Our Instructors
Our Instructors
Delia Brett
Anne Cooper
Olivia Schaffer
Manuel Rochette
Selena La Brooy
Marie Osterman
Joni Cooke
Stuart Phillips
Andrew Harwood
Natalie Tin Yin Gan (顏婷妍)
Julia Goudkova
Delia Brett Anne Cooper Olivia Schaffer Manuel Rochette Selena La Brooy Marie Osterman Joni Cooke Stuart Phillips Andrew Harwood Natalie Tin Yin Gan (顏婷妍) Julia Goudkova
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 La Brooy, is also known affectionately as ‘Selena BoBeena’. Over the last 20+ years she has pursued study of various yoga lineages, Laban developmental movement patterning, BMC, Feldenkrais, the Axis Syllabus, breathwork, vipassana and circus arts which colour the lens of her inquiry of the form of Contact Improvisation.
She is an anatomy nerd, certified rolfer and somatic movement integration practitioner which inform her approach to teaching contact improvisation. 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, Hubert Godard and Monica Caspari. She is most passionate about ways to make contact improvisation accessible to all bodies by empowering choice, inviting deep listening and inspiring perpetual curiosity into what else is possible. She is currently inspired by the weightless possibilities of aquatic movement, the merging of energetic with physical awareness of Qigong and the movement patterns of Capoeira.
She is a core member of the Salt Spring Island Contact Improvisation community, Salt Spring Island Contact Improvisation Festival and the founder of Rhizome Springs, the land of living inquiry: an off-grid exploratorium hosting multi-day retreats for somatic and creative research on the unceded territories of the Hul’Q’Umi’Num and Sencoten speaking people.
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! Rick Nodine and Anne Cooper. Photo by Patrick Beelaert
Natalie Tin Yin Gan (顏婷妍)
Natalie Tin Yin Gan (顏婷妍) is an independent dance artist, writer, and facilitator based in so-called Vancouver, on the unsurrendered ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She has performed and presented work in Asia, Europe, and across Canada. Natalie is Co-Artistic Director of company Hong Kong Exile and the smaller half of vulva clown duo, Pulsive Party. Natalie is a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®, a body-centred and trauma-aware approach to the voice. Natalie has been a student of Peter Bingham since 2009. Since 2023, she has had the deepest privilege of teaching CI at EDAM, where she delights in and nerds out on cultivating beginner-friendly space for BIPOC folks to fall in love with the form. nataliegan.com
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.