Axolotl Participatory Performance

July 12-26 The 2 week San Francisco Contact Intensive

August 8 to 10 The Dancing Wilderness Project

August 19 to 24 Body Research Contact Festival at Sierra Hot Springs, CA

August 25 to Sep 1 Contact Camp at Burning Man
Dancing Wilderness Labs


The Dancing Wilderness Project was started in 1997 by Karl Frost as an exploration of the interrelationships amongst wilderness experience, body-based creative process, and how we choose to live our lives.  With open mind and senses, we look for an immediate experience of nature – experience unmediated by ideas or preconceived limits.


The Dancing Wilderness Labs are organized as a mixture of wilderness backpacking trip and dance workshop/laboratory exploring:
    · Nature as source of metaphor and inspiration for movement and image
    · Quiet experience of nature as food for the soul
    · Finding a different sense of space, time, and relationship away from civilization
    · Dance not simply about the environment, but with it
    · Extrapolating our knowledge and practice of dance and creative process in the studio to new environments: forest and mountain top as the stage and earth, pine needles, and rock as the floor.

The trips are experiential explorations meant to feed our ongoing creative process and to expand appreciation of our place in the larger natural world -- an organic flow of structured and open time, hiking and dancing, group time and space for quietly receptive experience. In the calm opening of the senses that prolonged time in the wilderness brings, we find a more direct connection with our body and surroundings. Principles and structures from Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, and other interdisciplinary awareness and creative practices serve to give us a base from which we explore in the spirit of open laboratory, both as a group and as individuals.

In each trip, we hike in, bringing everything that we need for the time with us.  We pack in our food and share such collective tasks as food preparation and clean-up and camp set-up/breakdown. We practice low impact camping, paying attention to our physical relationship to the world around us.

The creative work is rooted in a felt experience of the body and the senses. Karl brings his experience in improvisational dance, physical theater, and wilderness backpacking to the project -- his facilitation acts as a springboard for group and personal explorations of the interface of creative/poetic experience with wilderness.  We begin with connecting in to our bodies, environment, and each other, establishing some common languages for exploration. Contact Improvisation deepens our physical awareness of our own and others’ bodies. As sensation directs and informs our movements more with a partner, we also take this as a metaphor and physical technique for interacting with the environment. The simple scores of Authentic Movement offer another route into deepening connection to the sensual world, helping us stay present with our own interests, investigation, and process. We follow our curiosities into solo and ensemble improvisation/composition, sensory exploration, writing, voice/body work, or wherever our individual or collective muses take us.  We see the poetic act is a fluid balance of receptivity and creativity, combined with a sense of curiosity and emotional investment. We look for the poetic in our relationship to nature, our selves, and each other.

 Part of the working time, Karl offers material to get explorations moving. In the rest, we decide together how much structure and open time we want, how much group and solo time, how much formal workshop, how much open lab. All are encouraged to find their own personal voices and individual styles of integrating with group. 


The general format is to hike in to a base camp, from which we explore in day trips over the course of the project.  In this way, we don’t have to spend a lot of our time breaking down and setting up camp and can concentrate on the dancing.  Hiking to base camp will be moderately strenuous, and from there as strenuous or easy as you want to make it for day trips.  This project is organized in the spirit of laboratory, where each brings what they have to share, some with more wilderness experience, and others with more dance experience.  All should have some hiking experience and some experience working creatively with their body.  Feel free to call or write with questions.
The next Dancing Wilderness Project is tentatively planned for summer 2007 on the S Fork Yuba River in California's Sierra Nevada mountains as part of the Yuba Life Art Project.


A related project is in the works oriented around connecting volunteer work on organic farms, living simply and sustainably, and creative work with the body.