As practitioners, teachers and facilitators of Contact Improvisation, we want to meet and research the place of the minor voice in our practice and community. How does CI engage disenfranchised people (racial minorities, differently abled persons, neurodiverse, queer and trans, refugees and migrants…) or does it?
Who and what comes to matter through this practice, and who doesn’t?
We feel a certain contradiction in our experience of/with/through ci. On the one hand the premise of the practice seems to invite the minor (think of the small dance, or the middle voice that leads the improvisation), the ‘come as you are’ invitation seemingly opens the practice to all bodies, minor and major. At the same time we note the overwhelming force of the major. Certain bodies are rarely present in the jams, spectacular (and ableist) aesthetics of flow and acrobatics is predominant in the studio as well as on youtube, Heteronormative habits of socialization permeate the dance floor. Though CI finds its origin in anarchist critique of neo-liberal capitalism, it is today integrated to, and embodies the market economy of demand and supply and the patriarchal star system.
We find that the CI community is overwhelmingly white and is composed primarily from persons who belong or grew up in educated, middle class households (this is, for example, the case of our community in Larret). All this despite the fact that CI has become ‘global’ over the last 25 years.
We have no ambition or intention to change or reform CI. We also recognize that the questions we ask as part of the CI community of practice trouble other communities (dance, art, academia..). We are just curious to create a space of collective research, of study, where these questions will be present. How to make a place for the minor without turning it into a major, and how to shape the major to make space for the minor.

The week will be framed by an international curating group composed of members and neighbors of the larret community and invited guests who engage with the minor in their artistic or pedagogical practices in different ways. The group will meet for a 5 days residency before the event to prepare the proposition. We expect a lot of dancing, labs, reading/writing sessions and informal sharings.

In preparation for September we have started an ongoing, open, online reading/moving group (every second Wednesday 19h-20h ECT, see below). One hour of moving to a reading of a text and then exchanging. Everyone is welcome to the practice (whether you intend to join ECITE or not).

PRACTICAL INFO
Arrival: 8 September 2024
Departure 16 September 2024
We can welcome about 40 participants. Accommodation will be available in shared rooms/dormitories as well as the camping space (or your own truck).
The price of the event includes studio space, evening classes, lodging and all the food necessary for the preparation of the meals. We will prepare the meals as a group and we will collectively take care of the life and the spaces (cleaning etc..).
Price: 350-450 euros sliding scale
\\ we ask for 50€ non-refoundable deposit \\

registration: https://forms.gle/Mr7LENAzeqaenRoM6

for deposit:
https://www.helloasso.com/…/ecite2024-the-minor-voices…

DOBST‧NOTAFLOF (Doing Our Best So That No One’s Turned Away For Lack of Funds): You may ask for gratuity or a reduced price (no justification needed) upon registration. If the functioning cost of the event is paid for, Larret will give away free and reduced-price spots. If you need financial help to get to Larret, please let us know.

LOMTSOFLOF (Leaving Our Money To SomeOne Lacking of Funds): You may give more money so as to help others to get reduced pricing.

Geography:
23 Impasse du Chalard, Larret – Saint Saud Lacoussière 24470
contact: ecite2024@gmail.com

closest airports: Bordeaux our Paris
closest train station: Thiviers

History:
Since June 2020 Larret is a place of collective life, creation and hosting where projects around dance, farming, cooking, building, thinking are developed in their ecological dimension. An eco-somatic place for those who live there and those who come, dancers, researchers, philosophers, craftsmen, the curious…

Accessibility and life on the land
The studios and collective space are 25 minutes by car from the nearest train station (a shuttle will be in place). The studios, collective dining areas, showers and dry toilets are not wheelchair accessible, and the circulation paths are a mix of dirt and pebbles. There are stairs to access the three-people bedrooms and the 10-people dormitory, but not the studios. From the studios, the river is a 15 minutes walk through the forest, with sometimes steep paths.

Larret-en-Mouvement is a collectively run space on a land that is privately owned by two self-identified cis straight white men. The land is stewarded by a (majority-white, majority-queer) collective and involves dancing, gardening, building, cooking food, and engaging in group-decision training.

Surrounding the studios is a forest, a small part of which is privately owned (not by us), and the most part of which is stewarded by the Parc naturel régional du Périgord Vert. Downhill, the river Dronne runs amid volcanic rocks and regional trees. Its stream and banks are public spaces, although there’s a large part that is seldom visited by locals or tourists.

8 May, 22 May, 5 June, 19 june, 3 July, 17 July, 31 July, 14 August, 28 August 7pm-8PM CET.

virtual meeting address:
https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/91003484409…

How does CI practice engage disenfranchised people (racial minorities, differently abled persons, neurodiverse, queer and trans, refugees and migrants…) or does it?

The purpose of this reading/movement group is not to organize or plan the next ECITE but to share a practice of tuning and conversing around the question of (how our practice makes audible or silences) minor voices in Contact Improvisation.

The structure of each meeting:
20 minutes listening/moving to a recorded text
5-10 minutes pesonal reflection and writing
30-35 minutes sharing

The recorded texts will be decided on by the group.

On the use of minor:
The notion of minor comes to us from the work of Deleuze & Guattari *(a Thousand plateaus) and Erin Manning (The Minor Gesture). It is related to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s work on the Undercommons.

The minor, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, is inherently subversive. It is about undermining the majoritarian (dominant) norms that define what is standard, normal, or acceptable. Minorities and marginal communities often find themselves in a position to embody this subversion due to their outsider status. This subversion is not just about resisting oppression but also about creating new forms of expression and existence that challenge the status quo. For Deleuze and Guattari, embracing the minor is a way for minorities and marginal communities to find power in their difference rather than seeking assimilation into the majoritarian culture. This involves a form of cultural and social creativity that turns the conditions of marginalization into opportunities for innovation and new ways of thinking.
Erin Manning writes:
« The minor is a continual variation on experience. It has a mobility not given to the major: its rhythms are not controlled by a preexisting struc- ture, but open to flux. In variation is in change, indeterminate. But indeterminacy, because of its wildness, is often seen as unrigorous, flimsy, its lack of solidity mistaken for a lack of consistency. The minor thus gets cast aside, overlooked, or forgotten in the interplay of major chords. This is the
downside of the minor, but also its strength: that it does not have the full force of a preexisting status, of a given structure, of a predetermined met- ric, to keep it alive. It is out of time, untimely, rhythmically inventing its own pulse.. The minor isn’t known in advance. It never reproduces itself in its own image… The minor invents new forms of existence, and with them, in them, we come to be. These temporary forms of life travel across the everyday, making untimely existing political structures, activating new modes of perception, inventing languages that speak in the interstices of major tongues… In its movement, the minor gesture creates sites of dissonance, staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of expression.. The minor gesture is not the figure of the marginal, though the marginal may carry a special affinity for the minor and wish to compose with it….The register of the minor gesture is always political: in its punctual reorienting of the event, the minor gesture invents new modes of life-living. »