision, and refined awareness, Francesca offers technical skill-building towards the end goal of finding ever more options within the moment to moment choice-making that is improvisation.
Francesca creates and performs in her own work, frequently in collaboration with Erika Mitsuhashi. She has also worked with Company 605, Emmalena Fredriksson, Company Saint Genet, Future Leisure, and Evann Siebens, among others. She is a co-producer and organizer of the interdisciplinary art series Here For Now, and the DIY performance space Boombox.
Farley Johansson (he/him)
Farley Johansson began Ballet lessons at age 3, he furthered his dance education at the New Zealand School of Dance where he was first introduced to Contemporary Dance technique. He has performed, taught and choreographed in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, France, Germany, Malta, New Zealand, Serbia and Venezuela. He has been in works that range from Classical and Contemporary ballets, to operas, musicals, TV & film, music videos. The most satisfying work he was able to do was with the Contact Improvisation based company EDAM Dance, based in Vancouver, BC, under the direction of Peter Bingham, a pioneer in Contact Dance in Canada, who is a great friend and mentor.
Jennifer McLeish-Lewis
Jennifer is a professional contemporary dancer, choreographer, teacher, bodyworker, and newly graduated therapeutic counsellor. Jennifer has been a student of EDAM and master teacher Peter Bingham since 2002. For over twenty years she has had an ongoing (daily or weekly) practice in Contact Improvisation which informs her contemporary dance choreography. Some of her most noted teachers include Peter Bingham, Andrew Harwood, Ray Chung, Chris Aiken, Karl Frost, Allan & Karen Kaeja, Delia Brett and Daelik. She continues to work with Delia Brett as a choreographic dramaturge and mentor. Her unwavering commitment to Contact has led her to teach classes and workshops along the west coast, across Canada, and in Mexico. Her latest creation, LiKEWiSE, a duet for two female dancers, will premiere in late 2025.
Nayana Fielkov
Nayana has performed at recognized festivals and venues across the nation with her genre-bending approach to theatre. She is co creator of multi-award winning RAGMOP Theatre, Habitats, Underbelly and The Myrtle Sisters. She brings together the mediums of clown, dance, mask, and physical comedy. Along with her touring duo, tiro, and solo shows, she creates ensemble work, roving acts, hosting characters, and variety acts. She is a founding member of The Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret and an active member of The New Old Time Chautauqua. She teaches contact dance and clown internationally, and has facilitated youth in theatre creation for many events including The International Children's Festival. Nayana is also a maker of puppets, clothing, costumes, and is a proud mother of a fourteen year old boy.