In seeking to study and teach contact improvisation, one encounters challenging questions. How can one communicate to others material that requires individual creativity, effort, and exploration? How can practice reveal hidden doors to be opened rather than ingraining fixed patterns? How can we acquire learning and yet remain open and curious?
Constellations is my attempt to convey what I see as the essential physical principles of contact improvisation through a structured curriculum, and to do so in a way that encourages and empowers individual creativity. In this progression, the learning centers on multi-layered, multi-level exercises—almost puzzles—that highlight the remarkable richness and depth of contact improvisation, and that can be worked on for years without exhausting what they can teach us. I call these vibrant, interconnected exercises constellations. You can take these home and work on them later; you can refine and explore them to make them your own; and you can share them with others.
Constellations was developed as a refinement of teaching the fundamentals of contact improvisation over many years. By the “fundamentals” I do not mean the “basics”; I mean the deep underlying principles, as engaging for advanced practitioners as they are for beginners. To teach Constellations in its most compact form takes about 50 hours, and in that time people typically see tremendous growth in their dancing. Below you will find some of the exercises from one weekend of a four-part presentation in Montréal in 2026.
Invisible Melon
Before putting weight into the hands, such as in the low table position, it’s important to make sure that the alignment is correct. Invisible Melon is a very useful exercise for making sure the fingers, hand, and wrist are all aligned correctly. Imagine holding a melon in your hand, with your palm up. The palm is open and there is extension through the pinky finger. To put your hand in the right position to hold the invisible melon, as is shown at the end of this video, you imagine opening not the fingers but rather the palm. Now turn your hand over keeping the openness in the palm and the extension through the pinky. This is now the right position to put your hand down for low table.
At the workshop where the video below was taken, one of the participants said that they had a wrist injury and that they were unable to put any weight on their hands because it was too painful. After practicing this exercise, they exclaimed, “My wrist is fine now!”, and they were able to take part in subsequent exercises in low table with no difficulty. It turned out that their wrist pain was simply due to an easily fixed alignment issue.
This exercise is a lot harder than it looks because doing it correctly requires releasing habitual tension in the back of the hand and wrist. Unless you are a tai chi master you can expect it take at least half an hour practice to gain the initial benefit.
Video by Fred Hunsberger
Low Table Mobility
Low table is a very common position in contact improvisation. This exercise walks us through five different level of mobility. Level zero is just having correct hand, wrist, and elbow alignment. The palm is hollow on the ground, as it was in Invisble Melon, with the weight mostly on the base and pinky edge of the palm, and just slightly on the fingertips. The arms are rotated such that the elbows point backwards, enabling the arms to fold towards the ground. The hands are slightly forward of the shoulders such that the angle between the forearm and the hand is greater than ninety degrees; having this angle sharper than ninety degrees is an extremely common cause of wrist injury. This alignment makes a stable, safe, and mobile base.
Five different degrees of rocking backward onto the toes are then presented, always pushing forward through the fingers and not down. By the fifth level you can come to standing on one leg by pushing forward through the fingers while extending backward through the heel of the raised leg. The number one problem that people get into when trying to come to standing on one leg is that they push downwards through their hands, which pushes their head upward and away. Keep your head down! You’re getting up through your heel, and once you come to standing then your head can raise. The second most common problem is that the hands are too far away. Pull them closer to the knee that will stay on the ground to prepare yourself to get up in this way.
Video by Fred Hunsberger
Four-Legged Animal
This is an absolutely essential weight-sharing exercise. It is quite easy to teach to beginners, and gives people the remarkable feeling of moving with another person as if they were one organism. Once they have that feeling, a hallmark of sincere weight sharing, people are more readily able to find it in other orientations. Another advantage of this exercise is that it is very easy for an instructor to spot when people are doing it incorrectly, and therefore make corrections.
There are several preparatory exercises that are only very briefly covered in this video. The first is Figure Eight, which is what you see in the initial moments of the video. The second is Hinge, an apparently simple fold forwards that is actually a critical and extremely subtle mechanism. This normally takes an hour or more of work in order to make sure that the alignment is correct that also people are not using unnecessary muscular tone. What you see in the second scene of the video is called Hinge to Wall, which we only move to once the freestanding Hinge is well established.
Once people can do Hinge to Wall, freely coming into and going out of the wall, they’re ready to do Four-Legged Animal. Engaging the hinge backwards towards your partner instead toward of the wall, your tails meet, and you are then able to sit backwards into each other. If the weight sharing is sincere then weight will be going through all four legs more or less equally. The hip sockets should be relaxed, which is why we practice Figure Eight first. At this point if one person takes a step, the other person will also take a step, not as a matter of choice but because it just happens as a consequence of the weight sharing. It literally feels as if you are one animal with four legs.
There are a number of ways that Four-Legged Animal can go wrong, so it’s important for an instructor to watch the class closely. The number one problem is that people are not sincerely sharing their weight with the other person. This is readily spotted because in order to avoid weight sharing, people will bend their knees forwards towards their toes, thus keeping their weight over their own feet. You yourself can also readily tell if you’re not sincerely sharing weight, because your legs will get tired very quickly. The second biggest problem is that the hips sockets are stiff, and this happens because people are pushing through their feet rather than simply resting their weight. This is why we practice Hinge to Wall first, as there we can make sure that people are resting against the wall rather than pushing. Whenever this exercise is not working out, go back to Hinge to Wall.
Video by Fred Hunsberger with Ciera Cleary
Floppy Sit-Ups
Now we move to skills for the flyer, the first being Floppy Sit-Ups. These build the core engagement that is necessary for the flyer—also known as the overdancer—to orient themselves in gravity without using their arms or legs to push or pull. The key features of the floppy sit-ups are that (i) any unnecessary tension is released, because we are doing these for navigational purposes and not for a workout, and (ii) the arms and legs reach into space in order to act as a dynamic counterbalance. This reaching is not a decoration, it’s actually a critical part of the balancing mechanism; you’re using the extension through your arms and legs the way a tightrope walker uses their pole.
Visualization here is important. Towards the end of the video, we do a partner practice where you toss your partner an imaginary rope, and they use their arms to grab this rope. While the rope is imaginary, the extension in the arms is real, and you may be surprised to find that it leads to a real increase in ease of these sit-ups.
Video by Fred Hunsberger
The Flying V
Another important skill for the flyer is what I call the Flying V. This lets you turn from side to side, and its practice also sets up a critical shape in the body that is later used for safely descending. The first part of practicing this exercise is to lay down on your back, keeping the heels slightly off the ground with extension through the heels and with the legs in a more or less “V” shape. Now if you simply rotate the legs in the hip sockets while keeping the legs low to the ground, it will turn you from side to side.
It is very important that this is not a stretch, so if you are coming from a movement practice that emphasizes always going to the maximum, you’ll need to dial back that tendency considerably. The V should be something that is mobile and has a lot of space in it, nowhere near the maximum of your flexibility. The front of the hips should not be getting sore in the exercise. Make sure to have extension through the heel and not the toes; this keeps the engagement that lifts the legs off the ground in the deep psoas muscle and not in the front of the hips.
The continuation of the Flying V is to cross the legs while keeping the arms floppy as before. This can lead you into a smooth and controlled turn onto your belly. The next level is to turn from your belly to your back and then to your belly again on the other side. The level after that is to go from belly directly to floppy sit-up to belly. This is a really excellent sequence for building the core mechanisms that will allow you to balance on your partner.
Video by Fred Hunsberger with Ciera Cleary
Flying 101
Finally we get to our first flying practice, Flying 101. Because I want to train people to fly safely, with the skills they need to take care of themselves rather than relying on their partner to safeguard their well-being, we take many hours of introducing preliminary practices before we get to this level. In my opinion, picking up a person who does not yet have the skills to take care of themselves as a flyer is a recipe for disaster.
The first level of Flying 101 is just to get comfortable resting your weight on your partner with your feet on the ground. Watch carefully the way in which you can gently and gradually lower your weight onto your partner using your hands. Do not make a camel over your partner with your hands and feet on the ground and then plop down, it feels terrible! Then, to practice controlling your weight without using your hands, you come off of your partner by dropping your weight backwards.
The next level is to lower yourself onto your partner with your feet off the ground. Stay here for a long while and learn to control your balance by reaching with your arms and legs. Then learn how to go backwards towards your feet by allowing your upper body to slump while keeping your feet extended backwards. This is harder than it sounds! If you find that you are stiff-arming the floor whenever your pitch forwards, this means you haven’t yet developed an internal mechanism of balance control. This is problematic because if you fly from high table or from shoulder height, you will not be able to reach the ground with your arms; an internal balance control is therefore essential.
The third level here is what I call the V-Slide descent. Coming towards the ground with your hands, place your two hands facing forward, the same direction as your partner’s hands. You then use the Flying V mechanism to turn on your side, with the lower leg—the one closer to your partner— extending forwards from your point of view, that is, towards your partner’s tail. Keeping your weight almost entirely on your partner, you can slide that lower leg along your partner’s back and towards the ground, where you can land in a low table position. Level four is to come to standing on one leg as we practiced earlier.
The most common problem with the V-Slide is that the lower leg gets stuck and cannot slide past the partner’s tail. This happens because you have not fully turned on your side but are slightly on your belly. You should use the Flying V to turn all the way on your side and actually slightly on your back. The second most common problem is excess straining in the upper body. This happens because you have put your weight into your own arms, rather than leaving it on your partner. Once the V-Slide is well established from low table, the next step is to work on crescent rolls so that we can turn on our side without needing to use our hands at all, and after that we are ready to try the V-Slide from high table.
Video by Fred Hunsberger with Ciera Cleary